The Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism by Augustin Barruel (1743-1820) was, from its first appearance in 1798, a runaway bestseller both in its original French and in its English and other translations, in spite of its being a four-volume work of almost two thousand pages. If the Memoirs had offered only a vast documentation of some major intellectual and ideological trends that produced the French Revolution, this alone would have assured it a place of honor among such books. But the Memoirs represented the highest form of writing history, or the probing into the causes of one of history's great turning points. In singling out the combined forces of the philosophes, the French Masonic Lodges, and the German Illuminists, as the decisive factor behind the radically secularist trends of the French Revolution, Barruel himself took a stance that amounts to a standing revolt against what has come to be the "received" view. Whatever one's disagreement with Barruel's thesis, the data and documentation offered by him remain a perennial challenge and an invitation to reflect on the meaning of the Enlightenment. - Back cover.