Content
Conspiracy manifestos?
L'or, c'est fine. L'alchemy also.
Hugues Jallon, Le cours secret du monde, Editions verticales, 2025.
Gold is out. So is alchemy.
In Le cours secret du monde In 2025, Hugues Jallon undertakes a radical revision of what is considered "secret" or "hidden"—not out of esoteric interest, but as a contrapuntal exploration against hegemonic, rational world knowledge. For Jallon, the "secret" is not a fixed category, a closed content, or a dogmatic system. Rather, it is a space for thought, an opening, a void from which alternative forms of history, perception, and interpretation of the world emerge. The attributions to the "secret" in the novel are manifold and deliberately contradictory. They aim to readjust the relationship between visibility, truth, knowledge, and power.
It's not a debut in this history. Il n'est même pas sûr qu'on puiss la raconter. Now you can see the history of the world without access.
There are already too many secrets.
Hugues Jallon, Le cours secret du monde, Editions verticales, 2025.
There is no beginning to this story. It is not even certain whether it can be told at all. You cannot tell the story of a world to which you have no access.
There are too many secrets.
Hugues Jallon is a French writer and publisher who, after a publishing career at Éditions La Découverte, took over as head of Éditions du Seuil in 2018. Jallon has spoken publicly on various political issues, including defending freedom of expression and criticizing government policies. As an author, Jallon has published several works, including... The base (2004) Combat zone (2007) Le début de quelque chose (2011) La conquête des hearts et des esprits (2015) Hélène ou le soulèvement (2019) and Le capital, c'est ta vie (2023). His works are characterized by dense descriptions of social and psychological conditions of the contemporary world and address themes such as panic, trauma, flight, disappearance, isolation and regression.
Jallon lost his leadership position at the publishing house Seuil because of his radical left-wing views. 1 and perhaps also, related to that, because of the publication of a conspiracy manifesto, which now also includes reading his own latest book, Le cours secret du monde (2025), could shed a particular light on this. This new publication continues the themes of his work by exploring alchemists, magicians, scientists, spies, revolutionaries, and poets searching for hidden truths. Jallon poses the question of whether the so-called heretics of the 20th century, who operated at the limits of science and reason, still have anything to say to us today, especially in an age where the “occult forces of capital” dominate our souls. The work invites us to secretly dream of other worlds and lives.
Back to the conspiracy manifesto in Seuil: “Was the pandemic just a pretext to suppress freedom movements from Hong Kong to the Yellow Vests? In France, an anonymous ‘conspiracy manifesto’ is currently causing a sensation.” This is how an article in the World In her article from 2022, Martina Meister asks why Hugues Jallon, as publisher of Seuil, decided to do this. manifest conspiraniste to publish in his house, which she assesses as follows: "It is peppered with quotations from great thinkers or literary figures such as Machiavelli, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Baudelaire, Pynchon, Adorno, Deleuze and of course Foucault. No author is missing who can be found in the libraries of those educated citizens who have so far apparently not understood that they are 'all' conspiracy theorists." 2
A post-war epic of conquest: La conquête des hearts et des esprits (2015)
Jallon's questions about a kind of counter-history to a hegemonic modern world can already be found in his earlier works: The beginning of his La conquête des hearts et des esprits (2015) is not a traditional novel opening, but rather a polyphonic chorus of postwar modernity, in which the boundaries between subject and spectacle, inner world and foreign policy, myth and media illusion blur. Jallon stages the second half of the 20th century as a post-utopian age in which the conquest of space collides with the inner emptiness of humanity—and he does so in a hypnotic, poetic-political way. The beginning of Hugues Jallon's epic in cantos is a highly condensed, rhythmically structured text that creates a mixture of epic incantation, media simulation, and documentary evocation. It functions like a hypnotic prologue poem, introducing less a plot than a state, a historical-emotional climate: the postwar period, "le milieu de l'après-guerre," which is stylized as the mythical zero point of an era. The novel opens with the phrase "C'est à El Lago, au milieu de l'après-guerre" – a concrete place (El Lago) encounters an abstract temporality ("au milieu de l'après-guerre") that is neither dated nor located. This immediately creates an uncanny limbo: we are simultaneously "after" and "before," in a historical vacuum that is more mythological than chronological. The postwar period becomes the stage for new dreams, new heroes – but also for new forms of control, propaganda, and psychological manipulation. The text is fragmented, elliptical, without a clear narrative voice, almost cinematically edited. Sentences break off, new images begin, transitions remain suggestive. The rhythmic repetition of "C'est au milieu de l'après-guerre" is used like a refrain, structuring the events while simultaneously shattering any chronological linearity.
What follows is a fusion of everyday domestic life and global spectacle: women in shorts in the living room, children running through the frame—but simultaneously a countdown, radio transmissions, the trembling of an image suggesting: we are witnessing the first moon landing. The text jumps between interior space and outer space, between living room and television, between individual intimacy and collective projection. This simultaneity creates a feeling of unreality—as if the world itself had become a simulacrum. The events are permeated by media images, signals, and commentary—and yet emotionally charged: “Something dies within us / But why?”
The hero—clearly identifiable as Neil Armstrong—is celebrated on the one hand: a taciturn, purposeful, "fanatical" man with "cold-bloodedness." On the other hand, his myth is systematically demystified. We learn about his childhood, his silence, his social inconspicuousness. The text shows how biographical fragments coalesce into an image of the "hero without a face"—an archetypal hero in whom individual history and national mythology intersect. The publisher's announcement's motto—"for the conquest of our souls" = "pour la conquête de nos âmes"—is fulfilled here: no longer is territory conquered, but the inner self of the individual. The "conquest" is not merely military or technological, but psychological, emotional, and media-related. A subtle melancholy pervades the novel's language: the heroes of the postwar era, it seems, have not liberated us, but transformed us—into spectators, into functionaries, into passive witnesses.
