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7/9/2025, 8:26:06 AM
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>From a British standpoint, such Lodges provided a route along which Britain’s Protestant politicians could bring open-minded French Catholics and others into their social and cultural milieu, creating a bridge across the religious divide and presenting progressive, reformist Catholics with a mechanism to understand the Enlightenment values and the social mores of Whig Britain. Importantly, the three Craft degrees underlined the Whiggish principles of natural liberty, justice and religious toleration
>But English Masonic lodges in France could also serve another purpose. With Jacobite freemasonry gaining traction, London sought to add to its intelligence gathering capability in Paris and within barely a month of Chevalier Ramsay’s Oration, John Coustos, a London Freemason, formed a French-speaking English lodge and initiated the Duc de Villeroy, one of Louis XV’s most senior courtiers
>Coustos (pictured), a jeweller, had moved to France a year or so earlier. He was a member of the Lodge at the Rainbow Coffee House in London and subsequently a founder of the Lodge at Prince Eugene’s Head. The Duc de Villeroy’s initiation gave Coustos’s Lodge status which was reflected in it being renamed ‘Villeroy-Coustos’, with Villeroy installed as Master on 17 February 1737 and Coustos his deputy
>Jacques Levine offers an interesting perspective on eighteenth-century French Freemasonry in his paper in AQC 104 (1991), as does an earlier paper on European Freemasonry by Tunbridge and Batham: AQC 83 (1970)
>From a British standpoint, such Lodges provided a route along which Britain’s Protestant politicians could bring open-minded French Catholics and others into their social and cultural milieu, creating a bridge across the religious divide and presenting progressive, reformist Catholics with a mechanism to understand the Enlightenment values and the social mores of Whig Britain. Importantly, the three Craft degrees underlined the Whiggish principles of natural liberty, justice and religious toleration
>But English Masonic lodges in France could also serve another purpose. With Jacobite freemasonry gaining traction, London sought to add to its intelligence gathering capability in Paris and within barely a month of Chevalier Ramsay’s Oration, John Coustos, a London Freemason, formed a French-speaking English lodge and initiated the Duc de Villeroy, one of Louis XV’s most senior courtiers
>Coustos (pictured), a jeweller, had moved to France a year or so earlier. He was a member of the Lodge at the Rainbow Coffee House in London and subsequently a founder of the Lodge at Prince Eugene’s Head. The Duc de Villeroy’s initiation gave Coustos’s Lodge status which was reflected in it being renamed ‘Villeroy-Coustos’, with Villeroy installed as Master on 17 February 1737 and Coustos his deputy
>Jacques Levine offers an interesting perspective on eighteenth-century French Freemasonry in his paper in AQC 104 (1991), as does an earlier paper on European Freemasonry by Tunbridge and Batham: AQC 83 (1970)
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