Paulicians

The Paulicians are presented in the protagonists’ evolving conspiracy theory as an elusive religious and political current whose alleged influence shifts into Russia. Their imagined role links rival secret societies, the production of anti-Semitic propaganda, and the novel’s central warning: a pattern invented to explain history can come to govern the people who believe in it.

The Paulicians in the imagined history

The group appears first as one of the many strands the protagonists cannot securely place. As they try to make every historical episode part of a single Plan, Belbo asks what the Paulicians and the Jerusalemites are doing while other groups take different paths. Diotallevi admits that they do not know. The uncertainty does not restrain their reconstruction; it becomes an invitation to extend it.

Napoleon supplies their next supposed clue. The protagonists reason that, having drawn other European centers and the Jerusalemites into his reach, he would still need the Paulicians, and that his search for them in Russia explains the missing connection. The account then relocates the Paulicians to Slavic regions, where, it claims, they reorganized under the names of Russian mystical groups. These claims belong to the trio’s speculative design, not to an independently verified history of the organization.

Russia and the proposed succession

In the Plan, the Paulicians are distinguished from other supposed heirs of the Jerusalemite group. Belbo imagines one branch passing through Spanish and Provençal cabalists into neo-Templar circles, another becoming a Baconian current associated with science and banking, and a third establishing itself in Russia. He portrays the Russian branch as mystical and reactionary, allied with landowners and connected to the court, in contrast to Russian Jews whom he describes as small traders and moneylenders and associates with a liberal and revolutionary intelligentsia.

The reconstruction gives the Paulicians a political use: they supposedly work to discredit Jews and thereby trouble their rivals abroad, the neo-Templars and Baconians. De Maistre enters this strand of the story as a suspected intermediary. Distrustful of Illuminati whom he associates with Enlightenment politics and revolution, he is imagined as seeking Martinist groups in Russia because he believes them to preserve a Paulician inheritance not yet corrupted by Western thought. The account then says this effort apparently fails: after the Jesuits are expelled from St. Petersburg in 1815, de Maistre returns to Turin.

The protagonists extend the theory into the nineteenth century. Diotallevi proposes that the Paulicians initiated the anti-Semitic campaign associated with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which appeared in Russia. Within the same invented history, the Protocols become the mechanism by which one clandestine faction supposedly discredits Jews and harms competing groups. This is not evidence of a real Paulician role; it exposes how the trio’s theory recruits anti-Semitic accusations as connective material.

Forgery, circulation, and political use

The novel places the Protocols within a history of textual borrowing and political manipulation. The protagonists recount how the London Times traced the document to Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, a liberal attack on Napoleon III, and how Joly’s arguments were themselves said to derive from an earlier document attributed to Sue. Rather than treating the discovery of plagiarism as a reason to abandon the conspiracy theory, the protagonists absorb it into another layer of supposed secret transmission.

They also describe Rachkovsky as a possible maker of the Protocols. In their reconstruction, Rachkovsky finds a pamphlet by Elie de Cyon, derived from Joly or Sue, and alters it by substituting Jews for the political target Witte. The document then circulates through Juliana or Justine Glinka and reaches the tsar, damaging Witte. The narrative presents this as a plausible chain within the Plan, while the very ingenuity of the explanation demonstrates how a theory can convert uncertain provenance into apparent confirmation.

That distinction matters because the Protocols are described as a set of twenty-four declarations containing mutually conflicting political prescriptions: they condemn liberalism while advocating means for fomenting unrest, and call for control and manipulation of populations. The novel shows how such contradictions can be treated not as reasons to question a text but as proof of an all-encompassing design. It also traces the anti-Semitic material to successive acts of attribution and reuse, showing how fabricated evidence can be repackaged to serve changing political enemies.

A self-sealing conspiracy

The Paulicians’ narrative importance lies less in a coherent account of their identity than in the work the protagonists make them perform. Their uncertainty allows them to connect Russia, mysticism, reactionary politics, anti-Semitic propaganda, and the rival factions of the Plan. Every gap can be filled by another alleged branch or hidden inheritance; every contradiction can be assigned to a deeper layer of concealment.

This method begins as a consciously playful practice. The narrator recalls that the three men recognized their associations as unjustified and treated them as parody, but repeated research and discussion trained them to connect everything to everything else. The distinctions between metaphor and fact, and between a resemblance and an identity, gradually weakened. The Paulicians exemplify that shift: first an unresolved name in a maze, then a crucial historical agent, and finally an explanation that appears to confirm the whole system because the system has already decided what every fragment must mean.

The novel finally makes the Plan’s invented status explicit. The protagonists created it, yet its adherents came to identify old fragments of their own mythologies as episodes in its supposedly irrefutable web. Once people act on the invented design, it acquires consequences as if it had existed all along. The Paulicians thus belong both to the fictional history the trio constructs and to the novel’s account of conspiracy thinking: a group made powerful by interpretation, whose alleged influence illustrates how an empty secret can sustain belief precisely because it never resolves into verifiable content.