Lost Illusions and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

By Lawrence Erickson

Aug 21, 2025

Cracking open a copy of Lost Illusions by French writer Honoré de Balzac proved to be a surprising experience. As possibly the most admired work from a titan of Western Literature, it should not be a work that is considered obscure. Yet it almost certainly would be for anyone outside of literary circles, with it having fewer ratings on Goodreads than fifteen of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s works, another titan that Balzac inspired. The novel proved to have all the penetrating human insight and moral struggles that would be expected from a writer of this caliber, as it told the tale of the ambitious young poet Lucien Chardon and his idealistic friend David Séchard.

When Lucien arrives in Paris to pursue his dream, this fascinating human drama quickly morphed into something that was unexpected but also conjured an inkling of familiarity in the back of my mind. As the title betokens, Lucien’s view of Paris as a haven for artists was soon crushed, and a world of corruption unfolded before him. With his money running out, Lucien decides to take up the power of the journalistic pen to alleviate his woes, much to the dismay of his more noble-minded friends.

What follows is possibly one of the earliest exposé’s on the shocking and disturbing power of the press, a force which was still in its infancy when Balzac published Lost Illusions between 1837 and 1843. Lucien is quickly seduced by this band of literary criminals as they coordinate to extort payments, destroy careers, and manipulate public opinion for their own gain.

As I made my way through the book, a few running themes stood out. Balzac’s paints an extremely conspiratorial view of Parisian society at the time, with nearly everything happening in the public eye having some ulterior motive behind it. This is reflected in quotes such as the following:

“There is a world behind the scenes in the theatre of literature. The public in front sees unexpected or well-deserved success, and applauds; the public does not see the preparations, ugly as they always are, the painted supers, the claqueurs hired to applaud, the stage carpenters, and all that lies behind the scenes. You are still among the audience. Abdicate, there is still time, before you set your foot on the lowest step of the throne for which so many ambitious spirits are contending, and do not sell your honor, as I do, for a livelihood."

“You do not seem to me to be strong in history. History is of two kinds--there is the official history taught in schools, a lying compilation ad usum delphini; and there is the secret history which deals with the real causes of events --a scandalous chronicle.”

“Whenever the press makes vehement onslaughts upon some one in power, you may be sure that there is some refusal to do a service behind it.”

The next would be the foreboding rise of a nearly omnipotent press. Lucien’s friends make or break the careers of young novelists and actresses, and begin to be treated like gods by those at their mercy. In multiple discussions, journalists predict that France will soon be ruled by the press:

"The influence and power of the press is only dawning," said Finot. "Journalism is in its infancy; it will grow. In ten years' time, everything will be brought into publicity. The light of thought will be turned on all subjects, and----"
"The blight of thought will be over it all," corrected Blondet.

"When Blucher and Sacken arrived on the heights of Montmartre in 1814 (pardon me, gentlemen, for recalling a day unfortunate for France), Sacken (a rough brute), remarked, 'Now we will set Paris alight!' --'Take very good care that you don't,' said Blucher. 'France will die of that, nothing else can kill her,' and he waved his hand over the glowing, seething city, that lay like a huge canker in the valley of the Seine.--There are no journalists in our country, thank Heaven!" [character is German]

"Blondet is right," said Claude Vignon. "Journalism, so far from being in the hands of a priesthood, came to be first a party weapon, and then a commercial speculation, carried on without conscience or scruple, like other commercial speculations. Every newspaper, as Blondet says, is a shop to which people come for opinions of the right shade. If there were a paper for hunchbacks, it would set forth plainly, morning and evening, in its columns, the beauty, the utility, and necessity of deformity. A newspaper is not supposed to enlighten its readers, but to supply them with congenial opinions. Give any newspaper time enough, and it will be base, hypocritical, shameless, and treacherous; the periodical press will be the death of ideas, systems, and individuals; nay, it will flourish upon their decay. It will take the credit of all creations of the brain; the harm that it does is done anonymously. We, for instance--I, Claude Vignon; you,Blondet; you, Lousteau; and you, Finot--we are all Platos, Aristides, and Catos, Plutarch's men, in short; we are all immaculate; we may wash our hands of all iniquity. Napoleon's sublime aphorism, suggested by his study of the Convention, 'No one individual is responsible for a crime committed collectively,' sums up the whole significance of a phenomenon, moral or immoral, whichever you please. However shamefully a newspaper may behave, the disgrace attaches to no one person."

"Napoleon did wisely when he muzzled the press. I would wager that the Opposition papers would batter down a government of their own setting up, just as they are battering the present government, if any demand was refused. The more they have, the more they will want in the way of concessions. The parvenu journalist will be succeeded by the starveling hack. There is no salve for this sore. It is a kind of corruption which grows more and more obtrusive and malignant; the wider it spreads, the more patiently it will be endured, until the day comes when newspapers shall so increase and multiply in the earth that confusion will be the result--a second Babel. We, all of us, such as we are, have reason to know that crowned kings are less ungrateful than kings of our profession; that the most sordid man of business is not so mercenary nor so keen in speculation; that our brains are consumed to furnish their daily supply of poisonous trash.”

“In these ways the pernicious influence of the press will be increased, while the most odious form of journalism will receive sanction. Insult and personalities will become a recognized privilege of the press; newspapers have taken this tone in the subscribers' interests; and when both sides have recourse to the same weapons, the standard is set and the general tone of journalism taken for granted. When the evil is developed to its fullest extent, restrictive laws will be followed by prohibitions; there will be a return of the censorship of the press imposed after the assassination of the Duc de Berri, and repealed since the opening of the Chambers.”

