Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865 sparked off a real shock wave in the United States as well as abroad. In France, as in the US, many Masonic institutions and Freemasons took initiatives to honor the memory of the great man, whose virtues were glorified and likened to Masonic values and were often based on the assumption that Lincoln was a Mason himself. However, French Freemasonry was highly politicized, and a close examination of the Masonic tributes to Lincoln also tells the story of a bitter political strife thinly veiled by the literary genre of eulogies, the fight of democracy against imperial rule.

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