Historical and Cultural Context
The mid to late 1800s witnessed a surge of conspiratorial scapegoat literature – books and pamphlets that ascribed all the world’s ills to a single person or group. This genre emerged against a backdrop of rapid social upheaval: the aftershocks of the French Revolution, industrialization, religious conflict, and nationalist unrest. In such turbulent times, many people sought simple explanations for complex problems. As one modern commentator notes, societies in crisis have an “innate need to point a finger and apportion blame.”1 This impulse gave rise to writings that scapegoated a convenient villain for every calamity. By reducing “complicated series of events to a small number of nefarious actors and ideas,” these narratives offered readers a sense of clarity and someone to blame. The result was a literary trend of paranoid or polemical exposés in the 19th century, in which authors insisted that secret cabals or evil individuals were behind revolutions, economic troubles, moral decline, and other societal woes.
This scapegoating genre had roots in earlier decades (for example, some works appeared soon after 1800), but it flourished in the mid-late 19th century. Diverse groups became targets of blame, depending on the author’s agenda. Reactionary Catholics often demonized Enlightenment philosophers: Protestant nativists maligned the Catholic Church; clerical writers inveighed against Freemasons; and populist demagogues singled out ethnic or religious minorities. These works typically claimed that a single entity orchestrated virtually all major evils – a sweeping, monocausal conspiracy theory. Below, we explore the prominent strains of this genre, their notable examples, and their impact on literature and society.
Enlightenment Thinkers as Scapegoats: Voltaire and the Revolution
In the aftermath of the French Revolution (1789), conservative and religious writers tried to “comprehend” the upheaval by placing blame on the Enlightenment and its leading figures. Chief among the scapegoats was the philosopher Voltaire, a renowned 18th-century critic of the Church. Abbé Augustin Barruel’s multi-volume Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797–98) became a foundational text of this trend.2 Barruel, a Jesuit priest, advanced a dramatic thesis: the Revolution was not a spontaneous uprising but the result of a decades-long conspiracy by irreligious intellectuals and secret societies. He claimed that Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, the Freemasons, and the Bavarian Illuminati had formed an “intricate plot to bring down the French throne and altar.”3 According to Barruel, these actors – not the failings of the monarchy or social grievances – caused all the chaos of the Revolution. This sweeping accusation (900 pages in all) wrapped the Enlightenment itself in blame for Europe’s turmoil.3 As one historian observes, Barruel’s conspiracy theory “reduces” the complex Revolution to “a small number of nefarious actors,” exonerating the ancient régime and Church from any fault. Voltaire in particular was cast as an arch-villain whose subversive ideas had unleashed an age of violence. Indeed, after 1800, many clerical reactionaries held Voltaire personally “responsible for the Revolution” and its bloody consequences.
Barruel’s wildly paranoid narrative struck a chord. His Memoirs became a bestseller across Europe, translated into multiple languages.2 It ignited an entire “right-wing interpretation” of the Revolution that persisted throughout the 19th century.2 This Counter-Enlightenment literature painted the philosophes as dangerous subversives; their writings were portrayed not as works of reason but as the seeds of all societal evil.2 Even some fellow conservatives were taken aback by the extremity of Barruel’s claims – Joseph de Maistre, himself no stranger to conspiracies, condemned Barruel’s theory as insane.3 Nevertheless, the idea of Voltaire-as-scapegoat endured. Decades after Voltaire’s death, ultramontane Catholic commentators continued to blame the “party of Voltaire” for modern unrest and secular ideas. As one modern scholar notes, Barruelian conspiracy tropes had “tremendous staying power” in Catholic circles, resurfacing whenever rapid social changes threatened traditional authority.3 This trend reached into the late 1800s – for example, during the 1890s, French clerics like Canon Henri Delassus railed against “the (by then deceased) American priest Fr. Isaac Hecker” as part of a “Judaeo-Masonic” plot eroding the faith.3 Such accusations, though far-fetched, provided a comforting explanation to the fearful: if only Voltaire and his ilk (or their ideological heirs) could be defeated, the world’s problems would cease.3