The critiques of the press became quite in-depth, including a significant discussion of the journalist’s most potent weapon, blackmail. One of Lucien’s friends, after falling on hard times, describes to Lucien his plan for a little chantage:

"What is 'chantage'?" asked Lucien.
"It is an English invention recently imported. A 'chanteur' is a man who can manage to put a paragraph in the papers--never an editor nor a responsible man, for they are not supposed to know anything about it, and there is always a Giroudeau or a Philippe Bridau to be found. A bravo of this stamp finds up somebody who has his own reasons for not wanting to be talked about. Plenty of people have a few peccadilloes, or some more or less original sin, upon their consciences; there are plenty of fortunes made in ways that would not bear looking into; sometimes a man has kept the letter of the law, and sometimes he has not; and in either case, there is a tidbit of tattle for the inquirer, as, for instance, that tale of Fouche's police surrounding the spies of the Prefect of Police, who, not being in the secret of the fabrication of forged English banknotes, were just about to pounce on the clandestine printers employed by the Minister, or there is the story of Prince Galathionne's diamonds, the Maubreuile affair, or the Pombreton will case. The 'chanteur' gets possession of some compromising letter, asks for an interview; and if the man that made the money does not buy silence, the 'chanteur' draws a picture of the press ready to take the matter up and unravel his private affairs. The rich man is frightened, he comes down with the money, and the trick succeeds.”

"'Chantage' seems to mean your money or your life?"
"It is better than that," said Lousteau; "it is your money or your character. A short time ago the proprietor of a minor newspaper was refused credit. The day before yesterday it was announced in his columns that a gold repeater set with diamonds belonging to a certain notability had found its way in a curious fashion into the hands of a private soldier in the Guards; the story promised to the readers might have come from the Arabian Nights. The notability lost no time in asking that editor to dine with him; the editor was distinctly a gainer by the transaction, and contemporary history has lost an anecdote. Whenever the press makes vehement onslaughts upon some one in power, you may be sure that there is some refusal to do a service behind it. Blackmailing with regard to private life is the terror of the richest Englishman, and a great source of wealth to the press in England, which is infinitely more corrupt than ours. We are children in comparison! In England they will pay five or six thousand francs for a compromising letter to sell again."

Also, a similar role played by money. Lucien is dismayed when he discovers that positive reviews for books and plays are frequently dependent on how much money the producer has been willing to shell out to the newspapers. Therefore, many of Paris’s icons simply bribed their way to the top:

"This so much desired reputation is nearly always crowned prostitution. Yes; the poorest kind of literature is the hapless creature freezing at the street corner; second-rate literature is the kept-mistress picked out of the brothels of journalism, and I am her bully; lastly, there is lucky literature, the flaunting, insolent courtesan who has a house of her own and pays taxes, who receives great lords, treating or ill-treating them as she pleases, who has liveried servants and a carriage, and can afford to keep greedy creditors waiting.“

“It is difficult to keep illusions on any subject in Paris,” answered Lucien as they turned in at his door. “There is a tax upon everything — everything has its price, and anything can be made to order — even success.”

Finally, a sprinkle of antisemitism:

Suppose that in a large banking-house a bill for a thousand francs is daily protested on an average, then the banker receives twenty-eight francs a day by the grace of God and the constitution of the banking system, that all powerful invention due to the Jewish intellect of the Middle Ages, which after six centuries still controls monarchs and peoples.

“In your intercourse with men, in short, be grasping and mean as a Jew; all that the Jew does for money, you must do for power.”

“The Jews have monopolized the gold of the world; they compose Robert the Devil, act Phedre, sing William Tell, give commissions for pictures and build palaces, write Reisebilder and wonderful verse; they are more powerful than ever, their religion is accepted, they have lent money to the Holy Father himself!”

As I digested this filthy but likely accurate picture of the media and elite society in Restoration France, I could think of only one other work that seemed to rival its prescience: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Under the conventional narrative stating that the Protocols were published at the beginning of the twentieth century, Lost Illusions would predate it by at least 60 years. However, the article American Pravda: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Ron Unz discusses an analysis by Nicholas Kollerstrom that suggests the Protocols were actually most likely produced in France before 1864.

Although I was doubtful about many of Kollerstrom’s views, some of the points he made seemed extremely telling. According to the conventional narrative, the Protocols were concocted as a work of antisemitic propaganda in the early years of the twentieth century, yet it makes absolutely no mention of Zionism, which seems an astonishing omission given the controversial nature of that high-profile movement. Therefore, Kollerstrom plausibly argued that the document must have been written before Theodore Herzl had launched that movement in the 1890s, although very minor elements such as the mention of “Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzscheism” may have been later added. He also noted that sworn testimony had established that the original copy of the Protocols was in French before being translated into Russian and distributed in that country.
As the Wikipedia entry demonstrated, the Protocols undeniably shared quite a number of passages with an obscure book published in 1864 by Maurice Joly, a French Jew whose satirical work was sharply critical of Napoleon III and therefore quickly suppressed by the latter’s government. So according to the standard narrative, the Czarist secret police or whatever other antisemitic group produced the Protocols had plagiarized Joly’s book.
But Kollerstrom considered this highly implausible since the latter work had nothing to do with Jews or antisemitism and any copies would have been extremely difficult to obtain decades later when the document was allegedly produced. Joly had been a Paris member of various Masonic lodges, so Kollerstrom persuasively argued that it was far more likely that his own book had borrowed elements from the Protocols, a document that must have been already available in his own political circles.

