Coffeehouses and masonic lodges were similar in important respects. Both flourished first in Great Britain and later spread to the continent. Both were at times associated with sedition, although freemasons repeatedly insisted on the nonpolitical aims of their lodges. And as places where individuals from diverse social and occupational backgrounds intermingled, both tended to dissolve distinctions of rank and foster the more egalitarian style of sociability characteristic of the Enlightenment public sphere. In the process, each contributed to the formation of new social identities distinct from traditional corporate and hierarchical norms of Old Regime society.

Membership in a lodge was voluntary, not ascribed, and was defined by criteria that were independent of the individual's formal legal status. Lodges cut across boundaries of occupation, confession, and class. They created or expanded networks of communication and sociability, and encouraged contacts between individuals from varying social backgrounds and regions. For these and other reasons, scholars like Margaret Jacob have emphasized the ways in which freemasonry anticipated the forms of associational life characteristic of modern civil society. Freemasonry was the first secular, voluntary association ever to have existed on a pan-European scale. It was also the largest, at least in the eighteenth century. In France, for example, freemasons may have comprised as much as 5 percent of the urban, adult male population on the eve of the Revolution.