I've not read ( indeed haven't heard of him until your post) Barruel and tend to dismiss satanic panic types out of hand, in general.

Yes, that Duquette, and I'm not familiar with him exaggerating, but I'm definitely interested in any material about that you care to provide. He does make a living on book sales, after all, so there's definitely room for incentive. I stumbled across both him and Hall quite accidentally and incidentally, in my wanderings. He's funny and entertaining.

Hall is definitely... interesting, with an interesting backstory. He also made a living selling books, so he also had incentive to exaggerate and take liberties.

Still, in looking into what the two I mentioned had to say on the subject, I couldn't disprove it. I'm interested in anything you can point me toward, and grateful for it.

Masonry was the prototype for such movements. Historians have it emerging from stonemasons’ guilds accepting (and becoming fashionable to) aristocratic/bourgeois patrons in the 17th century, and then riding a number of historical waves (enlightenment-era coffee-house culture, the rise of nationalism in the romantic era in Europe, Napoleon, the British Empire, and so on). Others drew on it. The Bavarian Illuminati were probably the best known, but by no means only, esoteric secret society modelled on Masonry. In the other direction, Rotary was essentially Masonry without the woo. Various nationalist, royalist and sectarian secret societies (like the Carbonari in Italy and unionists in Northern Ireland) modelled themselves on Masonry, and Cuba is the only Communist country to not ban Freemasonry because a lot of the revolutionaries there were Masons. So yes, Freemasonry was more of a moment than a coherent thing.