BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:The Illuminati\, the French Revolution\, and British paranoia\, 17
 97-1801 - Michael Taylor
DTSTART:20121003T200000Z
DTEND:20121003T203000Z
UID:TALK40932@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Roeland Verhallen
DESCRIPTION:The Illuminati have often been represented as a dastardly and 
 all-powerful secret society\, hell-bent on world domination\, and given st
 arring roles in such inexpressibly awful trash as "Angels and Demons" and 
 "Lara Croft: Tomb Raider". In reality\, they were an eighteenth-century so
 ciety of reform-minded deists who existed only for a decade between 1776 a
 nd 1786. Yet\, in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789\, the con
 spiracy theory that the Illuminati\, in league with freemasons and French 
 philosophers\, had in fact caused the Revolution took hold of the British 
 conservative imagination.  Historians\, perhaps because of the Illuminati'
 s association with nonsensical fiction and conspiracy junkies\, have tende
 d to ignore this reality. My paper seeks to correct that oversight\, to ex
 plain why the Illuminati theory was so popular in the 1790s\, and then to 
 demonstrate briefly how accepting the popularity of this conspiracy theory
  will allow historians to reconstruct what British conservatives thought a
 bout what the Illuminati represented: the Enlightenment.
LOCATION:Bateman Auditorium\, Gonville &amp\; Caius
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR