What historical events were influenced by the Illuminati?

The clearest genuine influence is intellectual rather than operational. The Bavarian Illuminati was one of many societies spreading Enlightenment ideas through German-speaking Europe in the 1770s and 1780s: religious tolerance, secular education, scientific method and scepticism toward inherited authority.

Those ideas did reshape Europe. They did so through books, universities, correspondence and coffee houses — a diffuse process in which the order was a participant, not a director.

The most famous claim, and the weakest. Augustin Barruel and John Robison argued in the 1790s that the Illuminati engineered the Revolution. Their books were bestsellers and became the foundation of modern conspiracy literature.

Historians since have found no evidentiary basis. The Bavarian society was suppressed in 1785, four years before the storming of the Bastille, and French revolutionary politics is exhaustively documented without it. The Revolution had causes enough: debt, famine, taxation and a collapsing political settlement.

The Eye of Providence on the Great Seal, adopted in 1782, is regularly cited as proof of influence. The designers' own records explain it as a conventional emblem of divine oversight, and its use in that sense was already old.

Several founders were Freemasons, which is documented and unremarkable for the period. That is a different organisation.

Both world wars, the Federal Reserve, the United Nations and most recessions have been attributed to the order at some point. These claims share a structure: a complex event, a demand for a single author, and a name available to supply one.

Complex events usually have many causes and no author. That is harder to hold in mind, which is precisely why single-author explanations spread.

Not directing events, but producing people who behave differently inside them: a doctor who refuses a bribe, an employer who trains an apprentice properly, an investor who warns a stranger off a bad deal.

That is the scale the order works at, and it is the only scale for which there is any honest evidence.