Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848

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Preface (#u577e727a-5ab6-5497-adf2-fadb1808a1dc)

The Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon’s final nemesis, also marked the defeat of the forces unleashed by the French Revolution of 1789. This had challenged the foundations of the whole social order and every political structure in Europe. It had opened a Pandora’s Box of boundless possibilities, and horrors: the sacred was profaned, the law trampled, a king and his queen judicially murdered, and thousands of men, women and children massacred or guillotined for no good reason. The two and a half decades of warfare that followed saw thrones toppled, states abolished and institutions of every sort undermined as the Revolution’s subversive ideas swept across Europe and its colonies.

The reordering of the Continent by those who triumphed over Napoleon in 1815 was intended to reverse all this. The return to a social order based on throne and altar was meant to restore the old Christian values. The Concert of Europe, a mutual pact between the rulers of the major powers, was designed to ensure that such things could never happen again.

Yet the decades that followed were dominated by the fear that the Revolution lived on, and could break out once more at any moment. Letters and diaries of the day abound in imagery of volcanic eruption engulfing the entire social and political order, and express an almost pathological dread that dark forces were at work undermining the moral fabric on which that order rested. This struck me as curious, and I began to investigate.

The deeper I delved, the more it appeared that this panic was, to some extent, kept alive by the governments of the day. I also became aware of the degree to which the presumed need to safeguard the political and social order facilitated the introduction of new methods of control and repression. I was reminded of more recent instances where the generation of fear in the population – of capitalists, Bolsheviks, Jews, fascists, Islamists – has proved useful to those in power, and has led to restrictions on the freedom of the individual by measures meant to protect him from the supposed threat. A desire to satisfy my curiosity about what I thought was a historic cultural phenomenon gradually took on a more serious purpose, as I realised that the subject held enormous relevance to the present.

I have nevertheless refrained from drawing attention to this in the text, resisting the temptation, strong at times, to suggest parallels between Prince Metternich and Tony Blair, or George W. Bush and the Russian tsars. Leaving aside the bathos this would have involved, I felt readers would derive more fun from drawing their own.

In order to avoid cluttering the text with distracting reference numbers, I have placed all notes relating to quotations and facts contained in a given paragraph under a single one, positioned at the end of that paragraph. For the sake of simplicity, I have used the Gregorian calendar throughout when referring to Russian events and sources. I have not been as consistent on the transliteration of Russian names, using those versions with which I believe the reader will be most familiar – the Golitsyn family have appeared in Latin script for over three hundred years as Galitzine, and I have therefore stuck to that spelling, which they still use themselves. Translations of quotations from books in languages other than English are mine, with some assistance in the case of German.

Lack of time prevented me from spending as much of it in archives as I would have liked, and I was therefore obliged to seek the assistance of others. I should like to thank Pauline Grousset for following up some of my leads at the Archives Nationales in Paris; Veronika Hyden-Hanscho for pursuing various trails in the Viennese archives on my behalf; Philipp Rauh for reading through a large number of books in German; Thomas Clausen for his enthusiastic trawl through the archives in Stuttgart, Wiesbaden and Darmstadt; Hubert Czyżewski for his diligent work in the National Archive at Kew; Sue Sutton for further searches on my behalf at Kew; and Jennifer Irwin for her research in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland.

I would also like to extend my thanks to Chris Clark for his guidance on matters German, to Michael Burleigh for moral support at a moment when the surrealism of my subject began to make me doubt my own sanity, to Charlotte Brudenell for drawing my attention to the eruption of Mount Tambora, and to Shervie Price for reading the manuscript.

I owe a great debt of gratitude to my editor Arabella Pike, for her patience and her extraordinary faith in and enthusiasm for my work; to Robert Lacey, whose meticulous and intelligent editing is unmatched; and to Helen Ellis, who makes the uphill task of promoting books a pleasure. I am also deeply indebted to my agent and friend Gillon Aitken, for his unflagging support. Finally, I would like to thank my wife Emma for her patience and understanding, and her love.