Although Kollerstrom disagrees, Unz and critics of the Protocols note that their style and presentation make it seem very unlikely that they are a legitimate recording of a speech from an elite Jew. Having read through them myself, I would agree with that analysis, and it seems overwhelmingly likely that they were instead written by a French Royalist, given that they seem to repeatedly illustrate the necessity of monarchy, aristocracy, the Church, and others aspects of reactionary ideology, through showing how this nefarious Jew is exploiting the decline of those institutions.

While the writer was likely a right-wing Royalist, he also was likely very familiar with and had access to elite Jewish/Masonic circles. As Kollestrom stated, Joly’s possession of the document and its absence from the general public indicates that it was probably floating almost exclusively around Masonic circles before its appearance in Russia, and therefore the writer probably distributed it in these circles originally.

Other pieces of textual evidence from the Protocols indicate that the writer was a literary man, rather than say, a politician. The writer seems to have been involved in literary gatherings and the press, and conveys that Masonic signals are being used in these areas:

Under the title of central department of the press we shall institute literary gatherings at which our agents will without attracting attention issue the orders and watchwords of the day…

Even nowadays, already, to take only the French press, there are forms which reveal masonic solidarity in acting on the watchword…

In describing recruits to Masonry, the writer ascribes a special focus to literary men:

The class of people who most willingly enter into secret societies are those who live by their wits, careerists, and in general people, mostly light-minded, with whom we shall have no difficulty in dealing and in using to wind up the mechanism of the machine devised by us.

Our agents will be taken from the higher as well as the lower ranks of society, from among the administrative class who spend their time in amusements, editors, printers and publishers, booksellers…

Finally, these quotes shows a preoccupation with literature:

In countries known as progressive and enlightened we have created a senseless, filthy, abominable literature.

The tax will bring vapid literary ambitions within bounds and the liability to penalties will make literary men dependent upon us. And if there should be any found who are desirous of writing against us, they will not find any person eager to print their productions.

Aside from this, assuming the Protocols are fictional, writing a speech where one must put oneself into the mind of a fictional character is something that a literary man would feel most comfortable with, and the document includes examples of literary flair such as:

Like the Indian idol Vishnu they will have a hundred hands, and every one of them will have a finger on any one of the public opinions as required. When a pulse quickens these hands will lead opinion in the direction of our aims, for an excited patient loses all power of judgment and easily yields to suggestion.

To have access to Masonic circles that were elite enough that the document would not leak to the public for at least 40 years, it seems likely that the writer was relatively prominent. Among 19th century French fiction writers, right-wingers seem to have been fairly rare, with Dumas, Hugo, Sue, Stendahl, Flaubert and Zola all leaning liberal.

Balzac was an exception, he was “a self-proclaimed reactionary, a monarchist who wanted to restore all the hereditary rights of the aristocracy and a Roman Catholic.” His ideology can be summed up nicely in the following quote:

But surely it would be safer to allow open and avowed privileges than those which are underhand, based on trickery, subversive of what should be public spirit, and continuing the work of despotism to a lower and baser level than heretofore. May we not have overthrown noble tyrants devoted to their country’s good, to create the tyranny of selfish interests? Shall power lurk in secret places, instead of radiating from its natural source?
-Scenes from Country Life (or Sons of the Soil)

Given that both supporters and critics of the Protocols generally believe it was written after 1890, it’s not surprising that no one seems to have considered the possibility of Balzac’s authorship, but it is more surprising that there also appears to not even be any discussion of influence from Lost Illusions on the Protocols, despite enormous thematic overlap.

Italian writer Umberto Eco discuses the origin of the Protocols in Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, holding the conventional view that they were plagiarized from Joly. Eco also notes though that there seems to be inspiration from Alexandre Dumas’ 1846 novel Joseph Balsamo as well as a section of Eugène Sue’s Mysteries of the People, which was written in the mid-1850’s. Dumas’ novel includes a speech by a member of the Illuminati which has very little thematic or stylistic overlap with the Protocols other than it being a plot for world domination. Sue’s novel includes a letter from a Jesuit outlining a plot for world domination, and this one seems to have more similarities, almost seeming like the Protocols from the reverse perspective. However, this text is far shallower, with almost no discussion of the press, blackmail, or many other strategies outlined in the Protocols. The bulk of the text consists of the Jesuit outlining his plan to massacre the opposition, install a Jesuit friendly monarch, and conduct various geopolitical schemes to suppress opposition from other nations.

It seems unlikely that this banal strawman of the Jesuit’s would inspire anyone to feel the need to write a rebuttal in the form of the Protocols, so I think it’s more likely that, like Joly, Sue was familiar with the Protocols and perhaps decided to write this part of his work as a halfhearted liberal rebuttal. Balzac and Sue were acquainted throughout their lives, generally having a “frenemy” relationship.

Along with access, the writer of the Protocols clearly had significant first hand knowledge of Jewish and Masonic groups, with Unz noting that it represents “a reasonably accurate description of the strategies and tactics employed by various conspiratorial movements, often heavily Jewish ones, in seeking to achieve their objective of obtaining political power.” Balzac’s relations with high level Jews and Masons isn’t something we just have to speculate about given his prominence. In fact, according to his biography by Graham Robb, Balzac’s father was a Freemason. His father’s activities may have inspired Balzac in writing The History of the Thirteen, a story focusing on “the activities of a rich, powerful, sinister and unscrupulous secret society in nineteenth-century France.”

