Abel Clarin de la Rive

Abel Clarin de la Rive (1855, Chalon-sur-Saône, France – 1914, Chalon-sur-Saône) was a French historian, essayist, journalist, and anti-Masonic writer.

Clarin de la Rive became a notable writer within the US, due to his direct involvement in the anti-Masonic movement within the US, and due to his involvement with Léo Taxil (pseudonym of Marie-Joseph Gabriel-Antoine Jogand-Pages), the author of the Taxil hoax, along with Clarin de la Rive's unbeknown fictitious writing about Albert Pike, who had become the Sovereign Grand Commander of the Scottish Rite's Southern Jurisdiction of the US in 1859, which is an appendant body of Freemasonry.

In the April, 1897 issue of the magazine, Freemasonry Unmasked, Clarin de la Rive wrote an article about Léo Taxil, after Taxil revealed his anti-Masonic writings to be a hoax, which became known as the Taxil hoax, on April 19, 1897. A. C. de la Rive recanted much of what he wrote about Freemasonry, since he used the writings and correspondence of Taxil as his source for the 'official documents of the sect', especially in his book, Woman and child in Universal Freemasonry.

His published works have been quoted and cited by many conspiracy theorists, anti-Masons, and mystics in the US and elsewhere, such as Edith Starr Miller and William Guy Carr. de la Rive is also quoted and cited by many Masonic historians, scholarly publications, and websites in the US and worldwide, including S. Brent Morris, PhD, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brigham Young University.

In the US, when de la Rive's book, Woman and child in Universal Freemasonry, became available, numerous anti-Masons and religious leaders, both Protestant and Catholic, used the work to denounce Freemasonry and Albert Pike throughout the US, and to show that Freemasonry "Palladism" was actually a religion of Satanism, even though no such thing as Palladism existed. Taxil and his hoax are mentioned in the New Catholic Encyclopedia, under the article on impostors.

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