Secret-society conspiracy theory saw historical actors as puppets of an eternal hidden sect

Evidence

The heroes of the French Revolution are to him “mannequins” of an “agence secrète,” the agents of the Freemasons. But Freemasonry is only the name which his contemporaries have given to a “revolutionary sect” which has existed at all times and whose policy always has been to attack “remaining behind the scenes, manipulating the strings of the marionettes it thought convenient to put on the scene.” He starts by saying: “Probably, it will be difficult to believe in a plan which was formed in antiquity and always followed with the same constancy:…the authors of the Revolution are no more French than they are German, Italian, English, etc. They constitute a peculiar nation which was born and has grown in darkness, in the midst of all civilized nations, with the aim of subduing them all to its domination.” — Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2640

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the structural template of the conspiracy worldview — shadow manipulators, eternal trans-national sect — that antisemitism inherits.
• XREF: This puppet-master template prefigures the Protocols’ depiction of Jewry; feeds into constructing the ‘Other’ as hidden director of events.