Provenance Regulations

The Ordonation of Provins is a supposed conspiratorial blueprint whose importance lies not in a verifiable original text but in its repeated transfer between alleged secret societies. In the researchers’ reconstruction, each group changes the subject of an inherited plot and accuses its opponents of carrying it out. The document becomes a model for conspiracy theories that seem to confirm one another, and ultimately for the researchers’ own invented Plan: once others believe in it and act accordingly, the fiction acquires real consequences.

The Blueprint and Its Recurrence

The researchers recognize the Ordonation in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by comparing the conspiratorial scheme beneath the text rather than its period-specific details. In their account, the Protocols describe a world-conquering design, but replacing references to recent French affairs with the tunnels of Provins, Jews with Templars, and the Elders of Zion with Thirty-six Invisibles divided into six reveals what they call the Ordonation. Its apparent novelty dissolves: the same story has been reassigned to a different alleged enemy.

They conclude that six groups have fought over the Plan of Provins across more than six centuries. Each takes the text, changes its subject, and attributes it to its adversaries. The document’s historical force therefore rests on repetition and substitution, not on a stable attribution. The conspiracy survives by being made to look like someone else’s conspiracy.

This mechanism also explains why the supposed blueprint can surface in mutually hostile accounts. After the Rosicrucians appear in France, the Jesuits are said to reverse the Plan, turning it into a negative design intended to discredit the Baconians and emerging English Masonry. Later, when Jesuits promote neo-Templarism, the Marquis de Luchet attributes the Plan to the neo-Templars. The Jesuits then abandon that alignment, borrow Luchet’s account through Barruel, and attach the design to Freemasons generally. Each transfer preserves the structure while changing the accused party.

Reversals and Counteraccusations

The researchers trace another turn through the Baconian counteroffensive. Liberal and secular polemicists, including Michelet, Quinet, Garibaldi, and Gioberti, attribute the Ordonation to the Jesuits; the idea may, they suggest, have begun with the Templar Pascal and his associates. Eugène Sue’s The Wandering Jew popularizes the accusation through Monsieur Rodin, presented as the embodiment of a Jesuit world conspiracy. In Sue’s later Les Mystères du peuple, the researchers find a scheme that seems to anticipate the Protocols: a final chapter exposes a supposed Jesuit plan in a document sent by Father Roothaan to Rodin. The narrative even supplies a character who uncovers and reveals that document, making the fictional disclosure resemble the later framing of a conspiracy text as documentary proof.

When the Jesuits see the Ordonation attributed to them, the researchers say, they adopt a tactic not yet used in this sequence: exploiting Simonini’s letter, they blame the Jews. In 1869, Henri Gougenot de Mousseaux publishes an account alleging that Jews use the cabala and worship Satan, and inventing a secret descent connecting Cain to Gnostics, Templars, and Masons. Pius IX gives him a special benediction. The accusation has moved again, now through a polemic that makes a supposed hidden lineage stand in for proof of a hidden plan.

The history does not end with Jesuit authors. In 1921, after the Protocols have appeared and been taken seriously, The Times investigates a report about a Russian monarchist landowner in exile in Turkey who bought old books from a former Russian secret-police officer in Constantinople. Among them is an unbound volume marked only “Joli” on its spine, with an 1864 preface. Research at the British Museum identifies the source as Maurice Joly’s Dialogue aux enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavel, published in Brussels in 1864, although its title page says Geneva. The account notes that Maurice Joly has no connection with Crétineau-Joly, but the resemblance of their names is itself treated as suggestive—a small demonstration of how readily resemblance can be recruited into a pattern.

A further apparent witness to the same scheme is a pair of fifteenth-century letters published in 1880 by the Revue des Études Juives. In them, Jews of Arles ask for help from Jews of Constantinople, and the reply advises those facing persecution to preserve their faith inwardly and place their sons in occupations from which they might eventually dominate Christians. The researchers read this as another version of the Jesuit Plan and, earlier still, the Templar Ordonation. Their conclusion is that the Protocols are self-generating: a blueprint migrates from one alleged conspiracy to another, acquiring fresh details while retaining the same architecture.

From Accusation to Self-Reproduction

The Ordonation’s pattern offers more than a history of competing accusations. It describes how accusation can reproduce the conduct it claims to expose. Groups attribute their own designs to rivals; because they regard those designs as hateful, they regard the supposed rivals as hateful too. Yet the rivals may recognize the same ambitions in the accusation and answer in kind. The antagonists then seem to confirm each other, not because an original master plot has been demonstrated, but because the allegations help generate the behavior they describe.

The same logic underlies the researchers’ joke about a secret society with branches throughout the world whose plot is to spread the rumor that a universal plot exists. The imagined organization would not need to coordinate every conspiracy; it would only need to make people see coordination everywhere. The joke exposes a circular explanation that can turn any evidence—including competing explanations—into support for the claim that a hidden design is at work.

At the researchers’ meetings, this method begins as deliberate parody. They know that their associations are unwarranted and extraordinary, and would be ashamed if accused of genuinely believing them. They tell themselves that they are imitating their Diabolicals’ reasoning. But the repeated practice of connecting everything to everything else changes the people doing the connecting. The narrator distinguishes the three effects: he becomes addicted to the game, Diotallevi corrupted by it, and Belbo converted. They lose the ability to distinguish similarity from identity and metaphor from literal fact. The Ordonation’s lesson is therefore not confined to the groups accused of wielding it: a method of suspicion can become a habit of belief even when it began in irony.

The Invented Plan Becomes Real

That slippage reaches its clearest expression in the researchers’ own Plan. They invent a nonexistent design, yet their supposed adversaries believe it is real and identify pieces of their muddled mythologies as moments within it. Analogy, resemblance, and suspicion join those fragments into a web that appears logical and irrefutable. Once people identify with the Plan and act on that identification, the invented object becomes effective in the world. Its reality is no longer a matter of whether an original document or original plot existed: belief and action have made the fiction consequential.

The narrator connects this process to ordinary failures as well as to historical polemics. A market crash can emerge from many individuals making wrong moves, but those affected may look for a plotter rather than accept a diffuse and difficult-to-understand cause. Guilt or frustration can prompt the invention of an enemy design; people then organize against it and become increasingly invested in the model they invented. The cycle turns uncertainty into a story of agency, but that apparent clarity can deepen the very conflict it claims to explain.

The Ordonation also belongs to a broader hunger for a secret that promises to explain frustration or offer salvation. Yet the narrative argues that a revealed secret disappoints: each answer can be taken as merely the surface of a deeper one, and interpretation can continue without reaching a final center. In this sense, the blueprint’s migratory life and the researchers’ Plan share a structure. Both invite people to keep searching for the hidden design; the search itself sustains the secret, while each apparent solution supplies material for another round of suspicion. The Ordonation matters because it shows how a document—or even a nonexistent plan—can acquire power through circulation, reinterpretation, and the actions of those persuaded that it must be real.