Notable Example: Barruel’s Memoirs (1797) stands as a prototype of this genre. It alleged a grand alliance of philosophes and Freemasons had secretly engineered everything from Enlightenment writings to revolutionary terror.2 3 While published at the century’s turn, its impact was felt in the mid-1800s and beyond as later writers echoed its claims. Blaming a handful of Enlightenment thinkers for all of Europe’s upheavals, this narrative helped fuel a counter-Enlightenment literary trend. Voltaire’s name became a byword for subversion in many 19th-century Catholic histories – he was the convenient scapegoat for the evils of modernity, from political revolution to religious decline.4
Anti-Catholic Narratives: The Church as Universal Villain
On the other side of the cultural divide, Protestant and secular writers of the 19th century often cast the Roman Catholic Church as the sinister force behind societal ills. Especially in predominantly Protestant countries (the United States, Britain, and parts of Northern Europe), a thriving anti-Catholic literary subgenre emerged in the 1830s–1860s. These works warned that Catholicism – “Popery” – was conspiring to undermine liberty, morality, and progress. They blamed the Catholic Church (or shadowy Jesuit orders) for everything from political plots to sexual corruption. Between 1830 and 1860, an astonishing 270 books (along with scores of pamphlets and periodicals) were devoted to the anti-Catholic cause in the U.S. alone.5 Many were sensational “exposés” written in the style of gothic fiction to maximize their shock value.6
A popular subset of this genre was the “convent narrative,” exemplified by Maria Monk’s notorious book Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel-Dieu Nunnery (1836). In this supposed memoir, Maria Monk — billed as an escaped nun — described a Montreal convent as a hellish prison where priests routinely raped nuns and murdered their illegitimate babies.6 The entire tale was fabricated (investigators found Monk had likely never set foot in the convent),6 but its lurid details electrified the public. Monk’s book became a bestseller, feeding a widespread belief that the Catholic Church was a monolithic source of evil hiding behind pious facades.6 It portrayed Catholic clergy as the secret perpetrators of society’s worst crimes, confirming every anti-papal prejudice of the era. The formula – an “insider” revealing the Church’s hidden depravity – was modeled on gothic novels and proved wildly effective.6 Indeed, Monk’s tale and its imitators sparked real-life violence: after similar allegations by another woman (Rebecca Reed), an angry Protestant mob burned down an Ursuline convent near Boston in 1834.6
Anti-Catholic fiction also flourished. Gothic and melodramatic novels often featured Catholic villains scheming against innocent Protestants. For instance, Eugène Sue’s wildly popular serial novel The Wandering Jew (1844–45) cast a Jesuit priest (Father Rodin) as a murderous mastermind plotting against a virtuous family.7 Sue, influenced by socialist ideas and France’s anticlerical currents, used his story to depict the Jesuit order as omnipotent, corrupt, and responsible for social injustice.7 The novel’s success (appearing in newspapers and read by millions) showed how much the public hungered for tales of Catholic conspiracy. Similarly, in Britain, Gothic thrillers like The Monk (1796) and later Victorian novels recycled tropes of “lustful priests, cruel abbesses, and sadistic inquisitors” as stock characters representing Catholic evil.6 These works implied that behind Europe’s troubles – be it fires, plagues, or political turmoil – lurked the hand of Rome.
Protestant polemicists added a veneer of scholarship to the blame game. In 1853, Scottish minister Alexander Hislop published The Two Babylons, arguing that the Catholic Church essentially continued ancient Babylonian paganism. By linking Catholic rituals to “Babylon” (the biblical symbol of depravity), Hislop reinforced the idea that the Papacy lay at the root of all false religion and corruption. Such tracts gave theological justification to treating Catholicism as the source of society’s problems. They often accused the Church of suppressing truth, fostering ignorance, and plotting world domination – a mirror image of the Catholic conspiracies about Freemasons.
