Couple of Pugs,
              Meissen figurine

During the early eighteenth century the Mops  or Pug  became popular in Germany.

Meissen Porcelain  figurines give us an example of the Pug during that period, showing his cropped ears and bells around their collars, making them even more charming.

Pug dog Meissen Porcelain

The managing director of Meissen Porcelain Factory, and Prime Minister  of Poland, Count Brühl, himself had many Pugs, and those very dogs served as models for the figurines-now expensive collectors' items.

Meissen's best customer was Augustus III (1696–1763) , King of Poland and Elector of Saxony, the Grand Master  of Freemasons  in Saxony.

Pug detail

Antoine Pesne (1683-1757), French court painter who executed a brilliant career in the Holy Roman Empire, but particularly in Prussia, in 1730 painted Countess Anna Karolina Orzelska, the illegitimate daughter of King August II of Poland (1670-1733) , holding her Pug  in the Blue Palace Garden.

"Condesa Anna Karolina Orzelska",
     Antoine Pesne, 1730

In 1736, the Pope Clement XII  excommunicated the Masons  in Germany, and they continued as the Mopsorden  (The Order of the Pug).

The Mops (Pug) became their secret symbol.

         "The Mopsorden"

Around the same time, the German sculptor, Johann Joachim Kändler, master model maker of the Meissen Porcelain Factory  in Germany, was commissioned to create a curious series of sculptures. They were a group of porcelain Pug dogs designed as secret emblems for a German underground Masonic-styled lodge known as "The Order of the Pug ".

According to an exposure published in 1745 in Amsterdam, "L'ordre des Franc-Macons trahi et le Secret des Mopses rélélé", the Mopsordern  was likely designed as a fraternal group for Roman Catholics who had been forbidden to join the Masons by Pope Clement XII  's 1738 bull. It is believed to have been started in Bavaria  by the Archbishop Elector of Cologne, Clemens August of Wittelsbach (1700-1761).

According to the exposure, the members called themselves Mops. Initiates were required to wear a dog collar, and gained entrance to the lodge by scratching at the door. Initiates were hoodwinked and led around a symbol-filled carpet nine times while the assembled "Mops " of The Order  barked loudly and yelled "Memento mori" ("Remember you shall die"). The blind candidate was required to kiss the Grand Pug 's backside under his tail as an expression of total devotion (in reality, a porcelain Pug Dog).

The Pug  was chosen as a symbol of loyalty, trustworthiness and steadiness.

All members had to be Roman-Catholics, and the Order of the Pug allowed women as members.

The Grand Master  was a man, but each lodge required two lodge masters or Big Pug, one man and one woman, who shared the governing role.

But why the Pug? Apparently, the Pug became something of a subversive emblem of the "Enlightenment ", and England  in particular.

Pug dogs came to England with King William III  when he was brought from the Netherlands  in 1688 by Parliament to replace his uncle and way-too-Catholic father-in-law, James II, who was booted out of Blighty.

This "Glorious Revolution " created a constitutional monarchy that was watched over carefully by Parliament.

William Hogarth,
with his Pug Trump

Europe's intellectuals began to admire this new style of English government and free thinking, and owning a Pug  was a subtle way of showing solidarity with England's revolution without getting locked in the stocks or hurled into a dungeon.

The English artist Hogarth, (1697-1764) was a very prominent Freemason.

    Voltaire, 1718

Denis Diderot, 1767

In Paris, Pugs  became associated with Voltaire, (1694-1778) and Diderot, (1713-1784).

"The Order of the Pug " was outlawed in 1748.

          Saxonian Pugs figurines

Meissen  continues to produce some of the most handsome porcelain pug figurines - still with the long legs, relatively long muzzle and cropped ears typical of 18th  and early 19th  century Pugs.

Breeders in Germany tried cross-breeding the Pug  and the Miniature Pinscher  during this period in an attempt to shorten the muzzles of other canine types.