Adam Zamoyski

May 2014

1

Exorcism (#u577e727a-5ab6-5497-adf2-fadb1808a1dc)

On Wednesday, 9 August 1815, HMS Northumberland weighed anchor off Plymouth and set sail for the island of St Helena in the South Atlantic, bearing away from Europe the man who had dominated it for the best part of two decades. All those who had lived in fear of the ‘Ogre’ heaved sighs of relief. ‘Unfortunately,’ wrote the philosopher Joseph de Maistre, ‘it is only his person that has gone, and he has left us his morals. His genius could at least control the demons he had unleashed, and order them to do only that degree of harm that he required of them: those demons are still with us, and now there is nobody with the power to harness them.’1 (#litres_trial_promo)

The man in question, Napoleon Bonaparte, former Emperor of the French, had said as much himself. ‘After I go,’ he had declared to one of his ministers, ‘the revolution, or rather the ideas which inspired it, will resume their work with renewed force.’ As he paced the deck with what the captain of the seventy-four-gun man-of-war, Charles Ross, described as ‘something between a waddle and a swagger’, he appeared untroubled by any thought of the demons he was leaving behind. He was more concerned with his treatment at the hands of the British to whom he had surrendered, who refused to acknowledge his title. He was addressed as ‘General Buonaparte’, and accorded no more than the honours due to a prisoner of that rank. Two days earlier, protesting vigorously, he had been unceremoniously transferred from HMS Bellerophon, which had brought him to the shores of England, to the Northumberland, in which Rear-Admiral Sir George Cockburn, commander of the flotilla that was to convey him to his new abode, had hoisted his flag. He had been subjected to a thorough search on coming aboard and his baggage was turned over – Captain Ross noted that he had ‘a very rich service of Plate, and perhaps the most costly and beautiful service of porcelain ever made, a small Field Library, a middling stock of clothes, and about Four Thousand Napoleons in Money’, which was confiscated and sent to the British Treasury. Dignity had never been Napoleon’s strong suit, and his attempts to elicit the honours due to his imperial status were doomed. Nor did he elicit much sympathy outside the group of devoted followers who had elected to share his captivity. On first meeting him, Captain Ross found him ‘sallow’ and ‘pot-bellied’, and thought him ‘altogether a very nasty, priest-like looking fellow’. Closer acquaintance as they set sail did nothing to soften his view. Admiral Cockburn described his habit of eating with his fingers and his manners in general as ‘uncouth’.2 (#litres_trial_promo)

Napoleon and six of his entourage, which, with domestics and the children of some of his companions, totalled twenty-seven, dined at the captain’s table, along with the admiral and the colonel of the regiment of foot which was to guard him. He soon abandoned his efforts to ‘assume improper consequence’ by, for instance, trying to embarrass the British officers into removing their hats when he did, or into leaving the dinner table when he rose. After dinner he would play chess with members of his own entourage, and whist or vingt-et-un with the British officers, from whom he took English lessons and whom he willingly entertained with accounts of the more sensational episodes of his life, particularly his Egyptian and Russian campaigns, often going into lengthy explanations and self-justifications. He was sometimes listless and absent, and occasionally indisposed through seasickness or the other discomforts of shipboard life, but on the whole he was cheerful and gave the impression of having left behind not only his ambitions, but all concern for the future of the continent he had held in thrall for so long. On the evening of 11 September, five weeks into the voyage and less than three months since he had stood at the head of a formidable army on the field of Waterloo, he read aloud for over two hours to the assembled company from a book of Persian tales.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

That same evening, the man who had contributed most to his downfall, Tsar Alexander of Russia, was giving thanks to the Lord at the end of what he professed had been the most beautiful day of his life. On a plain beside the small town of Vertus in the Champagne region of France, he had staged an extravagant display of military might and religious commitment, meant to herald the dawning of a new era of universal peace and harmony. It had commenced the day before, with a parade of over 150,000 of his troops and 520 pieces of artillery which went through their paces ‘with all the precision of a machine’, according to the Duke of Wellington. This was followed by a gargantuan dinner prepared by the famous chef Carême, lent to the tsar for the occasion by the gourmet prince de Talleyrand. The three hundred guests, who included the Emperor of Austria and the King of Prussia, as well as a glittering array of diplomats, generals and ministers, sat down at trestle tables under a marquee in the garden of a local physician, Dr Poisson, in whose house Alexander had set up his quarters. As the locality had been ravaged by war, the food for the banquet and the victuals for the troops had to be carted in from Paris.4 (#litres_trial_promo)