Notable Examples: The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836) became one of the most influential anti-Catholic books, fueling urban legends about priestly debauchery.6 Another example, Rebecca Reed’s Six Months in a Convent (1835), so inflamed public opinion that it led to the burning of the Charlestown convent before her book was even published.6 In fiction, Eugène Sue’s The Wandering Jew and his earlier The Mysteries of Paris (1842) were “anti-Catholic novels” that achieved massive popularity and imitation.7 These works didn’t just entertain; they convinced many readers that Jesuits or priests lurked behind every catastrophe. The anti-Catholic genre thus had a tangible societal impact: it strengthened Protestant identity and prejudices, painting the Catholic Church as a diabolical antagonist in the modern world.
Freemasonry and Secret Societies: The Grand Masonic Conspiracy
Another pervasive 19th-century paranoia centered on Freemasonry. Freemasons – members of a fraternal secret society – were accused by their detractors of masterminding revolutions, economic crises, and moral subversion across the globe. This line of thought often overlapped with the anti-Enlightenment and anti-Catholic trends: Barruel, for example, had lumped the Freemasons together with Voltaire in his grand conspiracy theory.2 In both Europe and America, anti-Masonic literature formed a distinct branch of the scapegoating genre.
In Europe, Catholic ultraconservatives fixated on Freemasonry as the invisible enemy undermining the throne and altar. The Catholic Church officially condemned Freemasonry repeatedly, and Papal writings themselves read like conspiracy tracts. In 1884, Pope Leo XIII issued an encyclical explicitly accusing the Freemasons of “planning the destruction of the holy Church publicly and openly.”8 Leo XIII described humanity as split between the Church and the “kingdom of Satan,” led by that “widespread association called the Freemasons.”9 This extraordinary language from the highest church authority shows how deeply the idea of a Masonic master-plot had taken hold. To devout Catholics of the late 1800s, it was plausible that nearly every modern ill – secular governments, declining religiosity, liberal reforms – could be traced back to clandestine Masonic machinations.8 9
Feeding this belief, writers produced volumes purporting to expose Freemasonry’s “secrets.” An infamous case was the Taxil hoax of the 1890s. Léo Taxil, a French anti-clerical turned trickster, feigned conversion to Catholicism and then published a series of sensational books that appeared to confirm Catholic fears.9 Taxil’s works (1885–1897) included fictitious eyewitness accounts of Freemasons conducting satanic rituals and devil worship around the world.9 He spun tales of an inner circle called the “Palladists” who supposedly took orders from literal demons, and he even introduced a character, “Diana Vaughan,” a former satanic high priestess turned Catholic, marked for assassination by vengeful Masons.9 These outrageous stories were presented in sober book form as true investigative reports, and many in the Catholic public swallowed them whole. For three years, Taxil’s fabricated revelations about a global Masonic-Satanic plot were widely accepted and fueled anti-Masonic hysteria. In 1897, he finally held a press conference and confessed that it was all a hoax, gleefully thanking the credulous clergy for unwittingly publicizing his fraud. Taxil later admitted he initially expected readers to see his yarns as “too outlandish to be true,” but when he discovered they believed every word – and that there was “lots of money” to be made – he kept the hoax going.9 The Taxil episode ironically demonstrated both the immense appetite for anti-Masonic conspiracy literature and how eager audiences were to blame a secret society for virtually any evil. Even after the hoax was revealed, its fictitious claims (e.g. that Freemasons worship Lucifer) took on a life of their own in conspiracy culture and were “rediscovered” by later anti-Masons.
