Synarchism (from Greek meaning “to rule together”) is a form of corporatism that has changed forms over the years and nearly faded out after World War II except for a handful of proponents who managed to breathe life back into the concept. The key problem with turning synarchism into a viable political option is its very name.
The earliest recorded use of the term “synarchy” comes from Thomas Stackhouse an English clergyman who used the word in his New History of the Holy Bible from the Beginning of the World to the Establishment of Christianity published in two folio volumes in 1737 to describe the system of Heaven. Harvard historian and sinologist John K. Fairbank also used the word synarchism in his 1953 book Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842-1854 and in later writings, to describe the mechanisms of government under the late Qing dynasty in China. Fairbank defined synarchy as a form of rule that co-opts existing elites and powers, bringing them into the system and legitimizing them through a schedule of rituals and tributes that gave them a stake in the Chinese regime and neutralized any risk that they might rebel against the monarchy.
The most substantive early use of synarchy comes from the writings of Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (1842-1909), who used the term in his 1882 book La France Vraie. St Yves considered the medieval Knights Templars to be ultimate synarchists of their time and consequently drew on Templar ideals when formulating his ideas. Alarmed by the emergence of anarchist movements, Saint-Yves, an occultist, elaborated a political-theological formula which he believed would lead to a harmonious society by viewing it as an organic unity. He advocated overcoming social differentiation and hierarchy through co-operation between social classes which would transcend conflict: Synarchy, as opposed to anarchy. Specifically, Saint-Yves envisioned a European society with a government composed of three councils, representing economic power, judicial power, and the scientific sector. The structure would be bound together by a metaphysical chamber. In this form of synarchy, political power effectively rested with secret or, esoteric societies composed of oracles. An elite of enlightened initiates would rule from behind the scenes and insure synarchy no matter which political party held power in a state or even what political system that state has. Saint-Yves believed spiritually superior earthly elite would use the oracles to communicate with an ethereal elite. He himself claimed that he was in touch with these beings, and that they actually gave him the principles of synarchy.
Saint-Yves' successor, Gerard Vincent Encausse “Papus,” founded the Saint-Yves School of Occult Sciences, and began a recruiting drive for a secret society, which he called the Synarchy Government. In his 1894 book Anarchie, Indolence and Synarchie, Papus spelled out an ambitious scheme to recruit all of the leaders of industry, commerce, finance, the military, and academia, to a single force, aimed at destroying the anarchist movement. Both Saint-Yves and Papus envisioned a global Synarchist empire, divided into five geographic areas: 1. the British Empire; 2. Euro-Africa; 3. Eurasia; 4. Pan-America; 5. Asia.
Lyndon LaRouche, leader of a controversial movement on the fringe of American politics, has conjured up a conspiracy theory of synarchy based upon the ideas of Saint-Yves/Papus. He claims that synarchism is an international movement born after the Versailles Treaty, which was financed and directed by financial groups belonging to the top international banking community. Its aim is essentially to overthrow the parliamentary regimes which are considered insufficiently devoted to the interests of the synarchists and substitute them with authoritarian regimes that are more easily controlled. This group installed fascist regimes throughout Europe during the Great Depression in an effort to maintain world order and prevent the repudiation of international debts. LaRouche claims U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney as a modern “synarchist", and claims that “synarchists” have “a scheme for replacing regular military forces of nations, by private armies in the footsteps of a privately financed international Waffen-SS-like scheme, a force deployed by leading financier institutions, such as the multi-billions funding by the U.S. Treasury, of Cheney's Halliburton gang.”