As well in La conquête des hearts et des esprits as well as in Le cours secret du monde It's about individuals who seek deeper truths beyond established norms. Jallon examines how ideological and economic forces influence and manipulate individual and collective consciousness. Both books employ a non-linear, poetic language that challenges traditional narrative structures.
Exhaustion of the subject: Le capital, c'est ta vie (2023)
In 2007, it was still called in Comba areaWe would have to string together therapy methods and discussion groups, coaching sessions and fitness classes in order to survive, to take control of our own lives: “One must submit to the common recommendations. The promises of guaranteed well-being have become endless. Between terrorist threats and management techniques, we live in constant fear of physical and social breakdown. In the combat zone, nothing distinguishes between the dangers of the world and our own private sphere. Some informal groups are preparing for the inevitable. Together, everything has become possible. A single word unites us: fear.” 3 The holiday group in a North African holiday village in Le début de quelque chose (2011) is drawn like a herd of wild boars, and it's in dire need of recovery, as Emily Barnett writes: "Jallon transforms this sterile Eden into a dumping ground for Western neuroses by introducing an additional layer of disorder. The minibar empties, a child cries, the fluorescent lights in the dining room explode, a thunderstorm breaks out: the smiling village transforms into a refuge, a ghetto, a hospital, or even a concentration camp, while outside something is growing that strongly resembles a civil war. A chillingly Brechtian novella (the distancing, the dangers of collective passivity) that is bound to stir up strong emotions." 4
Hugues Jallon finally wrote under the irritating title Le capital, c'est ta vie (2023) 5 The novel unfolds a disturbing inventory of the dehumanization inflicted on its subjects by omnipresent capitalism. It follows a narrator who is crushed in the maelstrom of economic and social constraints, caught between panic attacks and the imperative of self-optimization. The novel aligns itself with a current in contemporary French literature characterized by a new form of "littérature du symptôme"—texts in which personal experiences of crisis (depression, burnout, anxiety disorders) are not merely documented but staged as a reflection of collective conditions. In this respect, it stands Le capital, c'est ta vie While reminiscent of authors like Édouard Louis or Annie Ernaux, Jallon goes a step further: he searches not only for causes but also for rhythms, for resonances. His text gropes, stammers, falters, and erupts—and in doing so, it becomes an expression of an age that no longer knows how to grasp itself. Jallon's fragmentary narrative style and concentrated, layered scenes intensify this alienation by establishing value as an absolute measure—a logic manifested in celebrity, consumerism, and media visibility. Pop cultural icons like Kim Kardashian serve as ciphers for the emptiness of visibility and commerce, while intimate experiences and global mechanisms are inextricably interwoven. Thus, the novel unflinchingly reveals how markets colonize not only the economy but also self-understanding and relationships, exacting a psychological toll that transcends individual experiences of transgression and calls society into question.
The novel begins without a plot, without a classic exposition. No names, no dialogue, no chronology. Instead: a body. A body that trembles, shivers, whose breathing fails. The narrator describes his experience of panic attacks in oppressive, haunting images. These passages are not medical reports, but poetic condensations of an unbearable state: the body loses its coherence, the self disintegrates. Language itself begins to stagger, to repeat itself, to stutter. What Jallon describes here is not merely a psychological disorder—it is the experience of a complete disintegration of one's relationship to the world. The panic comes "from below," it creeps from the legs to the chest, it rips the subject's bearings from him. In these moments, the narrator says, there is no future, no past—only the present in its destructive form. Jallon's narrator documents the daily weariness: the walk from the bed to the café, the retreat to one's own neighborhood, the fear of stares, of conversations, of nothingness. These are scenes of depression, but also of despair at the lack of resonance. This unease is reflected in the structure of the text: there are no chapters, no linear development, but rather sections that roll in like waves, with sudden insertions, digressions, and lists. Jallon writes against linearity—like someone who can no longer imagine solid ground.
The protagonist doesn't "merely" suffer from panic attacks, but from a profound alienation from the world, in which "life projects" exist only as project management of consumption goals, career advancements, self-optimization, and "little pleasures." The exhaustion that grips the self is also the exhaustion of a subject that has to function—not because someone forces it to, but because it perceives itself as an investment: a small business competing for attention, performance, and efficiency. Jallon doesn't just depict this economization of life—he incorporates it. Reflections on the DSM-5, psychiatric clinics, the pharmaceutical industry, management rhetoric, economic theories, and globalized flows of goods are strung together with almost manic density. The world appears as a single market—literally. In an almost grotesque section of the novel, the narrator lists the "marché de…" dozens of times: "le marché du sommeil" (the sleep market), "le marché de la préadolescence" (the pre-adolescence market), "le marché de la fin de vie" (the end-of-life market), "le marché de l'attention" (the attention market), "le marché de la beauté" (the beauty market)... In the montage of the subjective and the global, of the nervous system and the world economy, of panic attacks and container shipping, a shattering truth is revealed: there is no place outside the system, no "perfect world," no refuge. Even attempts to escape its grasp—through withdrawal, illness, silence—already seem to be part of the game. And yet, the very articulation of this hopelessness is a moment of autonomy.