In the United States, anti-Masonic sentiment had earlier peaked in the 1820s–1830s, but it established a template for scapegoating secret societies. The mysterious disappearance of one William Morgan in 1826, after he threatened to expose Masonic secrets, led to widespread rumors that Masons had murdered him. Public outcry over this “Morgan Affair” ignited an Anti-Masonic movement so strong that it formed America’s first third party, even running a presidential candidate in 1832. Preachers and politicians warned that Freemasons had “infiltrated the government”, seized control of courts, and were plotting to destroy American democracy from within.10 A flood of anti-Masonic books and newspapers accused the fraternity of every conceivable wrongdoing. Freemasons were blamed for various unrelated economic and political grievances – a clear sign of scapegoating. By mid-century, the anti-Masonic fervor subsided as a political force, but its paranoid literature contributed to the broader 19th-century idea of hidden cabals orchestrating national troubles. Even new religious movements like the Mormons did not escape such suspicions; 1850s anti-Mormon tracts often recycled anti-Masonic and anti-Catholic themes, merely changing the villain’s name.10
Notable Examples: Aside from Taxil’s pseudo-histories (The Devil in the 19th Century, etc.), earlier works like John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy (1797) were foundational. Robison, a Scottish academic, echoed similar claims to Barruel, alleging the Illuminati and Masons conspired to topple European governments.11 His and Barruel’s books were reprinted and read in America, feeding the 19th-century anti-Masonic imagination.11 In the 1850s, Boston minister Charles Finney (a former Mason) wrote The Character, Claims, and Practical Workings of Freemasonry (1869), insisting the lodge was incompatible with Christianity and essentially satanic at heart – a popular theme in Protestant circles. The persistence of these narratives meant that by the late 1800s, “Freemason” had become synonymous with secret subversion in many minds. Together with fears of the Illuminati, this formed a pan-European conspiracy myth that was readily applied to explain revolutions, assassinations, or even cultural changes. In short, Freemasonry served as a universal scapegoat: revolution in Paris? It was the Masons. Secular schools in Italy? Masonic plot. Economic panic in the U.S.? Masonic bankers. Such was the refrain of this genre.
Other Targets of Blame: Antisemitic and Racial Conspiracy Theories
By the late 19th century, the scapegoating impulse expanded to include ethnic and religious minorities, notably Jews. While antisemitism has a long history, the modern antisemitic conspiracy narrative — portraying Jews as a secret cabal engineering national or global catastrophes — took shape in this era and can be seen as another facet of the trend. These works likewise posited a single, malevolent cause behind a society’s troubles, merely swapping in “the Jews” as the all-powerful culprit.
A landmark of this ugly genre was Édouard Drumont’s La France juive (“Jewish France”, 1886). Spanning 1,200 pages, Drumont’s book was a venomous invective blaming Jewish people in general for France’s decline in the late 19th century.12 He railed against prominent Jewish financiers and politicians, claiming that an “International Judah” conspired to impoverish the nation and corrupt its values. La France juive became the most widely-read book in France at the time – it sold over 100,000 copies almost immediately and went through more than 100 reprints within one year.12 Its massive popularity showed that many in post–Franco-Prussian War France were receptive to the idea that all their country’s misfortunes (military defeat, economic crises, political scandals) could be laid at the feet of a Jewish conspiracy. Drumont’s screed combined various strains of scapegoating – religious (the old “Christ-killer” tropes and medieval blood libels, resurrected in modern form),12 economic (blaming Jewish bankers for capitalism’s evils), and racial (asserting “Aryan” vs “Semite” conflict)12 – into a comprehensive theory of Jewish culpability for every ill afflicting French society.12 By turning Jews into the single explanatory villain, Drumont united disparate factions (disaffected Catholics, anti-republican monarchists, socialist anti-capitalists) under a shared scapegoat.12 His success led to the formation of an Antisemitic League in 1889 and the launch of his newspaper La Libre Parole, which eagerly kept spreading conspiracy claims.12
The impact of such works was profound. They primed the public for episodes like the Dreyfus Affair (1894–1906), in which a Jewish French army officer was falsely accused of treason. The accusations against Captain Alfred Dreyfus were rooted in conspiratorial prejudice – many believed that a Jewish officer must surely be part of the larger “Jewish plot” eating away at France. As Hannah Arendt later observed, the Dreyfus case became a “dress rehearsal” for the 20th century’s worst persecutions, and writers like Drumont had “set the stage” by whipping up the requisite hatred and suspicion.12 Indeed, the genre of blaming Jews for all the world’s problems would culminate in the early 20th century with the notorious forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903), which purported to be the blueprint of a Jewish world-conspiracy. Notably, the Protocols plagiarized from earlier French and German conspiracy fiction, underscoring how the 19th-century scapegoating literature fed directly into later antisemitic propaganda.