However, there is another, far less mystical version of synarchy as well. Impressed with Saint-Yves' political concept but not buying the esoteric feature, French Catholic philosopher and military strategist Dupont D’Ivry (1839-1915) looked to rescue synarchy from the occultists and turn it into a practical political force. D'Ivry, a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War viewed with trepidation France’s unraveling as a result of the conflict and feared a future armed clash would bring about a repeat of the Paris Commune on a larger scale. His 1878 book, War and Uprising explored these themes. To more closely knit French society together, D’Ivry advocated Saint-Yves’ ideas of a congruous, organic society which overcomes its class differences through co-operation. However, D’Ivry’s synarchy would accomplish this through a re-organized state and economic structure. Borrowing a pinch from Otto von Bismarck’s Welfare State, a sample of Pope Leo XIII papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, a taste of American Henry George’s Single Tax theory and a helping of syndicalism, some ideas from Hegel, the American Revolution, mercantilism and the Medieval Guild system, D'Ivry brewed a heady new stew of synarchy that gave every strata of society a stake in the synarchist republic. Using the human body as a metaphor for the organic society of synarchism, D'Ivry noted that members of a society are like organs of a living body. They cannot live outside society and within it, each performs its own function or the body dies. “A peasant is as different from a priest as the stomach is different from the liver but each is important to the overall whole,” he wrote in his 1901 manifesto for synarchism, Synarchy; The New Social Contract. At the center of the syrarchic body is the biological family which functions as a micro of the macro and the state, which functions as the brain.
Surprisingly, Dupont D’Ivry and his version of synarchy is largely forgotten even though it influenced fascist and non-fascist movements around the world including Mussolini and the Italian fascists and Futurists, the National Fedayeen in Egypt, Distributism, National Socialism, Elciran Pamil’s Ergenekon movement in Turkey, Dualism, Nadir Pasdaran in Iran, The Canadian Synarchist Party, Chandra Bose, Salizar in Portugal, Oswald Mosely, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, Ali Lettelli in Lebanon, Arthur Thatcham in Australia, Syria’s Muhammar Faravahar, Charles Ciroan and many others.
Among those who took D’Ivry’s concepts up were the members of Mexico’s National Synarchist Union. The party was founded in May 1937 by a group of Catholic political activists led by Jose Antonio Urquiza. Borrowing heavily from Synarchy; The New Social Contract, the group published the Sinarquista Manifesto, which listed their opposition to the policies of the government of PRI and President Lazaro Cardenas. “It is absolutely necessary that an organization composed of true patriots exists,” the Manifesto declared, “an organization which works for the restoration of the fundamental rights of each citizen and the salvation of the Motherland. As opposed to the utopians who dream of a society without governors and laws, Synarchism supports a society governed by a legitimate authority, emanating from the free democratic activity of the people, that truly guarantees the social order within all find true happiness.” In addition to D’Ivry’s ideas, the ideology of the Mexican Sinarquistas was rooted in conservative Catholic social thinking of the 1920s and ‘30s and based heavily on the synarchism articulated by D’Ivry. It stressed social co-operation as opposed to the class conflict of socialism, and hierarchy and respect for authority as opposed to liberalism. In the context of Mexican politics, this meant opposition to the centralist, semi-socialist and anti-clerical policies of the PRI regime.
The Mexican Sinarquistas stirred fears of fascism on the American doorstep and U.S. Intelligence analysts kept a watchful eye on the movement during World War II. In a declassified U.S. report dated April 22, 1942, Raleigh A. Gibson, First Secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, sent the U.S. Secretary of State an English translation of an editorial from El Popular, the newspaper of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, published on April 21, 1942. It reads in part as follows:
The French sinarquistas rushed into furious strife against French and European democracy; those of Mexico organized to combat Mexican and continental democracy. The French sinarquistas were adopted by Abetz, the Ambassador of Hitler in France; the Mexican sinarquistas were recruited, were given a name, were educated and directed by Nazi agents in Mexico and by Falange directors who are working illegally among us. And this is so apparent, so conclusive, that it eliminates the need of concrete proofs of the organic connection between them. The fundamental proof is that sinarquism is not a unique and exclusive Mexican product, as its leaders untruthfully argue. That Sinarquism, even bearing the identical name, does exist in other parts of the world and is an international movement formed by those who are under the supreme orders of Hitler.
