Historical Configurations of Freemasonry in Belgium: Secularity, Politics, Fragmentation ; Configuraciones Históricas de la Masonería en Bélgica: Laicidad, Política, Fragmentación

If Belgian freemasonry was a largely unproblematic sociability during the 18th century, it took a completely new direction since future Belgium’s annexation to France and the Netherlands at the end of the 18th century and in the first decades of the 19th. A set of new lodges with a largely new, mainly bourgeois membership gradually generated a freemasonry that was increasingly anticlerical and openly political as it was the backbone of the country’s liberal party. This article shows that, in its secularizing of its own discourse and practices, the Belgian Grand Orient was at the vanguard of wh... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Tyssens, Jeffrey
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
Verlag/Hrsg.: Editorial de la Sede del Pacífico de la Universidad de Costa Rica
Schlagwörter: Belgium / politics / secularity / gender / regularity / Bélgica / política / laicidad / género / regularidad
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-28546285
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://revistas.ucr.ac.cr/index.php/rehmlac/article/view/24279

If Belgian freemasonry was a largely unproblematic sociability during the 18th century, it took a completely new direction since future Belgium’s annexation to France and the Netherlands at the end of the 18th century and in the first decades of the 19th. A set of new lodges with a largely new, mainly bourgeois membership gradually generated a freemasonry that was increasingly anticlerical and openly political as it was the backbone of the country’s liberal party. This article shows that, in its secularizing of its own discourse and practices, the Belgian Grand Orient was at the vanguard of what is commonly called “Latin” freemasonry. However, at the turn of the 20th century, when mass democracy changed the country’s institutions and when the first socialist sympathies developed within the lodges, a process of de-politicization was engaged that was more or less completed after World War I. The Belgian masonic configuration then tended to become more fragmented. This process started in the early 20th century and was continued into the early 21th, with debates on the regularity issue and even more with the contesting of the male gender-exclusiveness of the grand lodges by members of mixed or feminine freemasonry. Nevertheless, if the old organizational unity was broken, a relatively benign coexistence was developed. ; Si la masonería belga era una sociabilidad a problemática durante una gran parte del siglo XVII, esta dinámica se transformó a partir de la anexión de Bélgica a Francia y a los Países Bajos a finales del siglo XVIII y durante las primeras décadas del XIX. Un conjunto de nuevas logias con una gran cantidad de nuevos miembros, principalmente burgueses generaron progresivamente una masonería que iba a ser cada vez más anticlerical y políticamente abierta como el núcleo duro del partido liberal del país. En este artículo muestra cómo durante la secularización de sus discursos y prácticas, el Gran Oriente belga estaba a la vanguardia de lo que comúnmente se llamó la masonería “latina”. Sin embargo, ...