So after all it was no enterprising bookseller, no brilliantly inspired philosopher, who conceived the idea of the _Encyclopédie_, but a powerful international organization able to employ the services of more men than all the academies could supply, which devised the scheme at least six years before the date at which it is said to have occurred to Diderot. Thus the whole story as usually told to us would appear to be a complete fabrication--struggling publishers, toiling _littérateurs_ carrying out their superhuman task as "independent men of letters" without the patronage of the great--which Lord Morley points out as "one of the most important facts in the history of the Encyclopædia"--writers of all kinds bound together by no "common understanding or agreement," are all seen in reality to have been closely associated as "artisans of the Fraternity" carrying out the orders of their superiors. The _Encyclopédie_ was therefore essentially a Masonic publication, and Papus, whilst erroneously attributing the famous oration and consequently the plan of the _Encyclopédie_ to the inspiration of the Duc d'Antin, emphasizes the importance of this fact. Thus, he writes: The Revolution manifests itself by two stages: 1st. _Intellectual revolution_, by the publication of the _Encyclopédie_, due to French Freemasonry under the high inspiration of the Duc d'Antin. 2nd. _Occult revolution_ in the Lodges, due in great part to the members of the Templar Rite and executed by a group of expelled Freemasons afterwards amnestied.[420] The masonic authorship of the _Encyclopédie_ and the consequent dissemination of revolutionary doctrines has remained no matter of doubt to the Freemasons of France; on the contrary, they glory in the fact. At the congress of the Grand Orient in 1904 the Freemason Bonnet declared: In the eighteenth century the glorious line of Encyclopædists formed in our temples a fervent audience which was then alone in invoking the radiant device as yet unknown to the crowd: "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity." The revolutionary seed quickly germinated amidst this _élite_. Our illustrious Freemasons d'Alembert, Diderot, Helvétius, d'Holbach, Voltaire, Condorcet, completed the evolution of minds and prepared the new era. And, when the Bastille fell, Freemasonry had the supreme honour of giving to humanity the charter (i.e. the Declaration of the Rights of Man) which it had elaborated with devotion. (_Applause_.) This charter, the orator went on to say, was the work of the Freemason Lafayette, and was adopted by the Constituent Assembly, of which more than 300 members were Freemasons.