Talk:Les Neuf Sœurs

Masonic Membership of Voltaire
I changed the honorary status of Voltaire to "member" not honorary. A am an active Freemason, and there is no such thing in Freemasonry as a "partial" or honorary membership. People are either members or are not. Voltaire recieved his degrees in the lodge making him a full fledged member of the fraternity. In masonry you are either a full member in good standing, demitt (meaning you bow out for a year or so) or leave altogether. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.216.166.126 (talk) 05:35, 9 October 2009 (UTC)

Deleted sentences

 * During the French Revolution the Académie Royale des Sciences at Paris was reorganised and "cleansed" of the influence of "nobility" (see:Reign of Terror, Antoine Lavoisier). Two members of the lodge, Antoine Laurent de Jussieu and Gilbert Romme, in collaboration with Henri Grégoire, helped to organise a "Société Libre des Sciences, Belles Lettres et Arts", to subsidize what had become the "Institut de France" and to keep the original influence of the "Neuf Sœurs" intact (Hahn, 1971).

These sentences did not seem to fit where they were, so I've moved them here. Anyone who knows the subject better than I is invited to rewrite and reinsert them. PRRfan 17:34, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

Hard work, is it not ?

Lunarian 12:04, 16 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Easy enough to plop sentences back into the article, a bit more effort to actually fit them into the chronology and clean up their wikilinks. -- PRRfan (talk) 17:49, 16 November 2007 (UTC)


 * To each his expertise.
 * From 1789 -the start of the French Revolution- till 1792 the lodge became a Société Nationale. You have "censored" this information.
 * By no means was the lodge "turned into" the Société Libre... Two lodge members collaborated with the Société and were influential in effect. Subsidising the Institute through the Société was a public -patriotic- venture.
 * The reference to Hahn, 1971 is there for a reason.
 * Please be carefull -specially when you do not know your subject all that well.


 * Best regards,
 * Lunarian (talk) 23:59, 16 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Fair enough; just about all I know about Les Neuf Soeurs I learned from this article -- evidence enough that several of its sentences remain unclear. Please fix them, lest you leave the next poor soul as confused as I. ("Censored," by the way, means "removed as objectionable," not merely deleted.) PRRfan (talk) 01:56, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

You're right this isn't a personal encyclopedia....
The tomne in this article is no good, the connections between things are unclear, and there is no proof for thwe majority of the suppositions made in the article.


 * You posit a connection between the lodge and a charitable society that it doesn't necessarily have a relation to besides the supposed "similar name and purpose", which is never explained.
 * Why would a widow help to start a Masonic lodge that was apparently for men only?
 * Stylistically, we don't do this in-line (see X) format you seem to like.
 * "During the French Revolution, while the Académie Royale des Sciences et des Arts was drastically reorganised -"cleansed" of the influence of "nobility"(see: Reign of Terror, Antoine Lavoisier)- two members of the lodge, Antoine Laurent de Jussieu and Gilbert Romme, in collaboration with Henri Grégoire, helped to organise a "Société Libre des Sciences, Belles Lettres et Arts", to subsidise what had become the "Institut de France" -i.e. the former Académie Royale des Sciences- so as to keep the original influence of the "Neuf Soeurs" intact. (Hahn, 1971)" - there's an unneeded explanatory phrases between the dashes here, and actions of the mebers don't equal actions of the Lodge.
 * Fundamentally, you're talking about what mebers did outside of the lodge, and you imply that the lodge had something to do with it (otherwise you wouldn't mention it), but you have no proof.
 * The Cercle d'Auteuil only had members in common with Neuf; you make no connection between the two whatsoever. So why is it in here?
 * The whole Ideologues section is irrelevant and the tone is inappropriate - "Neuf Soeurs lost a lot of friends"? What members did of their own volition has nothing to do with the group.

All the above concerns and irelevancies were what I addressed in my edits. I also note there were clarity concerns last year that do not seem to have been resolved. MSJapan (talk) 13:23, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Goodbeye !
My apologies for the rude intervention of MSJapan. I can not but give him the respect he deserves. I hope people really interested in the matter will already have gleaned something usefull from prior states of the article.
 * 84.198.251.167 (talk) 15:10, 3 September 2008 (UTC)
 * Sorry, forgot to log in:Lunarian (talk) 15:12, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

PS: Now his second revert has mysteriously disappeared... Sigh !: Lunarian (talk) 15:48, 3 September 2008 (UTC)
 * PPS:Sorry, nothing disappeared. It was my imagination.
 * I can not, however address the concerns made by the illustrious MSJapan. I have no time to waste.
 * So goodbeye it is.
 * Lunarian (talk) 22:35, 3 September 2008 (UTC)

Speculation, Good Faith and the Reading Of History

 * I would deem myself a right coward if I did not make at least one comment on the disappearance of whole sections of the article.
 * This is what I read in Thomas Jefferson's Paris ISBN 0-691-05232-8 which I had cited as reference as well as in text:
 * ...no trace remains ( this must sound like music in MSJapan's ears) of Madame Helvétius house, situated but a few doors from the Adamses on a site corresponding to present No 59 Rue d'Auteuil. Notre-Dame d'Auteuil, as Franklin called the widow of the noted philosophe, was a well known figure in the Paris intellectual world, although her informal manners astonished the more straitlaced Adamses. Jefferson met in her salon at Auteuil several of the young literati whose subsequent writings were to interest him deeply: Volney, Destutt de Tracy, and Cabanis among others.(...) He found American publishers and himself revised their translations of Destutt de Tracy's 'Commentary and Review of Montesquieu's Spirit of Laws' and 'Treatise on Political Economy'. Jefferson likewise held in esteem the writings of Cabanis, another "investigator of the thinking faculty of man".


 * In 1802, when sending Jefferson a copy of his 'Rapports du Physique et du Moral de l'Homme' Cabanis reminded the president that he had several times had the honor of seeing him at Madame Helvétius's in Auteuil. Madame Helvétius was gone but he and Abbé de La Roche still lived in the house (...)


 * For this section the author Howard Rice Jr. gave as a source a.o Gilbert Chinard Jefferson et les Idéologues ( Baltimore and Paris, 1925 )


 * on pg 31 in the same book:
 * ''In 1801, when he was President of the United States, he was elected a foreign associate of the Institute, "Classe des Siences morales et politiques", through the influence of men such as Volney, Cabanis, Destutt de Tracy, and Dupont de Nemours.


 * For this section the source reads Communication from Archivist, Institut de France, to H. C. Rice, 27 Nov. 1946

I invite the reader to compare this information to a state of the article prior to MSJapan's lightning intervention.


 * PS: A final speculation: Voltaire was given the apron of Helvétius on his acception in Les Neuf Soeurs. Maybe the help given by Helvétius' widow was to tell in which drawer the apron lay.


 * Lunarian (talk) 17:01, 7 September 2008 (UTC)

a couple of small issues
In skimming the article, I noticed a couple of things that are incorrectly stated. First, Franklin could not have been the "first Venerable Master", since he is listed in numerous sources as having been the 106th member. A Masonic Lodge cannot function without having a Master, so others must've held that position before him (e.g., Lalande). And second, "Venerable Master" is a non-standard term. In Anglo-American Masonry, the title would be "Worshipful Master"; in France, it would be " Vénérable Maître", or more commonly, just "Vénérable". Unless anyone objects with good reason, I'm going to correct these. Bricology (talk) 05:37, 10 April 2016 (UTC)