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nydus/Secret Societies and Subversive MovementsPublic
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Table of Contents

PREFACE

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Moreover, in Falk's conception of the ideal social order and his indictment of what he calls "bourgeois society" we find the clue to movements of immense importance. Has not the system of the ant-heap or the beehive proved, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the model on which modern Anarchists, from Proudhon onwards, have formed their schemes for the reorganization of human life? Has not the idea of the "World State," "The Universal Republic" become the war-cry of the Internationalist Socialists, the Grand Orient Masons, the Theosophists, and the world-revolutionaries of our own day?

Was Falk, then, a revolutionary? This again will be disputed. Falk may have been a Cabalist, a Freemason, a high initiate, but what proof is there that he had any connexion with the leaders of the French Revolution? Let us turn again to the Jewish Encyclopædia:

Falk ... is ... believed to have given the Duc d'Orléans, to ensure his succession to the throne, a talisman consisting of a ring, which Philippe Egalité before mounting the scaffold is said to have sent to a Jewess, Juliet Goudchaux, who passed it on to his son, subsequently Louis Philippe.

The Baron de Gleichen, who "knew Falc," refers to a talisman of lapis-lazuli which the Due d'Orleans had received in England from "the celebrated Falk Scheck, first Rabbi of the Jews," and says that a certain occultist, Madame de la Croix, imagined she had destroyed it by "the power of prayer." But the theory of its survival is further confirmed by the information supplied from Jewish sources to Mr. Gordon Hills, who states that Falk was "in touch with the French Court in the person of 'Prince Emanuel,' whom he describes as a servant of the King of France," and adds that the talismanic ring which he gave to the Due d'Orleans "is still

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