The literary form reflects precisely what it describes: being overwhelmed, losing control, and losing one's sense of boundaries. Jallon employs repetition, elliptical sentences, abrupt shifts in perspective, and insertions from other discursive fields. A pull is created between lyrical descriptions of shortness of breath and quotations from psychiatric texts, a pull that doesn't so much "carry" the reader as overwhelm them. Reading is not linear; it's a staggering experience. The text generates a dense sensory atmosphere: the trembling of hands, the pressure on the chest, the throbbing in the head—bodily sensations become linguistic scores. In moments of extreme panic, the focus narrows to seemingly insignificant details—a trembling cigarette, an ant in the sand, the rustling of sparrows in the branches—and then expands again to macroscopic scales, for example, when the text reflects on container logistics, Nobel Prizes in Economics, or geopolitical developments. This stylistic strategy is not merely a mannerism, but part of a poetological approach: the novel performs the fragmentation it addresses.
Capitalism here appears not as a flawed system, but as a condition that shifts every category of "normal"—psychologically, socially, linguistically. The narrator suffers, doubts, cries out for help—but there is no longer any authority to answer. Panic becomes the symbol of the "self" no longer being able to function as a unified whole. While the novel impressively demonstrates how capitalism permeates the individual into their most intimate spheres and leads to alienation, the portrayal often remains trapped in a moral nihilism, without presenting any genuine alternatives or possibilities for resistance. Thus, while the critique of capitalism is pointed and provocative, the solution to the problem remains vague, raising the question of whether the novel truly encourages deeper reflection or ultimately exhausts itself in depicting powerlessness. However, it must also be noted: Le capital, c'est ta vie Jallon does not invent conspiracy theories or secret power circles. Rather, he works to show how openly visible, everyday market mechanisms and imperatives for self-optimization wear down the individual – entirely without resorting to alleged "secret powers".
Paths to the Hidden
The many poetic works have a good part in my verbal alchemy.
Je m'habituai à l'hallucination simple: je voyais très franchement une mosquée à la place d'une usine, une école de tambours faite par des anges, des calèches sur les routes du ciel, un salon au fond d'un lac; les monstres, les mystères ; A title of vaudeville dressait des épouvantes devant moi.
Puis j'expliquai mes sophismes magiciques with l'hallucination des mots!
Je finishes par trouver sacré the désordre de mon esprit. J'étais oisif, en proie à une lourde fièvre: j'enviais la félicité des bêtes, – les chenilles, qui représentent l'innocence des limbes, les taupes, le sommeil de la virginité!
From: Arthur Rimbaud, Une Saison en Enfer, Délires II, Alchimie du Verbe.
In my alchemy of the word, the ancient poetic laws had a large place.
In the simplest hallucinations, I saw very clearly: here a mosque instead of a factory, a music band made up of angels, silver carriages on star-shaped roads, there a castle on the blue ocean floor, disgusting mythical creatures and green secrets. Even the title of a farce leaped into my eyes like a terrible event.
I explained my magical sophisms by the hallucination of words.
Finally, the chaos of my thoughts seemed to me like a sacred miracle. I did nothing, lived as if in a feverish stupor, and gazed enviously at the animals' bliss. I occupied myself with the caterpillars, which symbolized the innocence of the primordial heaven, just as moles symbolized the sleep of virginity.
From: Arthur Rimbaud, A Summer in Hell, Delirium II, Alchemy of the Word, adapted by Paul Zech, Complete Poems of Jean Arthur Rimbaud, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1990, pp. 109f.
The Kardashians will be in Le capital, c'est ta vie (2023) is mentioned, and not casually or merely as a pop-cultural embellishment, but as part of a profound social analysis. The Kardashians—especially Kim Kardashian—appear to represent the emptied, visually coded capitalism of the present, in which body, surface, and media presence become the dominant form of being. Kim is explicitly quoted as a “woman without talent” who nevertheless achieved global fame—an ironic reversal of the meritocratic self-image of Western societies. The narrator contrasts his own psychosomatic panic, his inability to work, his depression with the flawless, surgically enhanced figure of Kim Kardashian—as if her visibility, her apparent control over body and image, were the flip side of his silence and disintegration. Here, she functions as a counter-image to the decomposed subject of the neoliberal precariat.
The Kardashians represent the transformation of meaning into visibility, of being into performance. Their omnipresence points to the media's compulsion for constant presence, to a new form of "compulsion for self-exploitation." What was once considered "sacred" now manifests as an aesthetic-performative power structure—embodied in the digital public sphere by the Kardashian aesthetic. The surfaces of pop culture become vehicles for unconscious desires, anxieties, and norms—the Kardashians are icons of a new, emptied mysticism. In the novel, they mark an uncanny sacrality of the surface—a "secret doctrine without a secret," seemingly accessible to all but belonging to no one.
Hugues Jallons Le cours secret du monde (2025) is not a novel in the classical sense, but a hybrid text form between collage, narrative, essay, and speculative historical reflection. It is a "composed drift" that moves through centuries, worldviews, obscurities, and visions—in search of a "secret course of the world" that eludes established explanations, historical canons, and rationalistic worldviews. In Hugues Jallon's two novels Le capital, c'est ta vie (2023) and Le cours secret du monde We encounter a radically critical view of contemporary society, each in its own way. However, it unfolds in two very different forms: While The capital describing the suffering of the individual in neoliberal everyday life with the most compelling subjectivity, goes Le cours secret du monde Furthermore, it attempts to illuminate the fabric of reality itself – not in the mode of analysis, but in the process of speculative narrative, occult montage, and the poetic unveiling of a deeper, “secret” world order.
Le capital, c'est ta vie This is a novel of panic. In episodic, breathless sections, the narrator describes his psychological crises, his anxiety disorders, his inability to function in the world. These conditions, however, are not purely individual, but rather symptoms of a general way of life based on chronic exhaustion and overexertion. Capital, according to Jallon, colonizes not only work and consumption, but above all time, body, and emotions. The first-person narrator is in a state of constant derailment, which manifests itself in physical reactions: shortness of breath, trembling, circulatory collapse. The novel doesn't just target working life as the cause, but also the entire cultural environment—isolation, the constant barrage of media, the disappearance of genuine conversation, the impossibility of experiencing oneself as a living, meaningful being.
