Prior to the revolution that would change the system of governance in France, the people had suffered under the mismanagement of King Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, who, along with the aristocracy, refused to acknowledge the economic plight of the lower classes.

The first phase of the French Revolution started in 1789 when representatives of the noble, clergy, and common classes convened in a meeting of the Estates-General to address the economic duress of the population and institute reforms. King Louis XVI, under the influence of the conservative nobles of his privy council had banished the reformist finance ministers Turgot and Necker and generally neglected discussions of reform. He banned the crucial meeting of the Estates-General, forcing them to meet outside where they drafted the famous Oath of the Tennis Court on June 20, 1789. By July of 1789 the people of Paris were clamoring for change and began taking to the streets in protest. They stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, tearing down what had been a symbol of monarchical and aristocratic abuse of power for years.
The slogan of the French Revolution was “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” and aimed to elevate the rights of the impoverished lower classes and mitigate the inequalities that had existed for centuries in the French feudal system.

Both political and socioeconomic factors contributed to the French Revolution as the ambitions of the rising bourgeoisie were allied with aggrieved peasants, wage-earners, and individuals of all classes. The influence of the ideas that rounded out the revolutionary movement, rooted in Enlightenment philosophies were also paramount to the desire for change in what was felt to be a stagnant system of government.

The poor economic situation, peaked by high national debt due to Louis XVI’s involvement in foreign causes and war on the North American continent, aggravated the inequality between the classes in France. The feudal peasants and the enlightened liberals resented royal absolutism and aspired for a republican government that would represent the rights of individuals. In the months before the revolution, high unemployment and high bread prices resulted in strife for the lower classes who could not afford to purchase food and led to a general dissatisfaction and upheaval among the population.

The King, his wife Marie Antoinette, and their children attempted to escape from Paris in 1791 after months of popular dissatisfaction and the increasing threat to the monarchy. The King and his family did not make it out of Paris and were instead captured and held in Paris and in 1792 the King was sent to the guillotine. For three years, between 1792 and 1795, a committee was established to rule the country headed by Georges-Jacques Denton, Jean-Paul Marat, and Maximilien Robespierre. They ruled in what became known as the Reign of Terror, sending thousands of Royalists to the guillotine including Marie Antoinette and other Royalists, dissidents of the Revolution, and even moderate thinkers who sought to mediate the excesses of the revolutionary movement. The Revolution succeeded in overturning generations of autocratic monarchic rule but became a symbol of excessive force and revolt without sufficient stabilizing elements to fundamentally change conditions for the French people. In 1799 a young General named Napoleon Bonaparte helped overthrow the government, called the Directory, and by 1804 had risen to such power that he etablished himself as “Napoleon I, Emperor of the French.”

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The sex life of Catherine II of Russia, known to history as Catherine the Great, was a source of endless fascination for her contemporaries. As ruler of the Russian colossus, Catherine was one of the most powerful people of late-eighteenth century Europe and, in a world dominated by men, Catherine’s personal life was seen as both politically consequential and socially titillating. Indeed, the passage of just over two centuries since her death has done little to diminish our sordid appetite for tidbits regarding her most intimate affairs.

Despite contemporary beliefs to the contrary, in most cases Catherine’s relationships with various men, known in courtly parlance as “favorites”, carried little political significance. Over the 44 years of her reign, the number of her documented lovers did not exceed 12 and only one of those men ever achieved any real and lasting political power. While the dashing Gregory Orlov was instrumental in the coup that brought her to power, and the handsome Plato Zubov (almost 40 years her junior) was crucial to her emotional health in the final years of her reign, it was the mercurial personality and prodigious talents of Gregory Potemkin that won her heart most passionately.

Tall, handsome, brown-haired and strong, Potemkin was the son of a minor noble family known for loyal service to the Crown. A military officer in the Horse Guards during the coup that brought Catherine to power in 1762, he was not able to rise to the position of royal favorite until 1774. From then, until his death in 1791, Potemkin was the most powerful man in Russia and one of the greatest statesmen in the history of Imperial Russia.

