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Behind the Lodge Door: How lodges spend their time in France and England

Cécile Révauger
November,28 2020 19:00 GMT



A close study of the minutes of about a hundred lodges of the GODF since the 18th century brings to the fore several common points but also many differences between French and English lodges. This is history from below, as opposed to history from above, the point of view of the lodges rather than of the Grand Lodges. Never before the coronavirus, not even during revolutions or in war time, had so many lodges interrupted their activities for so long. So now is a good time to reflect on what Masons actually do during lodge meetings. They all devote a lot of attention to the ceremonies – the making, passing and raising of Masons-, and to the ritual, but their approach to lodge working differs. As early as the beginning of the 19th century French Masons started reflecting on social issues behind the lodge door. Masonic values are universal but Masonic time indeed reflects cultural identities.

Chair&Post-Discussion Susan M. Sommers

Cécile Révauger is Professor Emerita of English Studies at Bordeaux University. She defended a doctoral thesis on the history of freemasonry in the 18th century, in Britain and the United States. She has published several articles on British and American Freemasonry in academic journals and written several books on the history of freemasonry as well as The Abolition of Slavery: The British Debate, 1787-1833 (2008). She has co-edited two volumes at La Pensee et les Hommes devoted to women and Freemasonry in the 18 th , 19th and 20th centuries, following the international conference she organized in Bordeaux in June 2010. She edited a biographical dictionary of 18 th -century Freemasons, in collaboration with Charles Porset: Le Monde Maçonnique des Lumieres, published at Champion Editions, Paris, 3 vol (June 2013). In 2015, she coedited Les Ordres de Sagesse du Rite Français, a book on the history of the higher degrees of the French Rite . She edited the first volume of English primary sources compiled by Robert Peter, Jan Snoek and herself : British Freemasonry, 1717-1813, general editor Robert Peter, London and NY, Routledge, 2016, 5 vol. She wrote Black Freemasonry. From Prince Hall to the Giants of Jazz, Inner Traditions 2016. She has just published La Longue Marche des Franc-Maçonnes (2018), a book devoted to women and freemasonry in France, Britain and the USA since the Enlightenment. She supervised five doctoral students who defended their PHDs on the history of freemasonry. Her forthcoming book to be published by the Dervy editions is « Que faire ?... en loge », a comparative study of lodge practices in France, Britain and the States since the 18th century.

Susan Mitchell Sommers is a graduate of Washington University in St. Louis, and Professor of History at Saint Vincent College in Pennsylvania. She has been active in British political and Masonic research since 2004, and has served on the scientific committee for ICHF, the UCLA International conferences, and is a past editor of the Journal for Research into Freemasonry and Fraternalism. She was an active contributor to Le Monde Maçonnique au XVIIIe siècle, edited by Cecile Révauger and Charles Porset. Recent books include The Siblys of London: A Family on the Esoteric Fringes of Georgian England, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, April 2018) and Thomas Dunckerley and English Freemasonry, (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012).