This is countered by Le cours secret du monde It doesn't contradict it, but rather complements it on another level. While the first novel remains in the first-person perspective and within the realm of physical experience, the second radically breaks with the form of autofictional or self-analytical prose. It doesn't follow a coherent plot, but instead sketches a world in fragments, overlays, historical miniatures, esoteric theories, and cultural-philosophical meditations. Jallon draws a different kind of cartography: not of everyday life, but of hidden history—a history that unfolds outside of official narratives. Following in the footsteps of Jacques Bergier, René Daumal, Helena Blavatsky, and Georges Gurdjieff, the book explores occult movements, secret teachings, and repressed forms of knowledge. The question of what "holds the world together at its core" is posed not scientifically, but poetically, magically, and imaginatively.
On January 28, 1972, in a few minutes' report in French television, there was a voice announcement: "This man is a legend" and on the sky, a silhouette that marched across the forest, the beautiful head of the tree arrived. The porte has a black jacket on the two sides and a white shirt with a jabot, a small canne d'argent à la main.
This is not the same as the comte of Saint-Germain, the famous alchemist who met Casanova, who also had a temps Château de Chambord and à la cour de Louis XV. This is the last of the templiers. The apartment also belongs to the people of the Atlantide, a group of grand men who quit the land, and has a long list of appliances in the foundations of the Cathedral of Chartres. The smoke of the cigar, the goûte de grands crus, the wheel in a sports car that was reassembled into a Corvette, the possession of a store of antiques in the Place des Vosges. When he went to the gardens of Versailles, he was able to celebrate the grand festivals of the king. The pommeau de sa canne dissimule un percuteur qui la transforme en arme à fire. This is a frequent occurrence of the OAS and Nazi types. Avant de répondre aux questions, il laisse passer quelques secondes de silence, et son visage de marble s'éclaire parfois d'un petit sourire ironique teinté de melancolie. This is evidenced by the person in the Croira.
Quelques mois plus tard, lors d'une soirée en l'honneur de Dalida et de son dernier album, Pascal Sevran, an animateur vedette de la télévision, present à la chanteuse the comte de Saint-Germain, dont le nom circule dans all Paris. This is the début d'une histoire d'amour folle. Dalida is célèbre, elle est riche, mais elle dit que, grâce à lui, elle est “devenue une femme”. The conduit in the car, the occupancy of the business, can turn the tables and watch it on the television, comment on the transformer of the plumb en or, it is met with the painting, the fabrication of the bronze sculptures with the figures of large oiseaux, the register also, in a duo with the elle, une chanson, « Et de l'amour, de l'amour », and all the words « Pour une femme », « Le frimeur », et d'autres encore. The resemble a piece by Alain Delon qui a eu, lui also, a histoire with Dalida dans les années cinquante, et, comme lui, il est attiré par les armes. Alors qu'ils rentrent très tard d'un diner à l'hôtel particulier de Montmartre, il tire sur le petit ami de la bonne Portuguese de Dalida, ce qui lui vaut a mois de prison à Fresnes. It is tyrannique, aggressive, jaloux, and Dalida finishes par le quitter. Leur amour a duré neuf ans.
Hugues Jallon, Le cours secret du monde, Editions verticales, 2025.
Then, on January 28, 1972, a voice announces in a twenty-minute report on French television: "This man is a legend," and one can almost picture a figure with beautifully tied-back hair approaching us in a forest. He is wearing a black coat draped over his shoulders, a white shirt with ruffles, and carrying a small silver walking stick.
He says he was born more than seventeen thousand years ago, speaks seventeen languages and eight dialects, has traversed time, is the Count of Saint-Germain, the famous alchemist who knew Casanova and lived for a time at the Château de Chambord and the court of Louis XV. He says he is the last Templar. He also says he belongs to the people of Atlantis, a race of great men who left Earth and left some of their equipment beneath the foundations of Chartres Cathedral. He smokes cigars, drinks fine wines, drives a sports car that looks like a Corvette, and owns an antique shop on the Place des Vosges. When he walks through the gardens of Versailles, he says he remembers the grand feasts the king gave. The knob of his walking stick conceals a firing pin that transforms it into a firearm. He says he has had dealings with people from the OAS and Nazis. Before answering questions, he lets a few seconds of silence pass, and his expressionless face sometimes brightens with a small, ironic, melancholic smile. He says that, of course, no one will believe him.
A few months later, at an evening event honoring Dalida and her latest album, Pascal Sevran, a well-known television presenter, introduces the singer to the Count of Saint-Germain, whose name is on everyone's lips in Paris. It is the beginning of a tumultuous love affair. Dalida is famous, she is rich, but she says that thanks to him she has "become a woman." He drives her around, takes care of her affairs, turns tables, and demonstrates on television how he can turn lead into gold. He begins to paint, creates bronze sculptures of large birds, and records a duet with her, "Et de l'amour, de l'amour," then solo tracks like "Pour une femme," "Le frimeur," and others. He bears a slight resemblance to Alain Delon, who also had an affair with Dalida in the 1950s and, like him, was drawn to weapons. When they return very late from a dinner at a mansion in Montmartre, he shoots the friend of Dalida's Portuguese housekeeper, which earns him a month in prison in Fresnes. He is tyrannical, aggressive, and jealous, and Dalida eventually leaves him. Their love lasted nine years.
