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 ...