Beyond Jews, other marginalized groups were targets in similar “blame-all” narratives. In 19th-century America, nativist writers cast Irish and other immigrant Catholics as agents of the Pope’s conspiracy (we’ve seen this in anti-Catholic literature). Some Protestant authors also vilified Mormons, picturing the Latter-day Saints as a seditious cult threatening the social order.10 Racist tracts in the American South before and after the Civil War likewise blamed the abolition of slavery and later social turbulence on a cabal of northern abolitionists or “outside agitators” (often insinuating Jewish or Masonic involvement). In all these cases, the pattern was analogous: a scapegoat is accused of secretly causing a host of problems that might otherwise seem unrelated.
Notable Example: Drumont’s La France juive stands out as a late-1800s example of a monocausal conspiracy tome – it essentially told France that “all your miseries can be attributed to the Jews”. Its immediate popularity (millions of copies in subsequent editions) and the climate it fostered connect it firmly to the scapegoating trend.12 While the user’s question didn’t explicitly list antisemitic works, it is important to include this strain for a complete picture of the genre’s scope and impact. By the end of the 19th century, nearly every conceivable “outsider” group – philosophers, Freemasons, Jesuits, Jews, Mormons, socialists, etc. – had been blamed in print for machinating to destroy civilization. The common template uniting these works was a conspiracy theory worldview that explained historical change as the deliberate result of evil conspirators, rather than complex social forces.
Impact on Literature and Society
The scapegoat conspiracy genre of the mid-late 1800s left a significant imprint both on literature and the wider society:
- Shaping Popular Literature: This trend blurred the line between political/religious polemic and popular fiction. Conspiracy themes became staples of 19th-century sensational literature. The success of works like The Wandering Jew or Awful Disclosures influenced countless imitators. A whole market of serial novels, pamphlets, and “exposé” memoirs thrived on these lurid themes. Gothic fiction tropes (dungeons, secret tunnels, nefarious villains) were repurposed to attack real groups (monks, nuns, lodges).6 Conversely, actual polemical texts borrowed narrative techniques from fiction to captivate readers. The result was an early form of the modern thriller genre built around conspiracies. Characters such as the evil Jesuit, the scheming Mason, or the fanatic Illuminati member became recognizable figures in literature. This also fertilized the ground for later literary explorations of conspiracy and paranoia. For example, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov (1880) includes “The Grand Inquisitor” parable, a critique portraying a cynical Catholic Church manipulating truth6 – essentially engaging with the idea of institutional evil that the scapegoating genre popularized (albeit Dostoevsky’s treatment is philosophical). Thus, the conspiratorial worldview percolated into the mainstream of literature, giving voice to society’s darkest suspicions and providing a template for future dystopian and mystery genres centered on secret enemies.
- Reinforcing Prejudices and Social Divisions: These works had real social and political consequences. By constantly demonizing certain groups, the literature stoked prejudices that sometimes erupted into violence or discrimination. As noted, Rebecca Reed’s and Maria Monk’s accusations led directly to the burning of a convent and wider anti-Catholic rioting.6 In the U.S., decades of anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant propaganda contributed to institutions like the Know-Nothing Party in the 1850s and fueled nativist hostility toward Irish and German Catholic immigrants.10 The anti-Masonic writings helped give birth to the Anti-Masonic Party and a temporary collapse in Freemason membership – society literally reorganized itself in response to the fear of the “Masonic menace.” In France, the pervasive conspiracy literature targeting Jews, Freemasons, and republicans fed into the polarizing culture wars of the Third Republic, making events like the Dreyfus Affair possible and fracturing public opinion for years.12 In short, the narratives of a hidden enemy plotting all evil created an atmosphere of paranoia and mistrust. Minority groups suffered stigma and scapegoating in real life; for instance, the wave of Drumont-style antisemitism led to French mobs chanting “Death to Jews!” as they truly believed a Jewish syndicate caused economic scandals like the Panama Canal crash.