On 11 September, the feast of the patron saint of Russia St Alexander Nevsky and the tsar’s nameday, the troops reassembled and formed squares around seven altars erected on the same plain overnight on the pattern of a Greek Orthodox cross. Alexander rode up to the central one, dismounted and bowed his head. At this, the priests officiating at all seven altars began a Mass conducted in unison lasting more than three hours. Alexander went from altar to altar, led by the sentimental novelist turned religious mystic Baroness Julie von Krüdener, theatrically clad in a long black robe. He was entirely absorbed in the service, and ‘his attitude bore the appearance of a real devotedness and the humility of an earnest Christian’, according to an English lady present.5 (#litres_trial_promo)

Alexander saw the parade and the service as an event of cosmological significance, marking not only victory over the devils conjured by the Revolution and Napoleon, but also the death of the old world and the birth of a new one. He had been on a long spiritual odyssey, and had reached a point at which he recognised the absolute primacy of God. The parade on the plain of Vertus was a demonstration of both his own physical might and its submission to the Divine Will. He mentally associated himself and the two other monarchs who had vanquished Napoleon, the Emperor Francis I of Austria and King Frederick William III of Prussia, with the three wise kings of the Epiphany recognising the sovereignty of Christ. He wanted to give substance to this by engaging them, and all rulers, to confront the evils of the day with a new kind of government, one based on a legitimacy derived from the Word of God. Leaving aside the mechanics of this for later elaboration, he proposed that they all sign an undertaking to govern in a new spirit, a Holy Covenant (‘Sainte Alliance’ has traditionally been rendered in English as ‘Holy Alliance’, but the French word actually refers to the scriptural Holy Covenant) binding them to acknowledge the kingdom of God on earth.6 (#litres_trial_promo)

The original draft, couched in apocalyptic language, envisaged a fusion of Europe into a Christian federation, effectively ‘one nation’ with ‘one army’. This was amended at the insistence of Francis and Frederick William, but the final version nevertheless proclaimed that the sovereigns had ‘acquired the conviction that it is necessary to base the direction of policy adopted by the Powers in their mutual relations on the sublime truths taught by the eternal religion of God the redeemer’. They professed their ‘unshakable determination to take as the rule of their conduct, both in the administration of their respective States as in their political relations with all other governments, only the precepts of that holy faith, the precepts of justice, charity and peace, which, far from being applicable only to private life, should on the contrary have a direct influence on the decisions of princes and guide all their actions’.7 (#litres_trial_promo)

The Emperor Francis was sceptical; Frederick William thought it ridiculous; the British foreign secretary Lord Castlereagh and the Duke of Wellington had difficulty in controlling their mirth when the tsar showed it to them. They were all nevertheless prepared to humour what they saw as a harmless whim, ‘a high-sounding nothing’ in the words of the Austrian foreign minister Prince Metternich. The document was not a public act, and they hoped it would remain buried in the archives of their chancelleries, fearing that publication would make them appear ridiculous. It was duly signed on 26 September, the eve of the anniversary of his coronation, by Alexander, Francis and Frederick William. With time, on the tsar’s insistence, it would be signed by every monarch in Europe except King George III of England (on constitutional grounds) and the pope (on doctrinal ones). What none of them fully appreciated was how much importance the tsar attached to it.8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Alexander was the only European ruler of his time to have received an education worth speaking of. It was an unusual education, ill suited to his predestined role as autocrat of a huge empire, and it added to the contradictions inherent in his position and set him apart from his brother monarchs. His grandmother, the Empress Catherine II, had taken great care in selecting tutors and meant to direct his educational programme herself, but Alexander’s French-language teacher, the Swiss philosopher Frédéric César de La Harpe, soon took over. La Harpe inculcated his own view of the world in the young prince, refuting the notion of Divine Right and teaching him that all men were equal.9 (#litres_trial_promo)

Catherine had hoped to cut her son and Alexander’s father, Paul, out of the succession, and therefore insisted that the boy spend most of his time at her court rather than with his parents. Not only his education but his personal inclination made him detest this corrupt and immoral, typically eighteenth-century court, and he valued all the more the brief moments he could spend with his mother and father, whose establishment at the palace of Gatchina was homely and, given that they were, respectively, wholly and three-quarters German by blood, comfortingly gemütlich. While his grandmother primed him for the exercise of power, he dreamed of leading a quiet life as a private citizen somewhere in Germany.

