Saint-Martin's first and most influential book, Des Erreurs et de la Verite (Of Errors and of Truth), appeared in 1775 under the byline Un Philosophe Inconnu, the Unknown Philosopher, and set out his theosophical account of humanity's fall and its path back to divine reintegration. He continued writing and refining this inward, non ceremonial mysticism for the rest of his life, developing what later writers came to call the voie interieure, the inner way, in contrast to the theurgic ritual practice of his own teacher Pasqually. He died in Aunay, near Paris, on 13 October 1803.
He founded no order of his own, so his name survived instead through others who invoked it. In the 1880s, some eighty years after his death, Gerard Encausse, known as Papus, and Augustin Chaboseau assembled the modern Martinist Order in Paris, presenting it as a continuation of Saint-Martin's teaching and drawing its claimed lineage through the Elus Cohen he had once belonged to; the documentary chain between the eighteenth century Cohen and the 1880s revival is thin enough that historians generally treat the continuity as the order's own claim rather than an established transmission. Saint-Martin's own writing, distinct from either the Cohen theurgy or the Martinist Order's later ritual system, remains the primary source for what he actually taught.