Even more notable though is Balzac’s relationship with Baron James Mayer de Rothschild, with Robb’s book reporting that they had a “friendship“1 and discussing a few of their encounters. This ”friendship“ seems to have been an uneasy one though. An article from The Occidental Observer summarizes the treatment that de Rothschild received in Balzac’s fiction:

Balzac modelled his Jewish financier, Nucingen, who appears in more of his novels than any other character, on Baron James Meyer de Rothschild, whom he knew personally. Balzac told his future wife in 1844 that James, “the high baron of financial feudalism,” was “Nucingen to the last detail and worse.”[20] Nucingen is Balzac’s personification of Jewish money power and the social and political corruption attendant on the misuse of that power. In Splendors and Sorrows of Courtesans (1838–47), Balzac, with Nucingen (and thus Baron James) in mind, declared that “all rapidly accumulated wealth is either the result of luck or discovery, or the result of legalized theft.”[21] Nucingen is “the wiliest of all the rogues in The Human Comedy: a banker who can engineer a liquidation of his own assets, or plan an investment portfolio on a client’s behalf, simply and solely to further his own ends—enriching himself but bankrupting others by what is tantamount to legalized crime.”[22]

The article also notes explicit examples from Balzac’s work of Jewish conspiratorial behavior, such as the Jewish art dealer, Magus:

Magus uses Jewish ethnic networks to assiduously track every masterwork in Europe: “Magus had his own map of Europe with every masterpiece marked on it, and at every relevant spot he had co-religionists who kept their eyes open on his behalf in return for a commission—but the reward was meagre for the amount of vigilance entailed!” Balzac likens the monomania of Magus to the desires of kings: Magus is proud of his power to buy the finest canvases which he hoards in his mansion, thus depriving the gentile community of its great works of art.

Balzac also mentioned two elements that feature prominently in the Protocols, the Jewish tendency to dehumanize Gentiles and their tendency towards despotic government:

In personal appearance Remonencq was short and thin; his little eyes were set in his head in porcine fashion; a Jew’s slyness and concentrated greed looked out of those dull blue circles, though in his case the false humility that masks the Hebrew’s unfathomed contempt for the Gentile was lacking.
-Cousin Pons

Mahomet certainly derived from the Hebrews the idea of a despotic government…
-Philisophical Studies

The Bolshevik Revolution is widely credited with propelling the Protocols to stardom, given how eerily similar the events of that revolution seemed to be with the scenario described in the Protocols. This similarity is probably more than just a coincidence though. If the Protocols do date to France pre-1864, it seems highly likely that they were based on the 1848 revolution in France, which brought to power the exact kind of despotic, left-wing government that the Protocols discusses.

Balzac lived through this revolution first hand, and had even predicted beforehand that Europe was “on the brink of political catastrophes.“2 Robb’s book makes known some of Balzac’s thoughts during this harrowing experience. The first thing Balzac noted was the immediate anarchy:

On the 23rd, ‘seeing that there were strange goings-on, I changed my clothes and went out. The whole of our faubourg was barricaded, the streets abandoned to the rabble and they were smashing those beautiful lanterns and building barricades. The patience of the troops was sublime!’* When the Government collapsed, he wrote again to Eveline: ‘As far as we’re concerned, here are the results. — Anarchy. 3

The Protocols discusses a similar situation:

The mob is a savage and displays its savagery at every opportunity. The moment the mob seizes freedom in its hands it quickly turns to anarchy, which in itself is the highest degree of savagery.

As the Protocols lays out, this period of anarchy was followed by a period of despotism, which Balzac himself predicted:

In June 1848, the counter-revolution occurred when Balzac had said it would three months before. The provisional government had failed to ease the hunger and unemployment that swept it into power, and after six days of street-fighting a workers’ revolt was savagely repressed by those civilized bourgeois Balzac had always known would be forced by their own policies to act as barbarians. Thousands were shot, imprisoned or deported, the army gained control and in the elections the following December, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, nephew of the Emperor, became President.4

It’s hard not to see the Protocols as describing the same event:

When we have accomplished our coup d’etat we shall say then to the various peoples: “Everything has gone terribly badly, all have been worn out with sufferings. We are destroying the causes of your torment — nationalities, frontiers, differences of coinages. You are at liberty, of course, to pronounce sentence upon us, but can it possibly be a just one if it is confirmed by you before you make any trial of what we are offering you.”
Then will the mob exalt us and bear us up in their hands in a unanimous triumph of hopes and expectations. Voting, which we have made the instrument will set us on the throne of the world by teaching even the very smallest units of members of the human race to vote by means of meetings and agreements by groups, will then have served its purposes and will play its part then for the last time by a unanimity of desire to make close acquaintance with us before condemning us.

Balzac and the Protocols also shared alarm over the rise of communism. From Robb’s book:

Outside the palace in the Rue Fortunée, events were taking an ominous turn: ‘You can’t imagine how much ground communism has gained — a doctrine that consists in overturning everything, sharing everything, even produce and commodities, among all men considered as brothers.”5

From the Protocols:

We appear on the scene as alleged saviours of the worker from this oppression when we propose to him to enter the ranks of our fighting forces — Socialists, Anarchists, Communists — to whom we always give support in accordance with an alleged brotherly rule (of the solidarity of all humanity) of our social masonry.

To provide further evidence for the idea that Balzac may have written the Protocols amidst the turmoil of 1848, I’m going to go through the document itself and point out the many instances of overlap in theme and phrasing between what it says and Balzac’s work, especially Lost Illusions.

Note: All Balzac quotes can be found in this digital copy of the complete Human Comedy. I also used this copy of Lost Illusions.

Protocol I:

It must be noted that men with bad instincts are more in number than the good, and therefore the best results in governing them are attained by violence and terrorization, and not by academic discussions. Every man aims at power, everyone would like to become a dictator if only he could, and rare indeed are the men who would not be willing to sacrifice the welfare of all for the sake of securing their own welfare.

This is essentially the stylistic structure of Lost Illusions, as it provides the perspective of nearly every character and shows how they act primarily in their own self-interest, with the objective of gaining power over their own situation.

