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. 
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 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.”
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. | |
Tags: 1743, 1791, 18th Century, 18th century medical practices, Affair of the Necklace, alchemism, alchemist, Alexandre Dumas, Black Magic, Cardinal Louis de Rohan, Catholicism 1780s, Catholicism 18th century, Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, Count Cagliostro, Divine Caglisotro, Egyptian Lodge of Freemasonry, European History, Fortress of San Leo Marche, France 1770s, Giuseppe Balsamo, Lorenza Felliciani, magicians, Marie Antoinette, necromancy, Orson Welles, The Bastille
At the end of the 18th century as France was suffering through the Revolution (1789-99), changes in fashion were as dramatic as the change in the political order. What had characterized French style up until the Revolution had been costume resonant of the lavish, exquisite lifestyle of the French nobility and monarchy. By the late 1780’s France was severely in debt and the monarchy, enjoying its absolute power, along with the nobility and their feudal retentions were unable to align themselves with the majority of the population. 
In a radical shift, all this gave way to a more simplified form of dress during the revolutionary period. People moved away from the costume that had been representative of the Ancien Regime and chose to do away with the full skirts, flurry of ruffles and bows and the pompous wigs that had been so popular. Men’s clothing was curtailed slightly, too, with pant legs lengthening slightly and the look becoming generally more severe. Women relieved themselves of the tight corset and favored the classically-reminiscent high-waisted dress with a freer form and wigs were discarded in favor of natural hairstyles also influenced by neo-classical aesthetic.