Catherine had been afraid that Alexander would be chased by women and might turn into a libertine, so she insisted that he be brought up in total ignorance of ‘the mysteries of love’. His entourage was sworn to prudery, and when out on a walk one day the teenage Alexander encountered two dogs coupling, the tutor accompanying him explained that they were fighting. Yet he was married off at an early age, to a German princess, and although he fell in love with his child bride, he found it difficult to consummate the marriage. His subsequent love life was dogged by feelings of guilt, and he would come to see the early deaths of all his children as God’s punishment.10 (#litres_trial_promo)

When Catherine died in November 1796, her son Paul ascended the throne and promptly embarked on a course that was to make him one of the most unpopular rulers in Russian history. He banned almost the entire canon of French literature, and established censorship offices at every port to scour imported goods for subversion. He proscribed foreign music and the use of words such as ‘citizen’, ‘club’, ‘society’ and ‘revolution’. Russians were forbidden to study abroad. He issued imperial decrees, which he frequently revised, governing manners and mealtimes, hairstyles, the wearing of moustaches, beards and sideburns, and clothes. People would suddenly learn that the style of their garments had been banned, and would have to frantically cut off tails and lapels, add or remove pockets, and pin hats into the prescribed shape before they could go out.

Gradually, Alexander came to realise that he must assume the responsibility fate had reserved for him. ‘I believe that if my turn to rule ever came, instead of going abroad, I would do better to work at making my country free and thereby to preserve it from being in the future used as a plaything by lunatics,’ he wrote to La Harpe. He began to see his life’s task as that of transforming the Russian autocracy into a constitutional monarchy and freeing the serfs. His turn came in 1801, following Paul’s assassination, in which he was passively complicit. He liberated political prisoners, repealed much of his father’s repressive legislation, lifted censorship and restrictions on travel, brought in educational reforms, founded universities, set up a commission to codify the laws, and commissioned his friend Aleksandr Vorontsov to draw up a charter for the Russian people modelled on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.11 (#litres_trial_promo)

In 1804, when negotiating an alliance with Britain, he put forward a project for the transformation of Europe into a harmonious federation that would make war redundant. In 1807, when he signed a treaty with Napoleon at Tilsit, he believed that he was entering into a grand alliance of the Continent’s superpowers to ensure peace and progress. He gradually changed his view, and came to see the Emperor of the French as evil. He endured Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 with readings from the Bible and fervent prayer as his army was defeated and Moscow burned, and celebrated the French army’s expulsion with thanks to the Lord. Instead of making peace with Napoleon, a peace he could have dictated to great advantage for Russia (as many in his entourage wished), Alexander prosecuted the war. ‘More than ever, I resign myself to the will of God and submit blindly to His decrees,’ he announced in January 1813 as he set out to liberate Europe from the French ‘ogre’: he was convinced that he was merely a tool in the hands of the Almighty. Once he had achieved his purpose of forcing Napoleon to abdicate, he demonstrated (in a way that was to cost the allies dear in 1815) the spirit of Christian charity by granting him generous terms and sovereign status on the Mediterranean island of Elba.12 (#litres_trial_promo)

While he continued to hold Orthodox services, Alexander sometimes combined them, as on 10 April 1814, when according to both the Julian and the Gregorian calendars Easter fell on the same day, with Catholic and Protestant ones. In London, which the victorious allies visited following the defeat of Napoleon, he attended Bible Society meetings and communed with Quakers. In Baden on his way back to Russia he was introduced to the German Pietist Johann Heinrich Jung Stilling, with whom he held long discussions on how to bring about the kingdom of God on earth.

Over the next months Alexander would follow a path he believed to be dictated by God. He was frustrated by the practical difficulties he encountered at the Congress of Vienna, and believed that Napoleon’s escape from Elba was God’s punishment for the venial behaviour of its participants, himself included. At Heilbronn, on his way to join Wellington before Waterloo, he met Baroness Krüdener, who convinced him that he was the elect of God, and that he must concentrate on carrying out His will. Alexander was at the time absorbed in a book by the German philosopher Eckartshausen, which put forward the thesis that some people were ‘light-bearers’ endowed with the capacity to see Divine Truth through the clouds obscuring it from the multitude. That and the baroness’s words only reinforced his sense of being marked out by the Almighty. They knelt together to give thanks on hearing news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, and she followed him to Paris afterwards, moving into a house next door to the Élysée Palace where he took up his quarters. They saw each other every day, praying and holding often bizarre services, culminating in the spiritual jamboree on the plain of Vertus.13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Wellington, Castlereagh and many others thought the tsar had gone a little mad. Metternich had long regarded him as a child in thrall to dangerous enthusiasms. A cynical pragmatist, the Austrian foreign minister had no time for such nonsense, confident as he was that with Napoleon removed from the scene everything would return to normal. But in 1815 Alexander was probably the only one among the Continent’s monarchs and chief ministers who understood something of the longings and anxieties agitating European minds, and that many wanted something more than just peace, order and a full stomach.

