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AN INTRODUCTION
TO JOSEPH CERNEAU'S BIOGRAPHY
Alain Bernheim, C. B. C. S., 32°
The hitherto
unknown document Heredom has the pleasure to reproduce in its present
issue was presented by the Sovereign Grand Consistory of the United
States of America to Joseph Cerneau, November 10, 1827, on the occasion
of his return to France. It was recently discovered in the shop-window
of an antiquarian in Paris by Pierre Mollier, Director of the Library,
Archives and Museum of the Grand Orient of France, who recognized
immediately its unusual interest and was kind enough to put an excellent
diapositive at Heredom's disposal.
Little is known
about Joseph Cerneau's life and nothing definite about his death.
In 1800, he was a member of La Réunion Désirée,
a Lodge warranted in 1784 by the Grand Orient of France in Port
au Prince, while he appears on the June 1801 printed Tableau (List
of Members) of La Réunion des Coeurs No. 47, warranted in
1789 by the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania of the same town, as a goldsmith
merchant (marchand orfèvre), 'R\ A\, R\ =\' (Royal Arch and
Rose Croix). He was one of the first two Grand Secretaries of the
Provincial Grand Lodge of Saint Domingue, founded with Antoine Mathieu-Dupotet
as Provincial Grand Master at Port Républicain in January
1802 by the Grand Lodge of Pennsylvania. In December 1804, he petitioned
that Grand Lodge to warrant Lodge Le Temple des Vertus Théologales
in Havana of which he was then Worshipful Master. On July 15, 1806,
at Baracoa (Cuba), he received a patent from Antoine Mathieu-Dupotet
and arrived in New York in November. Various American historians
quoted from a Minute-Book of the Consistory founded in New York
by Cerneau, which is extant in the archives of the Northern Masonic
Jurisdiction, the full contents of which have never been published
yet. Cerneau's patent together with his New York activities will
be discussed in Heredom next year.
In December
1827, Cerneau returned to his native village in France where he
is said to have died some twenty years later.
JOSEPH CERNEAU
AND HISTORIANS
The first public
attack against Cerneau happened in an extremely rare pamphlet of
18 pages, issued in 1810 at Philadelphia, a copy of which M. Kent
Walgren was kind enough to put at my disposal. But as far as I am
aware, the earliest-known sketch of Joseph Cerneau's life was included
in a few paragraphs, altogether some 700 words, which appeared in
the third edition (1844) of a book of 400 pages, issued by Bègue-Clavel
in 1843, Histoire pittoresque de la Franc-Maçonnerie. Clavel's
sources are discussed below. With a few words added, what he wrote
about Cerneau was recopied in full as his own by Ragon. Thirty years
ago, Paul Naudon summarized both without any acknowledgment whatsoever.
According to
Ray Baker Harris, Albert Pike published during the 1880s thirty-four
distinct pamphlets on the 'Cerneau controversy'.
About 1884,
William H. Peckham, one of Cerneau's successors as Grand Commander,
thought fit to write to the mairie (Town Hall) of his birth-place
in France. The answer Peckham received showed that Joseph Cerneau
was born in Villeblevin near Sens, in the department Yonne, as 'the
legitimate son of Elme Etienne Cerneau, rector of the small schools
[? likely écoles primaires or elementary schools] of Villeblevin,
and of Félicité Perpétue Gateau, on the 14th
day of November, 1765'. For the past century and a half, most historians
stated that Cerneau was born in 1763.
The Report
issued in 1886 by the Supreme Council for France 'In re Joseph Cerneau'
showed the unfamiliarity of its Librarian with its own archives
as well as his bias. A series of articles by Emile Adrianyi-Pontet
writing under the pseudonym of Br\ Akim Haemeth appeared in 1929
in the Wiener Freimaurer-Zeitung, one of which was devoted to 'Cerneauism'.
It was a fair compilation which brought no new information.
Replying to
comments made upon a remarkable paper he submitted before Quatuor
Coronati Lodge on May 6, 1927, Bro. N. S. H. Sitwell wrote:
[...] when
this paper was written, the collection of these West Indian manuscripts
was but small. It now (October 1928) consists of over twenty of
such documents. [...] We have new records about Cerneau, and new
letters and documents about Morin and Martin [sic] de Pasquallis
[...]
The Cerneau
records discovered by Sitwell were never mentioned again. In 1965,
James Fairbairn Smith quoted the above reply but cut off the five
words: 'new records about Cerneau, and'.
In 1938, Baynard
culled a few indications from Reid's Washington Lodge No. 21, F.
& A. M., and some of its members (1911) and published the only-known
Cerneau's portrait.
In a short
paper issued in 1975, Jean Bossu mentioned that some Cerneau papers
were extant at the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and quoted
the following sentence from a letter written to the Grand Orient
of France on December 10, 1841, by Cerneau, then living at his birth-place
and asking for financial help: 'I believe I shall not bother you
again much longer, then I am in my 77th year, the close of my existence
cannot be far away, I experienced too many trials'. The Grand Orient
granted him twenty Francs after having granted him fifty in 1840.
*
* *
This excerpt is from Heredom, the
transactions of the Scottish Rite Research Society
Volume VI, Year 1997
©1997-2002, Scottish Rite Research Society
All Rights Reserved
Scottish Rite Research Society
1733 16th St., N.W., Washington, DC 20009-3103
202-232-3579 voice, 202-383-1847 fax
srrs@srmason-sj.org, www.srmason-sj.org
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