The Protocols:

Without an absolute despotism there can be no existence for civilization which is carried on not by the masses but by their guide, whosoever that person may be…
…the destruction of the privileges, or in other words of the very existence of the aristocracy of the goyim, that class which was the only defense peoples and countries had against us. On the ruins of the natural and genealogical aristocracy of the goyim we have set up the aristocracy of our educated class headed by the aristocracy of money.

Balzac, Scenes From County Life:

But surely it would be safer to allow open and avowed privileges than those which are underhand, based on trickery, subversive of what should be public spirit, and continuing the work of despotism to a lower and baser level than heretofore. May we not have overthrown noble tyrants devoted to their country’s good, to create the tyranny of selfish interests? Shall power lurk in secret places, instead of radiating from its natural source?

The Protocols:

Political freedom is an idea but not a fact.

Balzac, The Duchess of De Langeais:

Equality may be a right, but no power on earth can convert it into fact.

The Protocols:

Every resolution of a crowd depends upon a chance or packed majority…

Balzac in Lost Illusions, describing how the reception of actresses is entirely determined by whether they have paid for fake applause with claqueurs:

“Braulard makes, perhaps, thirty thousand francs every year in this way, and he has his claqueurs besides, another industry. Florine and Coralie pay tribute to him; if they did not, there would be no applause when they come on or go off."

The Protocols:

The political has nothing in common with the moral. The ruler who is governed by the moral is not a skilled politician, and is therefore unstable on his throne. He who wishes to rule must have resource both to cunning and to make-believe.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“So in France systems political and moral have started from one point and reached another diametrically opposed; and men have expressed one kind of opinion and acted on another. There has been no consistency in national policy, nor in the conduct of individuals. You cannot be said to have any morality left. Success is the supreme justification of all actions whatsoever. The fact in itself is nothing; the impression that it makes upon others is everything.”

“The craft is vile, but I live by it, and so do scores of others. Do not imagine that things are any better in public life. There is corruption everywhere in both regions; every man is corrupt or corrupts others.”

Protocol II:

The goyim are not guided by practical use of unprejudiced historical observation, but by theoretical routine without any critical regard for consequent results… It is with this object in view that we are constantly, by means of our press, arousing a blind confidence in these theories.

Balzac, Lost Illusions and Scenes From Country Life:

“The captious critic, trying his best to find fault, has been obliged to invent theories for that purpose, and has drawn a distinction between two kinds of literature — ’the literature of ideas and the literature of imagery,’ as he calls them.”

If a nation is in its dotage, if it has been corrupted to the core by philosophism and the spirit of discussion, it is on the high-road to despotism, from which no form of free government will save it.

The Protocols:

Through the Press we have gained the power to influence while remaining ourselves in the shade:

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“the harm that it does is done anonymously…However shamefully a newspaper may behave, the disgrace attaches to no one person."

The Protocols:

thanks to the Press we have got the gold in our hands…

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“The Jews have monopolized the gold of the world…”

Protocol III

The constitution scales of these days will shortly break down, for we have established them with a certain lack of accurate balance in order that they may oscillate incessantly until they wear through the pivot on which they turn.

Balzac, The Ball at Sceaux:

He preached the expensive doctrines of constitutional government, and lent all his weight to encourage the political see-saw which enabled his master to rule France in the midst of storms.

Protocol IV

Every republic passes through several stages. The first of these is comprised in the early days of mad raging by the blind mob, tossed hither and thither, right and left: the second is demagogy, from which is born anarchy, and that leads inevitably to despotism…

Balzac, Philosophical Studies:

“Liberty begets anarchy, anarchy leads to despotism, and despotism brings about liberty once again. Millions of human beings have perished without being able to make any of these systems triumph.”

The Protocols:

that leads inevitably to despotism — not any longer legal and overt, and therefore responsible despotism, but to unseen and secretly hidden…

Balzac, Scenes from Country Life:

But surely it would be safer to allow open and avowed privileges than those which are underhand, based on trickery, subversive of what should be public spirit, and continuing the work of despotism to a lower and baser level than heretofore… Shall power lurk in secret places, instead of radiating from its natural source?

The Protocols:

Their only guide is gain, that is Gold, which they will erect into a veritable cult, for the sake of those material delights which it can give.

Balzac, Philosophical Studies and Lost Illusions:

…it will perhaps receive some thoughtful attention from minds capable of recognizing the real plague-spots of our civilization, a civilization which since 1815 as been moved by the spirit of gain rather than by principles of honor.

“You of this generation in France worship the golden calf…”

Protocol V

All the wheels of the machinery of all States go by the force of the engine, which is in our hands, and that engine of the machinery of States is Gold.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“It is difficult to keep illusions on any subject in Paris,” answered Lucien as they turned in at his door. “There is a tax upon everything — everything has its price, and anything can be made to order — even success.”

The Protocols:

The principal object of our directorate consists in this: to debilitate the public mind by criticism; to lead it away from serious reflections calculated to arouse resistance; to distract the forces of the mind towards a sham fight of empty eloquence.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“Actresses will pay you likewise for praise, but the wiser among them pay for criticism. To be passed over in silence is what they dread the most; and the very best thing of all, from their point of view, is criticism which draws down a reply; it is far more effectual than bald praise, forgotten as soon as read, and it costs more in consequence. Celebrity, my dear fellow, is based upon controversy.”