In 1946 the movement regrouped as the Popular Force Party. In 1951, however, when it was clear that the more moderate National Action Party (PAN) had become the main party of opposition to the PRI government, the Synarchist leader Juan Ignacio Padilla converted the movement to an “apolitical” one promoting conservative Catholic social doctrine, promoted through co-operatives, credit unions and Catholic trade unions. Synarchism revived as a political movement in the 1970s through the Mexican Democratic Party. The party then suffered a split in 1988, and in 1992 lost its registration as a political party. It was dissolved in 1996. There are now two organizations, both calling themselves the Uniacional Sinarquista. One has an apparently right-wing orientation, the other is apparently left-wing, but they both have the same philosophical roots.
Because of Saint-Yves and D’Ivry, synarchism has a long history in France and has been at the heart of several conspiracy theories in the years after World War II. According to former OSS officer William Langer’s 1947 book Our Vichy Gamble, French industrial and banking interests had, “even before the war turned to Nazi Germany and looked to Hitler as the savior of Europe from Communism ...These people were as good fascists as any in Europe... Many of them had extensive and intimate business relations with German interests and were still dreaming of a new system of ‘synarchy,’ which meant government of Europe on fascist principles by an international brotherhood of financiers and industrialists.” This view was originally based on the discovery of a document called Pacte Synarchique following the death of Jean Coutrot, former member of the Groupe X-Crise group, in May 15, 1941. According to this confused document, a Mouvement Synarchique d'Empire had been founded in 1922, with the aim of abolishing parliamentary government and replacing it with synarchy. This has lead to the belief that La Cagoule (from cagoulards, the “hooded ones”) was the armed branch of French synarchism, and that some important members of the Vichy Regime such as Pierre Pucheu, Jacques Barnaud, Gabriel Le Roy Ladurie, Jacques Benoist-Méchin, Yves Bouthillier, François Lehideux or Henry Du Moulin de Labarthète were synarchists. An investigation was in fact ordered by the Vichy government, leading to the Rapport Chavin but no evidence for the existence of the Mouvement Synarchiste d'Empire was found. Most of the presumed synarchists were either associated with the Banque Worms or with Groupe X-Crise and were close to Admiral François Darlan. This also led to the belief that synarchists had engineered the military defeat of France for the profit of Banque Worms. Historian Annie Lacroiz-Riz wrote a 2006 book on this subject, titled Le choix de la défaite : Les élites françaises dans les années 1930 (The Choice of Defeat: the French elites in the 1930s). These theories have been dismissed as a “work of a paranoid imagination which wove together the histories of three disparate groups of activists, creating a conspiracy among them where none existed.” In fact, some historians suspect that the Pacte Synarchique was a hoax created by some members of La Cagoule to weaken Darlan and his technocrats and that the Movement Synarchique d’Empire never existed. According to this view, the Vichy regime would have found the conspiracy theories about synarchy convenient to justify the repression of secret societies such as freemasonry, and thus did not bother to dispel the rumors concerning synarchy.
Even though a U.S. military intelligence report, dated July 27, 1944, from the military attaché in Algiers, warned of synarchist penetration of the upper echelons of the Free French government of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, headquartered in Algeria, synarchy never emerged in France. In fact, after World War II, fascism lay in ruins both physically and philosophically as the world narrowed down to a battle of two opposing ideologies: Communism and Capitalism.
However, in the 1950s, a synarchist remnant slowly emerged from the ashes from the surprising locale of the United States. Spenglarian American philosopher Francis Parker Yockey (1917 –1960) sparked the re-emergence with his classic 1948 book Imperium. South African-born American philosopher Charles Ciroan (1930-2002) proved a direct descendent of Dupont D'Ivry with his inspiring and strongly synarchist tomes The Origins of Destiny (1958) and Heed the Thunder (1962). Other American synarchists included journalist/publisher Robert Thorwyn and soldier/activist Theodore Andricks. Argentina produced writer Orazio Zumez, from Ireland came guerilla leader Ronan O’Gara and Norway had Steinar Arneesen. Several synarchist political parties have been established and at least one glossy magazine, New Zeland’s Outlook, has a synarchist point of view.
