David Allen Harvey's Beyond Enlightenment is a contemporary academic monograph in English on Martinism and its relationship to French society. As Harvey presents it, Martinism is the characteristic form of French occultism. His definition of occultism is not at all innovative, basically accepting whole-cloth for this purpose the definition of "Western esotericism" developed by Antoine Faivre. (Since Faivre is himself French, one might anticipate a comfortable fit between his definition and the Martinist phenomena.) Harvey also aligns himself with other recent scholarship on occultism and modernity, such as that of Corinna Treitel, Joscelyn Godwin, and Alex Owen.

I was struck by Harvey's account of the Martinist Order's relationship to the Theosophical Society, which presents Martinist organizer Papus (Gerard Encausse) very much as the French Anna Kingsford, leading a schism from the French Theosophical society inspired by resistance to the "esoteric Buddhist" agenda of the international T.S. In the development of French occultism, Papus seems in fact to have played key roles that were vested in several individuals over two generations of English occultism.

I was especially gratified to read Harvey's overview of the scandals regarding and propagated by the Vintrasian heresiarch Joseph Boullan, which formed a principal backdrop to J.-K. Huysmans' La-Bas, along with eventually feeding into the neo-Gnosticism organized by Papus with Jean Bricaud. The Église Gnostique of Jules Doinel, however, goes without mention by Harvey, despite its eventual interactions with Martinism and Doinel's own involvement in the Taxil hoax, which latter does feature here.

As reflected in the book's subtitle Occultism and Politics in Modern France, Harvey is at particular pains to examine possible grounds for the suspicion that French occultism, as exemplified by the neo-Martinists of the nineteenth century, could have incubated and/or nourished the social impulse of French Fascism. In this question, he takes the work of Nicholas Goodrich-Clarke on "occult roots" of Nazism as a possible parallel, Harvey's conclusion, with which I concur, is that while there were certainly points of social and cultural contact between the Martinist milieu and the forerunners of French Fascism, Martinism lacked engagement with the "scientific" race theories characteristic of the latter, and had a pronounced antipathy for their militaristic dimensions. Despite "an ugly and exclusive racist undercurrent" in neo-Martinism, Harvey estimates that "the influence ... flowed in the other direction" (170).

This discussion helped me to more thoroughly understand why an assortment of contemporary Continental writers are prone to treat occultism exclusively as a creature of the political right (despite demonstrations to the contrary from, e.g., Godwin). In particular, it helps to provide an objective historical context for the weirdnesses of Umberto Eco's novel Foucault's Pendulum, including most especially the history and nature of the "synarchy," and how it became a feature of the paranoid occult scene alongside Templarism, Illuminism, and Rosicrucianism. Harvey supplies a full genealogy for this idea, which was first named in the works of Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, and traces its eventual "shadow" in twentieth-century conspiracy theories.

Grateful as I am for what I feel this study has gotten right, there are occasionally omissions or mis-characterizations that give me pause. A chief example is the notion of "unknown superiors," which is mentioned by Harvey only once, and there only as a "favorite theme of anti-Masonic lore" touched upon unadvisedly in a 1914 article by Papus (213). In fact, Papus had much earlier grounded the legitimacy of his Martinist Order in a transmission via "unknown superiors" from the eighteenth-century Martinists, and he even titled one of its principal degrees as Supérieur Inconnu. Moreover, the generic notion of "secret chiefs," so widespread in fin de siecle occultism, had its real origin in the German Masonic Rite of Strict Observance, and was imported to France by seminal Martinist Jean-Baptiste Willermoz.

Such blind spots made me a little uncertain about the thoroughness of other aspects of Beyond Enlightenment, but on the whole I found its contents a valuable addition to my historical knowledge of Martinism.