Despite all their differences, the two books share a distrust of the surface of reality, a deep skepticism towards the ideological promises of progress and modernity. But while The capital This skepticism, formulated from the innermost depths of a suffering subject – a subject in a state of psychological emergency – expresses Le cours secret They do so via the detour of history, occult narrative traditions, and alternative thought movements. It's as if Jallon, after the clinical-existential diagnosis in The capital feels the need to examine the grand narrative behind it: Why do we live the way we do? Why are we the way we are? Who instilled in us this worldview in which body and mind are separated, in which feelings are pathologized and history is sold as a linear narrative of progress?
Both texts share an independence of thought that is bound neither to academic discourse nor to political programs. Their critique is not agitational, but rather poetic-ontological. It is striking that both novels, each in its own distinct way, argue against instrumental rationality. The capital through the decomposition of language in the rhythm of fear, Le cours secret through the recomposition of world knowledge from what has disappeared, been kept silent, and repressed. In both cases, writing itself becomes a site of resistance: as a poetic gesture against forgetting, against simplification, against what Jallon describes, not without irony, as the world as it is, “le monde tel qu'il est”.
At the same time, the two books also differ in their perspective on the subject. The capital It is a vulnerable, disintegrating self-figure whose experiences are documented – an exhausted, overwhelmed, lonely self that shuttles between café, apartment, office, and clinic. In Le cours secret This "I" recedes behind the narrative voices, making way for a polyphonic, associative narrative flow in which biographies, visions, hypotheses, and myths intertwine. Here, the subject is no longer merely a victim of its time, but part of a much larger movement, a secret current running beneath the surface of history.
The two novels can also be read as complementary: Le capital, c'est ta vie as an intimate inside view of a sick body in a broken society; Le cours secret du monde as an external cartography of all those forces that have brought forth this society—visible, invisible, rational, or esoteric. What unites them is the attempt to find a language for that which can no longer be expressed: the silencing of meaning, the silence of the world, the explosion within. And what distinguishes them is not their stance—for both are radically independent—but their direction of view: from the inside out in one, from the outside down (into the subterranean) in the other. Jallon thus reveals himself, in a sense, as the author of a twofold critique—existential and metaphysical at the same time.
Visionaries of a secret doctrine
The central question of Jallon's latest work is not: What is history?, but rather: What has been excluded from it? The text brings together a range of figures—real people, spiritual teachers, outsiders, "seekers"—each of whom has, in their own way, created an alternative view of reality. From these portraits emerges a dazzling, contradictory, yet internally consistent counter-image to Western rationalist modernity.
Georges Gurdjieff – the archetype of secret knowledge
The perhaps central figure in Le cours secret du monde Georges I. Gurdjieff is an esoteric teacher of unclear origins, charismatic presence, and a dazzling biography encompassing Oriental mysticism, hypnosis, dance, asceticism, and speculative philosophy. The narrator does not follow Gurdjieff's trail to reconstruct a coherent system—on the contrary: the biographical details are fragmentary, contradictory, and mythologized. Gurdjieff, the narrator suggests, was perhaps many things—a spy, a charlatan, a saint, a revolutionary, a tyrant, a theater director—but above all, he was the bearer of an "enseignement" (in capital letters) that was not to be documented but rather embodied, danced, breathed, and lived.
Puis c'est la guerre.
Ses disciples semblent vivre à l'écart de toute la violence qui se déchaîne d'un seul coup à l'été 1914. Les yeux brilliants, les joues brûlantes de larmes, ils Travaillent. Ils Respirent avec leur Âme. Ils n'en sont qu'au début avec lui. Puis c'est la révolution d'Octobre, en Russie, et la guerre civile. A voyage begins, from Essen to Sotchi to Tbilisi. Gurdjieff was a small, nomad and cross-country traveler across the mountains of the Black Sea. Il la conduit dans une forêt ancienne, initiatique, auprès de dolmens ensevelis dans la broussaille. Ils from Constantinople, from Sofia, couches in the fond of a wagon, dormant in the forests, from Belgrade, from Berlin, from London or the Société théosophique reçoit Gurdjieff en grande pompe.
« You want to find a maître, you can decide that you want to be fair, you demand something from the heart of your heart, which you want, everything from the avant », conclut-il lors d'une conference qu'il donne à Londres. Alfred Richard Orage is in the room, this is a socialist, the language that the Angleterre a besoin du socialisme, the director of the revue The New Age, which were published by the likes of George Bernard Shaw, HG Wells, Ezra Pound, and also published in «l'Enseignement».
Gurdjieff débarque à Paris. With a toque d'astrakan, toujours une jambe repliée sous lui, the organization of these séances in the locations of the institute de gymnastique rythmique fondé par le musicien Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, rue de Vaugirard. The installation at the Prieuré des Basses-Loges à la fin du mois d'août 1922, in the village d'Avon, à soixante kilometers de Paris. This is a château immense for logger tous ceux qui l'accompagnent. It is a part of the park in three high mountains, and in the land of cultivators. « Travaillez bien, répète-t-il, devenez meilleurs, you startz à mieux penser, c'est bien. »
Hugues Jallon, Le cours secret du monde, Editions verticales, 2025.
Then war breaks out.
His followers seem untouched by all the violence that suddenly erupts in the summer of 1914. With shining eyes and tear-stained cheeks, they work. They breathe with their souls. They are still at the very beginning with him. Then comes the October Revolution in Russia and the Civil War. A journey begins, from Essentuki to Sochi and then to Tbilisi. Gurdjieff leads his small, nomadic, and squalid group through the Caucasus Mountains, along the Black Sea coast. He takes them into an ancient, mysterious forest, to dolmens buried in the undergrowth. They go to Constantinople, then to Sofia, sleeping in the hold of a train car, in the forests, then in Belgrade, Berlin, and London, where the Theosophical Society receives Gurdjieff with great pomp.