The idea endures.
The earliest recorded use of the term “synarchy” comes from Thomas Stackhouse an English clergyman who used the word in his New History of the Holy Bible from the Beginning of the World to the Establishment of Christianity published in two folio volumes in 1737 to describe the system of Heaven. Harvard historian and sinologist John K. Fairbank also used the word synarchism in his 1953 book Trade and Diplomacy on the China Coast: The Opening of the Treaty Ports, 1842-1854 and in later writings, to describe the mechanisms of government under the late Qing dynasty in China. Fairbank defined synarchy as a form of rule that co-opts existing elites and powers, bringing them into the system and legitimizing them through a schedule of rituals and tributes that gave them a stake in the Chinese regime and neutralized any risk that they might rebel against the monarchy.
The most substantive early use of synarchy comes from the writings of Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (1842-1909), who used the term in his 1882 book La France Vraie. St Yves considered the medieval Knights Templars to be ultimate synarchists of their time and consequently drew on Templar ideals when formulating his ideas. Alarmed by the emergence of anarchist movements, Saint-Yves, an occultist, elaborated a political-theological formula which he believed would lead to a harmonious society by viewing it as an organic unity. He advocated overcoming social differentiation and hierarchy through co-operation between social classes which would transcend conflict: Synarchy, as opposed to anarchy. Specifically, Saint-Yves envisioned a European society with a government composed of three councils, representing economic power, judicial power, and the scientific sector. The structure would be bound together by a metaphysical chamber. In this form of synarchy, political power effectively rested with secret or, esoteric societies composed of oracles. An elite of enlightened initiates would rule from behind the scenes and insure synarchy no matter which political party held power in a state or even what political system that state has. Saint-Yves believed spiritually superior earthly elite would use the oracles to communicate with an ethereal elite. He himself claimed that he was in touch with these beings, and that they actually gave him the principles of synarchy.
Saint-Yves' successor, Gerard Vincent Encausse “Papus,” founded the Saint-Yves School of Occult Sciences, and began a recruiting drive for a secret society, which he called the Synarchy Government. In his 1894 book Anarchie, Indolence and Synarchie, Papus spelled out an ambitious scheme to recruit all of the leaders of industry, commerce, finance, the military, and academia, to a single force, aimed at destroying the anarchist movement. Both Saint-Yves and Papus envisioned a global Synarchist empire, divided into five geographic areas: 1. the British Empire; 2. Euro-Africa; 3. Eurasia; 4. Pan-America; 5. Asia.
Lyndon LaRouche, leader of a controversial movement on the fringe of American politics, has conjured up a conspiracy theory of synarchy based upon the ideas of Saint-Yves/Papus. He claims that synarchism is an international movement born after the Versailles Treaty, which was financed and directed by financial groups belonging to the top international banking community. Its aim is essentially to overthrow the parliamentary regimes which are considered insufficiently devoted to the interests of the synarchists and substitute them with authoritarian regimes that are more easily controlled. This group installed fascist regimes throughout Europe during the Great Depression in an effort to maintain world order and prevent the repudiation of international debts. LaRouche claims U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney as a modern “synarchist", and claims that “synarchists” have “a scheme for replacing regular military forces of nations, by private armies in the footsteps of a privately financed international Waffen-SS-like scheme, a force deployed by leading financier institutions, such as the multi-billions funding by the U.S. Treasury, of Cheney's Halliburton gang.”