The Protocols:

In order to put public opinion into our hands we must bring it into a state of bewilderment by giving expression from all sides to so many contradictory opinions and for such length of time as will suffice to make the GOYIM lose their heads in the labyrinth and come to see that the best thing is to have no opinion of any kind in matters political, which it is not given to the public to understand, because they are understood only by him who guides the public.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“It is a kind of corruption which grows more and more obtrusive and malignant; the wider it spreads, the more patiently it will be endured, until the day comes when newspapers shall so increase and multiply in the earth that confusion will be the result--a second Babel.”

The Protocols:

There is nothing more dangerous than personal initiative; if it has genius behind it, such initiative can do more than can be done by million, of people among whom we have sown discord.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

But in this particular art or craft, as in all others, you shall find a thousand mediocrities for one man of genius.

Men of genius, according to her doctrine, had neither brothers nor sisters nor father nor mother; the great tasks laid upon them required that they should sacrifice everything that they might grow to their full stature.

“There is the stamp of genius on your forehead," d'Arthez continued, enveloping Lucien by a glance; "but unless you have within you the will of genius…“

This should be examined more in-depth. The concept of genius was a major interest of Balzac, especially in Lost Illusions. Upon reading the Protocols, I noticed the concept came up many times there as well, being mentioned 15 times. I decided to run a simple analysis to compare how often the word “genius” was used in the Protocols versus Lost Illusions and the most famous novels of Balzac’s contemporaries, Dumas, Flabert, Sue, Hugo and Stendahl. I found the texts online via Gutenberg, copy and pasted them into a word counter to get the word count, and then used ctrl-F to see how many times “genius” was used. Then I divided that by the word count to get the rate of use and this was the result:

As you can see, Lost Illusions and the Protocols come in roughly similar, more than double the next closest and around 10x as much as the average. The only one somewhat close was The Red and the Black by Stendahl, but this appears to be an outlier and I included Stendahl’s next most popular work (according to Goodreads), The Charterhouse of Parma, to illustrate that. I believe this analysis understates the similarity though. Lost Illusions is divided into three parts and it is the first part that lays most of the thematic foundation. I included Part I alone to show that it is a near exact match. If we graph this while removing the outlier and the whole of Lost Illusions, the comparison becomes even more stark:

The Protocols:

The science of political economy invented by our learned elders has for long past been giving royal prestige to capital.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

…then the banker receives twenty-eight francs a day by the grace of God and the constitution of the banking system, that all powerful invention due to the Jewish intellect of the Middle Ages, which after six centuries still controls monarchs and peoples.

Protocol VI

To complete the ruin of the industry of the goyim we shall bring to the assistance of speculation the luxury which we have developed among the goyim, that greedy demand for luxury which is swallowing up everything.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

And besides all this, he was reveling in his first taste of luxury; he had fallen under the spell.

He saw besides that his so-called friends were leading the same life, earning money easily by writing publishers' prospectuses and articles paid for by speculators; all of them lived beyond their incomes, none of them thought seriously of the future.

Protocol XII

We shall deal with the press in the following way: What is the part played by the press today? It serves to excite and inflame those passions which are needed for our purpose or else it serves selfish ends of parties. It is often vapid, unjust, mendacious, and the majority of the public have not the slightest idea what ends the press really serves.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

"Every newspaper, as Blondet says, is a shop to which people come for opinions of the right shade. If there were a paper for hunchbacks, it would set forth plainly, morning and evening, in its columns, the beauty, the utility, and necessity of deformity. A newspaper is not supposed to enlighten its readers, but to supply them with congenial opinions. Give any newspaper time enough, and it will be base, hypocritical, shameless, and treacherous; the periodical press will be the death of ideas, systems, and individuals; nay, it will flourish upon their decay.”

The Protocols:

It is often vapid, unjust, mendacious, and the majority of the public have not the slightest idea what ends the press really serves. We shall saddle and bridle it with a tight curb.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“When the evil is developed to its fullest extent, restrictive laws will be followed by prohibitions; there will be a return of the censorship of the press imposed after the assassination of the Duc de Berri, and repealed since the opening of the Chambers.”

The Protocols:

We shall reckon them as pamphlets in order, on the one hand, to reduce the number of magazines, which are the worst form of printed poison…

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“You are the proprietor of one of those poison shops.” [referring to newspapers]

“…our brains are consumed to furnish their daily supply of poisonous trash.” [referring to newspapers]

The Protocols:

By discussing and controverting, but always superficially, without touching the essence of the matter, our organs will carry on a sham fight fusillade with the official newspapers solely for the purpose of giving occasion for us to express ourselves more fully than could well be done from the outset in official announcements, whenever, of course, that is to our advantage.

Balzac, Lost Illusions. In this passage, they are discussing how it is beneficial to an actress to have a raging debate ongoing about her performance:

"You don't understand it in the least," said Martainville; "if she plays for three months amid a cross-fire of criticism, she will make thirty thousand francs when she goes on tour in the provinces at the end of the season.“

The Protocols:

Not one journalist will venture to betray this secret, for not one of them is ever admitted to practice literature unless his whole past has some disgraceful sore or other…These sores would be immediately revealed. So long as they remain the secret of a few the prestige of the journalist attracts the majority of the country — the mob follow after him with enthusiasm.

In order that our scheme may produce this result we shall arrange elections in favour of such presidents as have in their past some dark, undiscovered stain, some “Panama” or other — then they will be trustworthy agents for the accomplishment of our plans out of fear of revelations and from the natural desire of everyone who has attained power, namely, the retention of the privileges, advantages and honour connected with the office of president.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

The 'chanteur' gets possession of some compromising letter, asks for an interview; and if the man that made the money does not buy silence, the 'chanteur' draws a picture of the press ready to take the matter up and unravel his private affairs. The rich man is frightened, he comes down with the money, and the trick succeeds.