Stressed by the demands of absolute power, Catherine appreciated Potemkin’s gifts as an adviser, lover and friend and fed off his well-articulated devotion to her. A great volume of their personal correspondence has survived and it paints the picture of a relationship that was tempestuous, but deeply affectionate. Money, palaces, titles, honors and offices were all his for the taking as he assumed a very active role in the policy of her realm. (Some historians even speculate that the couple was secretly married.) Though their physical relationship ended perhaps two years or so into the affair, Potemkin, alone among her favorites, maintained all of his positions until his

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death. Even when his attention as a lover was no longer needed, his skill for statecraft proved irreplaceable. When Catherine heard of Potemkin’s death she was tear-stricken for days. More than any of the men in her life, Potemkin was the intellectual and emotional equal of Catherine in a way that none could ever replicate. Her greatest confidant and collaborator was gone and she would never again find his equal.

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Though he enthralled the aristocracy of Europe with tales of his supposed Oriental origins, the man known as Count Alessandro di Cagliostro actually began life under much less auspicious circumstances.

In truth, he was born Giuseppe Balsamo in the destitute Jewish quarter of Palermo, Sicily around 1743.  Little is known of his life until the age of twenty-five, when he married Lorenza Felliciani – the well-educated daughter of bankrupt noble family.  Taking for themselves, quite illegitimately, the titles of Count and Countess Cagliostro, they set out across the continent as mystics for hire.  Soon they were fetching vast sums for appearances in the courts of European nobility, where they performed the usual parlor tricks of 18th century itinerant magicians: fortune telling, alchemy, and the occasional feat of necromancy.

In doing so, the Count endeared himself to a great number of prominent figures, not all of whom accepted his “enhanced” biography wholesale; Goethe, in his Voyage in Italy, writes: “I answered that indeed, in the eyes of the public, he posed as aristocrat of high birth, but that to his friends he liked to acknowledge his humble origin.”

By the time the couple reached France in the 1770s, Cagliostro’s own reputation preceded him.  Upon appearing for the Cardinal Louis de Rohan, he supposedly engineered a diamond of tremendous size through alchemical means; the prelate’s own jeweler would later value the stone at twenty-five thousand livres.  So taken was Rohan with the magician’s perceived gifts that he would later commission a bust of the Count for his study, bearing the inscription: To Divine Cagliostro.

With his popularity in France at all-time high, it was there that Cagliostro founded the Egyptian Lodge of Freemasonry - claiming that he procured secret knowledge from a “curious manuscript” and baited his followers with promises of immortality.  In truth, his life-extending formula was little more than a blend of common mystical tropes and crude 18th century medical practices, such as the consumption of heavy metals.

Cagliostro’s penchant for influence peddling soon caught up with him, however.  He was imprisoned in the Bastille for nine months following accusations that he had collaborated in a plot to steal a necklace intended for Marie Antoinette.  The “Affair of the Necklace” ended when he was released due to insufficient evidence.  According to popular accounts of his release, ten thousand cheering Parisians greeted him at the prison gate and triumphantly carried him down him down the Boulevard Saint-Antoine.  Nonetheless, the Count and Countess still found themselves banished from France and, in 1791, moved onto Rome, where he opened a branch of his Egyptian Lodge.

The seat of Catholicism and papal authority, however, wasn’t as tolerant of occultists as libertine-era France; the Count and Countess were both arrested on charges of heresy and sorcery and sentenced to death.  Lorenza, who had chartered her own, all-female branch of the Egyptian Lodge while in Rome, was spared, after issuing a full “confession” and agreeing to live out her days in a nunnery.  Cagliostro’s own sentence was eventually commuted to life, and he died, imprisoned in the Fortress of San Leo, not long after.

For some though, Cagliostro lived on; like many other arcane hucksters of the alchemical era, he was said to have obtained immortality and revered as an “Ascended Master” by many subsequent teachers of arcane philosophy. To others, he was the very embodiment of the occult swindler. It’s a role in he has inhabited repeatedly ever since, in everything from the works of Alexandre Dumas to the films of Orson Welles, who played the Count in 1949’s Black Magic.

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