However, there is another, far less mystical version of synarchy as well. Impressed with Saint-Yves' political concept but not buying the esoteric feature, French Catholic philosopher and military strategist Dupont D’Ivry (1839-1915) looked to rescue synarchy from the occultists and turn it into a practical political force. D'Ivry, a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War viewed with trepidation France’s unraveling as a result of the conflict and feared a future armed clash would bring about a repeat of the Paris Commune on a larger scale. His 1878 book, War and Uprising explored these themes. To more closely knit French society together, D’Ivry advocated Saint-Yves’ ideas of a congruous, organic society which overcomes its class differences through co-operation. However, D’Ivry’s synarchy would accomplish this through a re-organized state and economic structure. Borrowing a pinch from Otto von Bismarck’s Welfare State, a sample of Pope Leo XIII papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, a taste of American Henry George’s Single Tax theory and a helping of syndicalism, some ideas from Hegel, the American Revolution, mercantilism and the Medieval Guild system, D'Ivry brewed a heady new stew of synarchy that gave every strata of society a stake in the synarchist republic. Using the human body as a metaphor for the organic society of synarchism, D'Ivry noted that members of a society are like organs of a living body. They cannot live outside society and within it, each performs its own function or the body dies. “A peasant is as different from a priest as the stomach is different from the liver but each is important to the overall whole,” he wrote in his 1901 manifesto for synarchism, Synarchy; The New Social Contract. At the center of the syrarchic body is the biological family which functions as a micro of the macro and the state, which functions as the brain.
Surprisingly, Dupont D’Ivry and his version of synarchy is largely forgotten even though it influenced fascist and non-fascist movements around the world including Mussolini and the Italian fascists and Futurists, the National Fedayeen in Egypt, Distributism, National Socialism, Elciran Pamil’s Ergenekon movement in Turkey, Dualism, Nadir Pasdaran in Iran, The Canadian Synarchist Party, Chandra Bose, Salizar in Portugal, Oswald Mosely, Jose Antonio Primo de Rivera, Ali Lettelli in Lebanon, Arthur Thatcham in Australia, Syria’s Muhammar Faravahar, Charles Ciroan and many others.
Among those who took D’Ivry’s concepts up were the members of Mexico’s National Synarchist Union. The party was founded in May 1937 by a group of Catholic political activists led by Jose Antonio Urquiza. Borrowing heavily from Synarchy; The New Social Contract, the group published the Sinarquista Manifesto, which listed their opposition to the policies of the government of PRI and President Lazaro Cardenas. “It is absolutely necessary that an organization composed of true patriots exists,” the Manifesto declared, “an organization which works for the restoration of the fundamental rights of each citizen and the salvation of the Motherland. As opposed to the utopians who dream of a society without governors and laws, Synarchism supports a society governed by a legitimate authority, emanating from the free democratic activity of the people, that truly guarantees the social order within all find true happiness.” In addition to D’Ivry’s ideas, the ideology of the Mexican Sinarquistas was rooted in conservative Catholic social thinking of the 1920s and ‘30s and based heavily on the synarchism articulated by D’Ivry. It stressed social co-operation as opposed to the class conflict of socialism, and hierarchy and respect for authority as opposed to liberalism. In the context of Mexican politics, this meant opposition to the centralist, semi-socialist and anti-clerical policies of the PRI regime.
The Mexican Sinarquistas stirred fears of fascism on the American doorstep and U.S. Intelligence analysts kept a watchful eye on the movement during World War II. In a declassified U.S. report dated April 22, 1942, Raleigh A. Gibson, First Secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, sent the U.S. Secretary of State an English translation of an editorial from El Popular, the newspaper of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, published on April 21, 1942. It reads in part as follows:
The French sinarquistas rushed into furious strife against French and European democracy; those of Mexico organized to combat Mexican and continental democracy. The French sinarquistas were adopted by Abetz, the Ambassador of Hitler in France; the Mexican sinarquistas were recruited, were given a name, were educated and directed by Nazi agents in Mexico and by Falange directors who are working illegally among us. And this is so apparent, so conclusive, that it eliminates the need of concrete proofs of the organic connection between them. The fundamental proof is that sinarquism is not a unique and exclusive Mexican product, as its leaders untruthfully argue. That Sinarquism, even bearing the identical name, does exist in other parts of the world and is an international movement formed by those who are under the supreme orders of Hitler.