His Holy Alliance was a genuine attempt to put the world to rights. He believed that only a system built on Christian morality could hope to bind the wounds opened up by the events of the past quarter of a century and restore harmony to a profoundly fragmented world. And although his approach may have been naïve and his solution half-baked, he alone among the monarchs and ministers who fashioned the Vienna settlement appreciated that no peace treaty, however equitable, could alone hope to bridge the chasm that had opened up in 1789.

2

Fear (#u577e727a-5ab6-5497-adf2-fadb1808a1dc)

News of the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 had had an electrifying effect as it travelled across Europe and beyond, over the Atlantic to the United States and the European colonies of the Americas. Although the event did not in itself amount to much more than an alarming outbreak of rioting, mutiny and mob rule, it was universally interpreted as standing for something else, and accorded immense significance. The English statesman Charles James Fox declared it to be ‘the greatest event that ever happened in the World’. Rather than wait and observe further developments before reaching an opinion, most educated people immediately took up one of two diametrically opposed positions. It was as though they had seen a long-awaited signal.1 (#litres_trial_promo)

To those who identified with the ideological canon of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, the grim old fortress (which was largely redundant) was an emotionally charged symbol of the oppressive and iniquitous ancien régime whose institutions and practices were unacceptable to the modern mind. It stood for everything that was wrong with the world. Its fall was therefore seen as the harbinger of a new age, immeasurably more just and moral in every way than the existing one. There was nothing logical or reasoned about their response.

‘Although the Bastille had certainly not been a threat of any sort to any inhabitant of Petersburg,’ noted the French ambassador to the Russian court, ‘I find it difficult to express the enthusiasm aroused among the shopkeepers, merchants, townsfolk and some young people of a higher class by the fall of this state prison.’ He went on to describe how people embraced in the street as though they had been ‘delivered from some excessively heavy chain that had been weighing them down’. Even the young Grand Duke Alexander greeted the news with enthusiasm.2 (#litres_trial_promo)

From London, the barrister and legal reformer Sir Samuel Romilly wrote to his Genevan friend Étienne Dumont: ‘I am sure I need not tell you how much I have rejoiced at the Revolution that has taken place. I think of nothing else, and please myself with endeavouring to guess at some of the important consequences which must follow throughout Europe … the Revolution has produced a very sincere and very general joy here … even all the newspapers, without one exception, though they are not conducted by the most liberal or the most philosophical of men, join in sounding forth the praises of the Parisians, and in rejoicing at an event so important for mankind.’3 (#litres_trial_promo)

This view was echoed in Germany, where poets such as Klopstock and Hölderlin hailed the Revolution as the greatest act of the century, and numerous Germans flocked to Paris to breathe the air of freedom. ‘If the Revolution should fail, I should regard it as one of the greatest misfortunes that had ever befallen the human race,’ wrote the Prussian civil servant Friedrich von Gentz in a letter to a friend on 5 December 1790. ‘It is philosophy’s first practical triumph, the first instance of a form of government based on principles and on a coherent and consistent system. It is the hope as well as the consolation for so many of the old evils under which humanity groans.’4 (#litres_trial_promo)

To the young in particular, the sudden explosion of energy in the French capital held enormous appeal, and it set their collective imagination on fire. ‘A visionary world seemed to open up’ to the young poet Robert Southey, and according to Mary Wollstonecraft ‘all the passions and prejudices of Europe were instantly set afloat’. The news from Paris was greeted with almost religious fervour, and William Wordsworth spoke for many of his generation when he wrote: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’. The Second Coming could hardly have elicited greater ecstasy.5 (#litres_trial_promo)

The excitement was driven by emotions of an essentially spiritual nature – similar to those which would drive so many young people in the second half of the twentieth century to embrace without questioning a ‘socialism’ they were usually at a loss to define, but which they believed held out the promise of a better world. Convinced as they were that it was the ‘right’ way forward for humanity, many of those who hailed the French Revolution would not only seek to justify its worst atrocities, they would brand those who did not share their faith as ‘enemies of the people’.