“You must find a master; only you can decide what you want to do. Ask yourselves from the bottom of your hearts what you want, and move forward,” he concludes in a lecture he gives in London. Alfred Richard Orage is in the audience; he is a socialist who writes that England needs socialism. He edits the magazine *The New Age*, published by his friends George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, and Ezra Pound, and will eventually also end up in the “doctrine.”
Gurdjieff arrives in Paris. Wearing his Astrakan cap and always with one leg tucked under him, he organizes his sessions in the premises of the Institute for Rhythmic Gymnastics, founded by the musician Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, on the Rue de Vaugirard. At the end of August 1922, he settles at the Priory of Basses-Loges in the village of Avon, sixty kilometers from Paris. It is a huge château, large enough to accommodate all those who accompany him. There is a park surrounded by very high walls and farmland. "Work well," he repeats, "become better, you're beginning to think better, that's good."
The narrator sees in Gurdjieff a witness to another dimension of truth, a truth that eludes Western thought with its fixed opposition of body and mind, faith and knowledge. Gurdjieff's world is a world of transitions, of inner alchemy, of ritual repetition—a practice of "awakening," not of explanation. The narrator concludes that any teaching that claims to be "true" must simultaneously be a school of discipline, of physicality, and of experience. Truth lies not in texts, but in states of being.
René Daumal – the poetic-spiritual suicide
The poet and mystic René Daumal, known for Le Mont AnalogueDaumal is introduced as a student of Gurdjieff, but also as someone who, with his own tragic radicalism, pursued a "poetics of mystical certainty." In describing Daumal, the text plays with his affinity for Rimbaud, his desire to become a "voyant," and his experiments with drugs, death, and language. For the narrator, Daumal is a lost child of modernity, someone who searched for an absolute reality through the poetic word, but was ultimately destroyed by it.
Il [di Gurdjieff] organized the exercises of attention and sensation, of the séances of auto-hypnosis, of the ateliers of couture for the fair of costumes and coussins, and of the sacred dances, toujours. On July 8, 1924, the face of the Citroën was against a tree. Son corps ensanglanté repose sur l'herbe tiède, à côté de la carcasse tordue, the motor arraché fumant au loin. Pas de morphine, non, dit-il aux médecins. Et puis, il est debout dans les jours qui suivent. Il demande des cigarettes. Ses disciples abattent des arbres pour allumer des feux immenses partout dans le parc. Aux belles women, the exige leur "premier corps", and elles le suivent dans sa chambre. « I am in my heart at the heart of my sex », I am a novelist.
The Prieuré is located at 6, rue des Colonels-Renard, where Mme Salzmann is, one of the disciples. This is how René Daumal returns to see many of his mystical men who are so red about the world and the raison de vivre. If you have any knowledge, you don't need to know it exists in the world and every day you pour it, you get the merit, and it's accéder ». Daumal a vingt-deux ans. It's a mystique, it's a drug. This is a poet who is not like Rimbaud, in a village perdu à cinq kilometers de Charleville-Mézières, a coin misérable des Ardennes qui semble avoir the don d'enfanter des "voyants". À quelques mois près, all les deux sont morts au même âge, à trente-six ans. Rimbaud disparaît bien avant la Grande Guerre – il s'est essayé misérablement au commerce des armes après en avoir fini with la poésie. Daumal, lui, after this war that apporte au monde la destruction de masse moderne.
Hugues Jallon, Le cours secret du monde, Editions verticales, 2025.
He organized mindfulness and sensory exercises, self-hypnosis sessions, sewing workshops to make costumes and cushions, and, again and again, sacred dances. On July 8, 1924, he crashed his Citroën into a tree. His blood-soaked body lay on the lukewarm grass beside the mangled wreckage, the engine ripped out and smoking in the distance. No morphine, no, he told the doctors. And then, in the following days, he got up again. He demanded cigarettes. His followers cut down trees to light huge fires all over the park. He demanded their "first body" from the beautiful women, and they followed him to his room. "I felt violated in my sexuality," one writer recounted.
He sells the priory and moves to 6 Rue des Colonels-Renard to live with Madame Salzmann, one of his closest followers. There, René Daumal regularly visits the mysterious old man who gives him back “hope and a purpose in life.” “I see that the hidden knowledge I have dreamed of exists in the world and that one day, when I deserve it, I will have access to it.” Daumal is twenty-two years old. He is a mystic, a drug addict. He is a poet who, like Rimbaud, was born in a remote village five kilometers from Charleville-Mézières, a miserable area in the Ardennes that seems to have a knack for producing “seers.” Both died at the age of 36, only a few months apart. Rimbaud disappeared long before the First World War—after unsuccessfully trying his hand at the arms trade, after giving up on poetry. Daumal was born after this war, which brought modern mass destruction to the world.
From the figure of Daumal, a poetics lesson emerges: words alone do not carry truth—they must be charged by the body, by asceticism, by experiences at the limits of human endurance. Language itself becomes a threshold: it can lead to initiation—or to self-dissolution. The narrator reads Daumal as someone who remained at the threshold—a failure, but significant precisely in that failure.
Jacques Bergier – the technomystical mediator
Another central figure in the book is Jacques Bergier, a former resistance fighter, science writer, and figure straddling the boundaries between espionage, science fiction, occultism, and nuclear physics. Bergier is not an initiate in the classical sense, but rather a compiling mind, connecting a wide range of worldviews, theories, and speculations. He believes in "cryptocracy," a rule of knowledge by secret elites. For the narrator, Bergier is an ironic figure of modernity, someone who uses the rational world to transcend it—through "magical" thinking that is aware of its own construction.