In 1946 the movement regrouped as the Popular Force Party. In 1951, however, when it was clear that the more moderate National Action Party (PAN) had become the main party of opposition to the PRI government, the Synarchist leader Juan Ignacio Padilla converted the movement to an “apolitical” one promoting conservative Catholic social doctrine, promoted through co-operatives, credit unions and Catholic trade unions. Synarchism revived as a political movement in the 1970s through the Mexican Democratic Party. The party then suffered a split in 1988, and in 1992 lost its registration as a political party. It was dissolved in 1996. There are now two organizations, both calling themselves the Uniacional Sinarquista. One has an apparently right-wing orientation, the other is apparently left-wing, but they both have the same philosophical roots.
Because of Saint-Yves and D’Ivry, synarchism has a long history in France and has been at the heart of several conspiracy theories in the years after World War II. According to former OSS officer William Langer’s 1947 book Our Vichy Gamble, French industrial and banking interests had, “even before the war turned to Nazi Germany and looked to Hitler as the savior of Europe from Communism ...These people were as good fascists as any in Europe... Many of them had extensive and intimate business relations with German interests and were still dreaming of a new system of ‘synarchy,’ which meant government of Europe on fascist principles by an international brotherhood of financiers and industrialists.” This view was originally based on the discovery of a document called Pacte Synarchique following the death of Jean Coutrot, former member of the Groupe X-Crise group, in May 15, 1941. According to this confused document, a Mouvement Synarchique d'Empire had been founded in 1922, with the aim of abolishing parliamentary government and replacing it with synarchy. This has lead to the belief that La Cagoule (from cagoulards, the “hooded ones”) was the armed branch of French synarchism, and that some important members of the Vichy Regime such as Pierre Pucheu, Jacques Barnaud, Gabriel Le Roy Ladurie, Jacques Benoist-Méchin, Yves Bouthillier, François Lehideux or Henry Du Moulin de Labarthète were synarchists. An investigation was in fact ordered by the Vichy government, leading to the Rapport Chavin but no evidence for the existence of the Mouvement Synarchiste d'Empire was found. Most of the presumed synarchists were either associated with the Banque Worms or with Groupe X-Crise and were close to Admiral François Darlan. This also led to the belief that synarchists had engineered the military defeat of France for the profit of Banque Worms. Historian Annie Lacroiz-Riz wrote a 2006 book on this subject, titled Le choix de la défaite : Les élites françaises dans les années 1930 (The Choice of Defeat: the French elites in the 1930s). These theories have been dismissed as a “work of a paranoid imagination which wove together the histories of three disparate groups of activists, creating a conspiracy among them where none existed.” In fact, some historians suspect that the Pacte Synarchique was a hoax created by some members of La Cagoule to weaken Darlan and his technocrats and that the Movement Synarchique d’Empire never existed. According to this view, the Vichy regime would have found the conspiracy theories about synarchy convenient to justify the repression of secret societies such as freemasonry, and thus did not bother to dispel the rumors concerning synarchy.
Even though a U.S. military intelligence report, dated July 27, 1944, from the military attaché in Algiers, warned of synarchist penetration of the upper echelons of the Free French government of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, headquartered in Algeria, synarchy never emerged in France. In fact, after World War II, fascism lay in ruins both physically and philosophically as the world narrowed down to a battle of two opposing ideologies: Communism and Capitalism.
However, in the 1950s, a synarchist remnant slowly emerged from the ashes from the surprising locale of the United States. Spenglarian American philosopher Francis Parker Yockey (1917 –1960) sparked the re-emergence with his classic 1948 book Imperium. South African-born American philosopher Charles Ciroan (1930-2002) proved a direct descendent of Dupont D'Ivry with his inspiring and strongly synarchist tomes The Origins of Destiny (1958) and Heed the Thunder (1962). Other American synarchists included journalist/publisher Robert Thorwyn and soldier/activist Theodore Andricks. Argentina produced writer Orazio Zumez, from Ireland came guerilla leader Ronan O’Gara and Norway had Steinar Arneesen. Several synarchist political parties have been established and at least one glossy magazine, New Zeland’s Outlook, has a synarchist point of view.
The idea endures.