To these, news of the upheaval in Paris came not only as a terrible shock, but as confirmation that a long-prepared onslaught on the ideological basis of their universe had begun. Monarchs reacted with predictable outrage. The British chargé d’affaires in Vienna reported that the Austrian Emperor went into ‘transports of passion’ and uttered ‘the most violent Menaces of Vengeance’ when he heard the news. The King of Sweden had not been able to sleep after reading reports of the goings-on in Paris, and the Empress of Russia had stamped her foot in rage.6 (#litres_trial_promo)

Barely more measured were the reactions of many who had less to lose. ‘If the French delirium is not properly repressed, it may prove more or less fatal to the heart of Europe,’ the philosopher Baron Melchior Grimm warned, ‘for the pestilential air must inevitably ravage and destroy everything it approaches.’ In England, Edmund Burke thundered against the ‘Venom’ being spewed out by ‘the Reptile Souls moving in the Dirt of the Obscure Vices in which they were generated’, as he described the French revolutionaries. Even in faraway North America the news from France divided those who, in the words of Edmund Quincy of Massachusetts, saw it ‘as another Star in the East – the harbinger of peace and good-will on earth’, from those for whom it was ‘a baleful comet that “from its horrid hair shook pestilence and war”, shed its influences for good or evil upon the New World as well as the Old’. ‘It inspired terror or joy, according as the eyes which watched its progress looked for its issues of life or of death in faith or in fear,’ he concluded.7 (#litres_trial_promo)

A notable feature of the gulf which had opened up was that while the discussion, if one can call it that, was conducted between people of considerable intellectual standing, it was carried on along almost entirely irrational lines. While partisans of the Revolution praised its vices as well as its virtues in poetic and quasi-religious terms, its enemies responded in the language of the Inquisition.

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, Edmund Burke warned that everything being perpetrated in Paris violated fundamental laws and undermined the twin pillars of religion and property on which the social order of Europe rested. History would vindicate his prediction that the road the revolutionaries had taken would lead them to commit untold horrors and to the eventual emergence of a brutal dictatorship. But long before this happened, his tone would change and his diatribes against the Revolution degenerate into hysterical rants.

Another prominent defender of the ancien régime, the Savoyard nobleman, lawyer, diplomat and philosopher Joseph de Maistre, propounded a spiritual view of the events. A devout Catholic, he had in his youth been an enthusiastic supporter of the American Revolution, and even welcomed the fall of the Bastille before identifying the evil lurking behind it. He now condemned the entire canon of the Enlightenment, arguing that God presided over a natural order of things, departure from which was perverse, and that the Catholic faith was ‘the mother of all good and real knowledge in the world’. He believed the eighteenth century would come to be seen by posterity ‘as one of the most shameful epochs in the history of the human mind’. As for the French Revolution, it was, according to him, an ‘inexplicable delirium’, ‘an atrocity’, ‘an impudent prostitution of reason’ and an insult to the concepts of justice and virtue. ‘There is in the French revolution,’ he concluded, ‘a satanic character which distinguishes it from everything we have seen and, perhaps from everything we will ever see.’8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Like those of Burke, which sold in great quantities and were translated into the principal European languages, the writings of Maistre echoed and gave form to the feelings of many who had viewed the progress of the Enlightenment with suspicion. As they watched events unfold during the 1790s they were confirmed in all their earlier objections to the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau and other eighteenth-century philosophers. With the benefit of hindsight, they could chart how the spread of their teachings had led to the catastrophe which had shattered their world.

While some saw it as an unfortunate process fostered by impious or misguided intellectuals, others saw it all in terms of a conspiracy against not only the established political order but against the very bases of European society and civilisation. Voltaire had waged a lifelong war which verged on the pathological against the Catholic Church, which he referred to as ‘l’Infâme’ (the infamous one). His influence was clearly discernible in the virulently anti-Christian tenor of the Revolution. Some related this not just to his writings and the secularising influences of the Enlightenment: Louis de Bonald saw everything that had happened since the first breaths of the Reformation in the fifteenth century as a gradual decline into the abyss. Others reached further back, tracing the rot to Jan Hus, John Wycliffe and the Lollards.9 (#litres_trial_promo)