Through the introduction of René Alleau, a history of alchemy, the encounter between Louis Pauwels and the quitter of the Gurdjieff group. Pour Pauwels, this is a variety of illumination. Speaking of the new maître, the écrit: « The spectacle of this intelligence in movement n'a jamais manqué de production en my une exaltation of facultés without laquelle la conception et la rédaction de cet ouvrage m'eussent été impossibles. » The ensemble of a child who contains the paroles of Bergier, and the recueille of religion.
À partir de ce material, ils écrivent tous deux The Morning of the Magicians qui paraît en 1960, un gros livre, dont find parfois un exemplaire aux pages jaunies dans les maisons de campagne ou les locations de vacances. It is presented as an "introduction to a fantastic reality", which has a fair dialogue with the advanced scientists in science with the savoirs of occult millenniums. The ouvrage is actually a variety of cheese that crosses the siècles où l'on croise tous les savoirs anciens, des continents enfouis aux civilizations disparues, des savoirs alchemiques aux mondes extraterrestres, en passant par la Terre creuse et la Société des neuf inconnus, Thulé et l'ésotérisme Nazi, les Mayas, la psychology des profondeurs, l'île de Pâques, la Synarchie, la theory de la relativité, les romans d'Aldous Huxley, les secrets de l'énergie et de la matière, etc.
The book connaît un succès énorme et inattendu. On the other hand, it is passed in the France of the Trent Glory and Gaullism Triomphant, on the other hand the public is poured on the pavement plus six cents pages assez indigestes qui mélange tout et dont on ne retient pas grand-chose. Bergier and Pauwels créent dans la foulée la revue Planet, for continuer à « réconcilier, dans a certaine mesure, la pensée ancienne, disons magicique, avec la pensée avancée d'aujourd'hui » avec son slogan célèbre: « Rien de ce qui est étrange ne nous est étranger ! » Le public en redemande.
Dix ans plus tard, quand "le réalisme fantastique" finit par lasser, Pauwels found a new maître. Il rejoint the clique d'Alain de Benoist et la New Droite, ce groupe d'intellectuels et d'activistes fascinés par les grands mythes païens and celtiques, les civilizations nordiques, and qui recyclent de vieilles idées ultranationalistes et racistes. This nebulous autour du GRECE, the Groupement de recherche et d'études pour la civilization Europeannne, voit ses idées popularisées par Le Figaro Magazine, which was created by Louis Pauwels in 1978. The rest of his history is poured out of the écrit, in 1986, the youth of the world, mobilized against the reform of the universities, was at the same time "sida mental".
During this period, the National Front is encore a small part of the quelques centaines de membres où se retrouvent de vrais neonazis. The world that is definitely dead in 1945 is close to a bunker in the center of Berlin and is recommended to be respired.
Hugues Jallon, Le cours secret du monde, Editions verticales, 2025.
Through René Alleau, a historian of alchemy, he meets Louis Pauwels, who has just left Gurdjieff's group. For Pauwels, this is a kind of enlightenment. About his new mentor, he writes: "The sight of this intelligence in motion has always aroused in me an enthusiasm without which the conception and writing of this work would have been impossible." He seems like a child, literally eating out of Bergier's hand and religiously collecting his words.
Based on this material, the two wrote in 1960 The Morning of the Magicians (The Morning of the Magicians), a thick book, a copy of which you sometimes find with yellowed pages in country houses or holiday apartments. It presents itself as an "Introduction to Fantastic Realism," which aims to bring the latest scientific findings into dialogue with millennia-old occult knowledge. The work is, in reality, a kind of madcap romp through the centuries, encountering all sorts of ancient knowledge, from sunken continents to vanished civilizations, from alchemical knowledge to extraterrestrial worlds, from the hollow Earth and the Society of the Nine Unknowns, Thule and Nazi esotericism, the Mayans, depth psychology, Easter Island, synarchy, the theory of relativity, the novels of Aldous Huxley, the secrets of energy and matter, and so on.
The book was an unexpected and enormous success. No one knows what was going on in France during the thirty glorious years and the triumph of Gaullism; no one knows why the public devoured this over six-hundred-page, rather indigestible tome that stirred everything up and from which little could be retained. Bergier and Pauwels subsequently founded the journal Planet, in order to “in a certain way reconcile the old, let’s say magical thinking with the progressive thinking of today”, with their famous slogan: “Nothing that is strange is alien to us!” The public demands more.
Ten years later, when "fantastic realism" finally became tedious, Pauwels found a new mentor. He joined the clique around Alain de Benoist and the Nouvelle Droite, a group of intellectuals and activists fascinated by the great pagan and Celtic myths and the Nordic civilizations, who recycled old ultranationalist and racist ideas. The entire nebulous movement surrounding GRECE, the Groupe de recherche et d'études pour la civilisation européenne (Group for Research and Studies for European Civilization), saw its ideas propagated by the organization founded by Louis Pauwels in 1978. Le Figaro Magazine He became popular. He went down in history because in 1986 he wrote that the youth of that time, who were mobilized against the university reform, were suffering from "mental AIDS".
At that time, the National Front was still a small party with a few hundred members, in which genuine neo-Nazis were active. The world that had been considered definitively dead in 1945 near a bunker in the center of Berlin was beginning to breathe again.
Bergier thus embodies a key question of the text: Can modern knowledge transcend itself? Can the Enlightenment become a "secret Enlightenment"? The narrator does not conclude that Bergier was right, but rather that his thinking opens up a space in which alternative readings of history can develop – not as facts, but as movements of thought.