- Psychological Comfort and Simplicity: On the other hand, these scapegoating narratives offered a kind of psychological relief to their audiences by simplifying a chaotic world. To a peasant bewildered by agricultural depression or a worker facing industrial change, it was reassuring (if dangerous) to be told that some identifiable villain – be it the Jesuit, the Freemason, or Voltaire – was responsible for all misfortune. As one historian explains, the appeal of Barruel’s conspiracy model was that it “left the [ordinary people or the Church] blameless” while pinning blame on a secret few, thus simplifying the crisis and comforting the fearful.3 This “neat way to connect…political enemies with the forces of deepest evil” is a hallmark of the conspiratorial mindset.11 It creates a clear dichotomy of good versus evil in place of the messy complexity of reality. The 19th-century readers of such literature often found in it an explanation for rapid changes they couldn’t otherwise explain: losing one’s traditional social position was easier to accept if one believed a cabal was scheming to destroy society.10 This mindset – sometimes called “the paranoid style” – became deeply ingrained. It persists even today in various conspiracy theories, illustrating the lasting impact of the 19th-century trend. Modern conspiracists still recycle elements first popularized then, from the notion of an Illuminati or Masonic New World Order to revived versions of antisemitic tropes (as seen in some internet communities).
- Legacy in Later Literature and Thought: The scapegoat genre of the 1800s can be seen as a precursor to later literary and ideological phenomena. In the 20th century, totalitarian propaganda would employ the same one-enemy-for-everything tactic (for example, Nazi propaganda picturing “the Jew” as the omnipresent orchestrator of Germany’s woes – directly drawing on texts like The Protocols and Drumont).12 Dime novels, pulp fiction, and eventually modern thriller novels continued to feature conspiratorial plots inspired by this tradition. Even serious literature took up the theme, sometimes critically (as Umberto Eco did in his novel Foucault’s Pendulum (1988) and The Prague Cemetery (2010), which satirize the 19th-century conspiracy literature). Thus, the 19th-century trend had a dual legacy: it influenced genre fiction and pop culture, and it warned later generations about the dangers of all-consuming scapegoating. Writers and intellectuals who saw the damage caused by these paranoid narratives (like the Dreyfusards in France, or later, George Orwell with his critique of totalitarian “Two Minutes Hate”) made it a point to dissect and caution against such simplistic blame of a single enemy for all problems.
In summary, the mid-late 1800s gave rise to a distinct literary trend of scapegoating and conspiracy. In an era of rapid change, many found refuge in stories that assigned all blame to one person or group, be it Voltaire, the Jesuits, the Freemasons, or another minority. These works, rife with exaggeration and hatred, thrived on fear and credulity. They had a wide cultural impact: entrenching stereotypes in literature, inciting political movements, and inflaming social conflicts. While ostensibly about specific targets, they all told a similar cautionary tale – one that shows how easily complex realities can be reduced to good versus evil narratives in troubled times. The popularity of this genre in the 19th century reveals much about the myths, superstitions, and anxieties of that age.1 And, as history has shown, the toxic legacy of these scapegoating narratives would echo well into the 20th century and beyond.
Footnotes:
1. Al Majalla, The Scapegoat’s Place in Literature, en.majalla.com
2. Law & Liberty, Conspiracies à la française for American Catholics, lawliberty.org
3. Wikipedia, Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, en.wikipedia.org
4. Britannica, Voltaire—Enlightenment, Philosopher, www.britannica.com
5. Alexander Hislop, The Two Babylons (London, 1853).
6. Eugène Sue, The Wandering Jew, trans. Daniel De Leon (New York, 1900).
7. Maria Monk, Awful Disclosures of the Hôtel-Dieu Nunnery (New York, 1836).
8. Pope Leo XIII, Humanum Genus (Rome, 1884).
9. Léo Taxil, The Devil in the 19th Century (Paris, 1895).
10. Édouard Drumont, La France juive (Paris, 1886).
11. Robison, John. Proofs of a Conspiracy Against All the Religions and Governments of Europe. London, 1797.
12. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1951.
