Augustin Barruel, born at Villeneuve de Berg (Ardèche), had entered the Society of Jesus, commonly known as the Jesuits, in 1756 and taught grammar at Toulouse in 1762.

The storm against the Jesuits in France had driven him from his country and he was occupied in college work in Moravia and Bohemia until the suppression of the order in 1773.

He had then returned to France and his first literary work had appeared in 1774: Ode sur le glorieux avenement de Louis Auguste au trone.

That same year he became a collaborator of the Année littéraire, edited by Élie Catherine Fréron.

His first important work was Les Helveiennes, ou Lettres Provinciales philosophiques, published in 1781.

National affairs in France were meanwhile growing more and more turbulent as Barruel had continued his literary activity, which from this point forward is concerned especially with public questions.

From 1788 to 1792, he had edited the famous Journal Ecclesiastique founded by Joseph Dinouart in 1760.

In this periodical was published Barruel's La Conduite du. S. Siège envers la France, a vigorous defense of Pope Pius VI.

He had likewise written a number of pamphlets against the civil oath demanded from ecclesiastics and against the new civil constitution during 1790 and 1791.

He had afterward gathered into one Collection Ecclésiastique all of the works relative to the clergy and civil constitution.

The storm of the French Revolution had in the meantime forced Barruel to seek refuge in England, where he became almoner to the refugee Louis Francis II of Bourbon, Prince of Conti.

Here, in 1793, he had written the Histoire du Clergé pendant la Revolution Française, dedicating the work to the English nation in recognition of the hospitality that it had showed toward the unfortunate French ecclesiastics.

It has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Polish, and English.

The English version, which has gone through through several editions, has done much to strengthen the British nation in its opposition to French revolutionary principles.

While in London, Barruel had published a work in English, A Dissertation on Ecclesiastical Jurisdiction in the Catholic Church, but none of his works have attracted so much attention as his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, written and published in French in 1797-78.

In the book, Barruel claims that the French Revolution is the result of a deliberate conspiracy or plot to overthrow the throne, altar and aristocratic society in Europe.

The plot was allegedly hatched by a coalition of philosophes, Freemasons, and the Order of the Illuminati.

The conspirators had created a system that has been inherited by the Jacobins, who had operated it to its greatest potential.

The Memoirs purports to expose the Revolution as the culmination of a long history of subversion.

Barruel is not the first to make these charges but he is the first to present them in a fully developed historical context and his evidence is on a quite unprecedented scale.

Barruel has written each of the first three volumes of the book as separate discussions of those who had contributed to the conspiracy.

The fourth volume is an attempt to unite them all in a description of the Jacobins in the French Revolution.

Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism is representative of the criticism of the Enlightenment that spreads throughout Europe during the Revolutionary period.

His basic idea is that of a conspiracy with the aim of overthrowing Christianity—or more to the point, any and all forms of political and social organization based on conformity to the moral teachings of the Roman Catholic Church.

It inspires John Robison, who has been working independently on his own conspiracy theory, to extend his book Proofs of a Conspiracy Against all the Religions and Governments of Europe and include several quotations from Barruel.

Barruel’s book concludes, like Robinson, that when the Illuminati was driven underground, it had resurfaced as an organization called the German Union, allegedly a principal in the fomenting of the 1789 French Revolution.

His version of the revolution, which blames specific men and points out a single cause, has been rejected by the majority of scholars, as the concept of a "master conspiracy" lies on the fringes of historical analysis.