The Protocols:

Our calculations are especially extended to the provinces. It is indispensable for us to inflame there those hopes and impulses with which we could at any moment fall upon the capital, and we shall represent to the capitals that these expressions are the independent hopes and impulses of the provinces. Naturally, the source of them will be always one and the same — ours. What we need is that, until such time as we are in the plenitude of power, the capitals should find themselves stifled by the provincial opinion of the nation, i.e., of a majority arranged by our agentur.

After reading the Protocols for the first time, the previous passage which depicts cities subjugated by the provinces was somewhat puzzling to me. After all, the urban poor (the “proletariat”) played a far larger role in the French Revolution of 1789 than the peasantry. They would continue to be the primary source of revolutionary activity all the way up until the Bolshevik Revolution. The Protocols uses the word “proletariat” four times, but in none of those references is it suggested that any revolution may be coming from the proletariat. This somewhat odd view may be explained by Balzac’s personal expectation of an agrarian revolution, as reported in Robb’s book:

Reformist groups had reorganized, and the workers of Paris, some of whom were hard at work on Balzac’s new home, were preparing to reconquer the republic that had been won and lost in 1830.
From his pink-walled study in the Ukraine, surrounded by wheat- fields, Balzac saw things differently. For him, peasants, not the urban proletariat, were the revolutionary threat. With one foot firmly planted in the ancien régime, he had portrayed the species in Les Paysans as an economic termite — a view with which Proudhon agreed* — sly, greedy, idle, sullen, promiscuous and stupid, seething with negative energy, sitting unprofitably on little parcels of land they had stolen from the great estates that should now be restored to their former integrity.
…
Balzac’s prognosis of an agrarian revolution was entirely wrong, which is interesting since the largest gap in his panorama of French society is the urban proletariat, to which he seemed oblivious or indifferent.6

Protocol XV

…they thirst for the emotion of success and applause, of which we are remarkably generous. And the reason why we give them this success is to make use of the high conceit of themselves to which it gives birth… You cannot imagine to what extent the wisest of the goyim can be brought to a state of unconscious naivete in the presence of this condition of high conceit of themselves, and at the same time how easy it is to take the heart out of them by the slightest ill-success, though it be nothing more than the stoppage of the applause they had, and to reduce them to a slavish submission for the sake of winning a renewal of success… These tigers in appearance have the souls of sheep and the wind blows freely through their heads.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

Coralie, to all appearance bold and wanton, as the part required, was in reality girlish and timid… Coralie suffered besides from another true woman's weakness--she needed success, born stage queen though she was. She could not confront an audience with which she was out of sympathy; she was nervous when she appeared on the stage, a cold reception paralyzed her. Each new part gave her the terrible sensations of a first appearance. Applause produced a sort of intoxication which gave her encouragement without flattering her vanity; at a murmur of dissatisfaction or before a silent house, she flagged; but a great audience following attentively, admiringly, willing to be pleased, electrified Coralie.

“Believe me, Lucien's horror of privation is so great, the savor of banquets, the incense of success is so sweet in his nostrils, his self-love has grown so much in Mme. de Bargeton's boudoir, that he will do anything desperate sooner than fall back…”

The Protocols:

In general, our judges will be elected by us only from among those who thoroughly understand that the part they have to play is to punish and apply laws and not to dream about the manifestations of liberalism at the expense of the educationary scheme of the State, as the goyim in these days imagine it to be… The young generation of judges will be trained in certain views regarding the inadmissibility of any abuses that might disturb the established order of our subjects among themselves.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

"The enemies of social order, beholding this contrast, take occasion to yap at justice, and wax wroth in the name of the people, because, forsooth, burglars and fowl-stealers are sent to the hulks, while a man who brings whole families to ruin by a fraudulent bankruptcy is let off with a few months' imprisonment. But these hypocrites know quite well that the judge who passes sentence on the thief is maintaining the barrier set between the poor and the rich, and that if that barrier were overturned, social chaos would ensue…”

The Protocols:

We have set them on the hobby-horse of an idea about the absorption of individuality by the symbolic unit of collectivism.

Balzac, Lost Illusions

“Because, in these days, society by degrees has usurped so many rights over the individual, that the individual is compelled to act in self-defence.”

Protocol XVII

…In our hundred hands will be, one in each, the springs of the machinery of social life.

…which will restore the regular course of the machinery of the national life… (Protocol I)

(The Protocols uses this machinery metaphor quite a few additional times to refer to the State)

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

“I did not see the social machinery at work; so I had to learn to see it by bumping against the wheels and bruising myself against the shafts, and chains.”

The whole machinery of modern society is so infinitely more complex than in ancient times…

…he had seen the seamy side of life, the consciences of men involved in the machinery of Paris, the mechanism of it all.

perhaps, passion may enter among the steel springs of this machinery that turns out tears and affectations and languors and melting phrases;

So, strange coincidence! while Lucien was drawn into the great machinery of journalism,

a minute description of some part of the machinery of banking will be as interesting as any chapter of foreign travel.

In the absence of recognized machinery, therefore, the arrest of a debtor is a problem presenting no small difficulty;

Balzac, Father Goriot and Philisophical Studies:

Even now it was clear to him that, once involved in this intricate social machinery, he must attach himself to a spoke of the wheel that was to turn and raise his fortunes;

perfect this essential portion of the social machinery?

In the six books by Balzac’s contemporaries that I examined in the section on genius, I counted only three instances where “machinery” was used metaphorically, and in no instances was it used to refer to society as a whole. Meanwhile, Balzac uses “machinery” as a metaphor seven times in Lost Illusions alone, and three of those times it is used as a metaphor for society. It’s also used as a metaphor for journalism, banking, law enforcement, and human anatomy.

Protocol XX

A loan is — an issue of government bills of exchange containing a percentage obligation commensurate to the sum of the loan capital. If the loan bears a charge of 5 per cent, then in twenty years the State vainly pays away in interest a sum equal to the loan borrowed, in forty years it is paying a double sum, in sixty — treble, and all the while the debt remains an unpaid debt.

Balzac, Lost Illusions:

Suppose that in a large banking-house a bill for a thousand francs is daily protested on an average, then the banker receives twenty-eight francs a day… In other words, a thousand francs would bring such a house twenty-eight francs per day, or ten thousand two hundred and twenty francs per annum. Triple the average of protests, and consequently of expenses, and you shall derive an income of thirty thousand francs per annum, interest upon purely fictitious capital.

Lost Illusions contains a quite extensive discussion on the intricacies of banking, probably because Balzac himself was frequently in debt. Balzac closes this discussion by describing it as “manifold atrocities lurking beneath the formidable word ‘legal.’”

Protocol XXI

States announce that such a loan is to be concluded and open subscriptions for their own bills of exchange, that is, for their interest-bearing paper. That they may be within the reach of all the price is determined at from a hundred to a thousand; and a discount is made for the earliest subscribers. Next day by artificial means the price of them goes up, the alleged reason being that everyone is rushing to buy them… But when the comedy is played out there emerges the fact that a debit and an exceedingly burdensome debit has been created. For the payment of interest it becomes necessary to have recource to new loans, which do not swallow up but only add to the capital debt.

Balzac, The Firm of Nucigen:

“But if you look at banking in that light,” broke in Couture, “no sort of business would be possible. More than one bona fide banker, backed up by a bona fide government, has induced the hardest-headed men on ‘Change to take up stock which is bound to fall within a given time. You have seen better than that. Have you not seen stock created with the concurrence of a government to pay the interest upon older stock, so as to keep things going and tide over the difficulty? These operations were more or less like Nucingen’s settlements.”

Different people may find different examples to be more or less convincing. Personally, I found the similarities regarding a rural revolution, the extensive focus on genius, the use of “poison” to describe newspapers, the consistent use of the “machinery” metaphor for society, and people being chained to the need for applause and success to be the most striking. The Balzac quotes about how the Jews monopolized the world’s gold, are more powerful than ever, and invented an ancient banking system which today controls monarchs and peoples also stuck out to me.

If Balzac did write the Protocols, there are still a few unanswered questions. It should be somewhat obvious why he would write it anonymously, given the enormous persecution he surely would have faced if he released it under his own name. It’s less obvious though why he did not release it into the public, instead choosing to give it to one or multiple elite Masons. My guess would be that he did not want the public to mistake it as genuine, and he did not write it in a more clearly fictional style because his style would have been quickly recognized in that case. It’s also possible that he never completed whatever his plan for the work may have been, given that he died two years after the beginning of the 1848 revolution.

To add to this picture, my guess would be that Balzac primarily wrote the document because he was hoping to persuade some of his friends who were in the Masons to stop being involved in that organization. The Protocols includes numerous references to the Masons, where they are portrayed primarily as being useful idiots of the Jews who will soon dispose of them:

In this way we shall proceed with those GOY masons who know too much; such of these as we may for some reason spare will be kept in constant fear of exile.

Meantime, however, until we come into our kingdom, we shall act in the contrary way: we shall create and multiply free masonic lodges in all the countries of the world, absorb into them all who may become or who are prominent in public activity, for in these lodges we shall find our principal intelligence office and means of influence.

We execute masons in such wise that none save the brotherhood can ever have a suspicion of it, not even the victims themselves of our death sentence, they all die when required as if from a normal kind of illness

To be more specific, I would speculate that Balzac gave the document to Dumas originally. Dumas was a Mason and also served as a pallbearer at Balzac’s funeral. Dumas probably then gave a copy to Sue at some point and Sue used it to write his own version about the Jesuits. The document continued to circulate throughout Masonic circles until it ended up in the hands of Joly, who plagiarized it, and then the rest is history.

As far as I know, very few people are aware that the Protocols dates to pre-1864 France, probably around 1848, and therefore there have been little to no serious investigations as to who actually wrote it. I am writing this article to put forward a candidate, and I would invite any readers to see if they can find anyone more plausible. I imagine the list of talented writers from this era who were antisemitic Royalists but also connected with elite Jews and Masons is a very small one. If we narrow this down to writers who also had an in-depth knowledge of the press, blackmail, and banking, I am skeptical that there exists anyone other than Honoré de Balzac.

If this is true, discussion of whether the document is “authentic” or not would be missing the point. Is the Grand Inquisitor “authentic”? The Protocols would be a masterwork of political philosophy from one of our greatest writers who based it on first hand information. In that sense, it probably has more value than if it were actually the recording of a speech delivered by an unhinged Jewish activist.

There is perhaps one more grand irony in this whole saga. Balzac’s depiction of class struggle made him a noted favorite writer of prominent communists, with Engels declaring him his favorite, Marx referencing him in Das Kapital, and Trotsky famously bothering other Bolsheviks by reading Balzac novels during meetings of the Politboro. When the Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, one of their first acts was to mandate the death penalty for anyone caught with a copy of the Protocols. One can see the gallows humor in the idea of a bored Trotsky reading Balzac shortly after giving the order to execute those who were also reading Balzac, completely unaware that his beloved author was silently condemning him from beyond the grave.

Balzac: A Biography by Graham Robb, p. 380

ibid, p. 372

ibid, p. 384

ibid, p. 390

ibid, p. 376

ibid, p. 382-385

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