It will be objected that the reforms here indicated were wholly admirable. True, the abolition of the _corvée_, of _main morte_, and of servitudes were measures that met with the approval of all right-minded men, including the King of France himself. But what of the abolition of the "working guilds" and "all the corporations," that is to say, the "trade unions" of the period, which was carried out by the infamous Loi Chapelier in 1791, a decree that is now generally recognized as one of the strangest anomalies of the Revolution? Again, to whose interest was it to do away with the customs and excise duties of France? To establish the absolute and unfettered liberty of the press and religious opinions? The benefits these measures might be expected to confer on the French people were certainly problematical, but there could be no doubt of their utility to men who, like Frederick the Great, wished to ruin France and to break the Franco-Austrian alliance by the unrestricted circulation of libels against Marie Antoinette, who, like Mirabeau, hoped to bring about a revolution, or who, like Voltaire, wished to remove all obstacles to the spread of an anti-Christian propaganda. It is therefore by no means impossible that Weishaupt was at first the agent of more experienced conspirators, whose purely political aims were disguised under a plan of social reform, and who saw in the Bavarian professor a clever organizer to be employed in carrying out their designs. Whether this was so or not, the fact remains that from the time Weishaupt assumed control of the Order the plan of "social reform" described by Mirabeau vanishes entirely, for not a word do we find in the writings of the Illuminati about any pretended scheme for ameliorating the lot of the people, and Illuminism becomes simply a scheme of anarchic philosophy. The French historian Henri Martin has thus admirably summed up the system elaborated by "Spartacus":