Helena Blavatsky – the prophetess of esoteric feminism
With Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, co-founder of the Theosophical Society, a completely different figure enters the text – a woman, a prophetess, a restless traveler who systematically intertwined worldviews: East and West, antiquity and modernity, myth and science. For the narrator, Blavatsky is an "inspired forger," a figure of enormous imagination who understood the world as a web of signs, traces, and ciphers – and at the same time a political woman who never submitted, never lingered, never gave up.
Helena Blavatsky avait autrefois affirmé que ses « Divins Instructeurs » lui avaient confié l'existence d'une civilization disparue, prehistorique, « a civilization millénaire qui pourrait révéler d'étranges secrets à l'humanité », qui aurait laissé de mystérieux « entrepôts Souterrains » dont les entrées (au Tibet, au Pérou, dans l'Antarctique et ailleurs) sont cachées, impossibles à trouver, sauf par des initiés. Avec elle, de nombreux « chercheurs de vérité » pensent qu'il s'agirait peut-être des habitants de l'Atlantide, ou des Lémuriens, ou des Hyperboréens, ou d'autres encore des « Ancêtres Supérieurs », des « Dieux du Passé » Venus de planetes lointaines, Peut-être de la Nebuleuse de la Lyre, que les astrophysiciens ont renommée M57. Certain parts of the «Anciens Astronautes», of the Venus of the world of intergalactic space, dotés de technologies et de savoirs avancés, qui auraient installé leurs bases au cœur de galeries creusées dans les profondeurs de la Terre.
Hugues Jallon, Le cours secret du monde, Editions verticales, 2025.
Helena Blavatsky once claimed that her “divine teachers” had told her of the existence of a vanished, prehistoric civilization, “a civilization thousands of years old that might reveal strange secrets to humanity,” and that had left behind mysterious “underground repositories” whose entrances (in Tibet, Peru, Antarctica, and elsewhere) were hidden and undetectable except to initiates. Like her, many “truth seekers” believe that these might be the inhabitants of Atlantis, the Lemurians, the Hyperboreans, or other “Higher Ancestors,” “gods of the past,” who came from distant planets, perhaps from the Lyra Nebula, which astrophysicists have dubbed M57. Some speak of “ancient astronauts,” beings from the depths of intergalactic space who possessed advanced technologies and knowledge and established their bases within tunnels deep within the Earth.
In the text, Blavatsky represents the powerful moment of female engagement with the world in an era that mystified, yet did not take seriously, the feminine. The narrator does not take her at her word, but rather in her impulse: her thinking was open, permeable, and resistant to any form of confinement. From her character emerges the idea that every esoteric doctrine can never be complete—that it must instead be an experiment in interpreting the world, a nomadic way of thinking that defies all dogmatization.
Alongside the major portraits, the text brings together a multitude of other figures—painters, esotericists, compilers, modern media icons—whose cult of the surface is staged as a new mysticism. This apparent heterogeneity is not a break, but rather part of the book's project: Every era has its own forms of secret knowledge—and also its caricatures. The cult of the visible (e.g., body, celebrity, lifestyle) appears as an inverse reflection of the invisible wisdom of earlier times. The narrator plays with this simultaneity of irony and seriousness, of belief and simulation. The result is an image of modernity as a spectacle of disenchantment, which simultaneously gives rise to a new form of magic—the media image as a sacralized surface.
Counter-archive to the availability of knowledge
From all these voices, traces, and individuals emerges not a dogmatic system, but an open, contradictory, self-reflective field of attempts to think the invisible. The "cours secret du monde" is not to be understood as an absolute truth, but as a counter-movement to total visibility, to the total availability of the world. It is about reclaiming depth, meaning, and resonance—without tipping into esotericism or fanaticism. The narrator draws no definitive conclusions, but feels his way through the teachings, myths, and fragments in search of a different way of thinking: a way of thinking that does not control, but perceives; that does not explain, but suggests; that does not fix, but remains in motion.
Hugues Jallon has with Le cours secret du monde A kind of literary-philosophical counter-archive has been created – a space in which repressed, forgotten, ridiculed, or deliberately excluded forms of knowledge are set in motion once again. The book itself becomes Counter-doctrineNot esotericism, but an ethics of questioning, a poetics of uncertainty. The narrator is not a guru—but a reader, a collector, a poet of the unspoken. And what he shows is perhaps the most essential point: that reality does not begin where everything has been said, but where silence raises questions. Whether all this helps us understand the publication of the conspiracy manifesto by Editions Seuil, as described at the beginning, remains an open question.
This article is written in German and can be found at https://rentree.de. Automatic translations into English and French are available. English, French.
Notes- See “Le Seuil perd son Jallon”, Nouvel Observateur, June 2, 2024.>>>
- Martina Meister, Corona Manifesto: “We will win because we go deeper,” The World, 18. February 2022.>>>
- Publisher announcement, Editions verticales.>>>
- "Jallon transforme cet éden aseptisé en poubelle des névroses occidentales, tout en y introduisant a désordre supplémentaire. The minibar is vide, a child pleure, les neons du réfectoire petitionent, an orage éclate: the village souriant a tôt fait de muter tour tour en refuge, en ghetto, en hospital, voire en espace concentrationnaire, tandis qu'au dehors grandit ce qui ressemble fort une guerre civile. Résolument brechtien (la distance, les dangers de la passivité collective), a court roman glacant qui ne peut que déranger les esprits.” Emily Barnett, “Le début de quelque chose: bienvenue dans le Club Med de l'horreur,” Les Inrockuptibles, 15. February 2011.>>>
- See: “Hugues Jallon, l'étonnant patron des Editions du Seuil”, Nouvel Observateur, January 21, 2023; Raphaëlle Leyris, «Le Capital, c'est ta vie»: panic with Hugues Jallon, Le Monde, 18. March 2023.>>>
