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

There were those who pointed out that the date of the storming of the Bastille, 14 July, was the same as that on which Jerusalem fell to the First Crusade in 1099, suggesting some kind of revenge of the Infidel. To the more fanciful, the fall of the French monarchy was the outcome of ‘the curse of the Templars’, who had been destroyed by it nearly five centuries earlier. The Templars no longer existed, but there was a theory that while awaiting execution in the Bastille in 1314, the last Grand Master of the Order had founded four Masonic lodges to avenge its dissolution and his death on the French royal family.

Freemasonry had originated in Scotland at the beginning of the eighteenth century, spread to every country in Europe, and grew rapidly. As the movement attracted the intellectual elites, its membership was overwhelmingly secularist and freethinking, a loose brotherhood vaguely dedicated to the betterment of humanity through the spreading of reason, education and humanist values. Its members were grouped in lodges which met to listen to lectures and discuss anything from social problems to the latest fashions in the arts. Some came together for purposes of social networking, others in order to pursue more sensual interests such as drinking or sex. There was ritual involved, much of it extremely silly, purporting to have medieval or even Biblical origins. Freemasons often met in temples, crypts or artificial grottos, which added a whiff of the occult, and initiation rites involved blindfolding novices who were made to swear solemn oaths amid a panoply of gothick props, including cloaks, daggers, axes, burning braziers and cups of red wine symbolising blood – although real blood was sometimes drawn too.

As the lodges were founded by groups of individuals rather than by any organised system of delegation or procuracy, they evolved markedly different styles. In France, Freemasonry was generally social and often frivolous. In countries such as Poland and Russia it had more to do with aping French fashions than anything else. But in Germany it was taken very seriously. It reflected and partially overlapped religious trends seeking a return to a ‘purer’ form of Christianity and genuinely aspired to some kind of spirituality.

In 1776 Adam Weishaupt, Professor of Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria, started a student society, the Order of Perfectibles. There was nothing remarkable in this, as German universities pullulated with such confraternities. In 1778 he changed its name to the Order of the Illuminati, and introduced grades, along with an elaborate system of signs and passwords. There were also synonyms for people and places: Bavaria was ‘Greece’, Munich ‘Athens’ and Weishaupt himself ‘Spartacus’.

In 1780 a new recruit, Baron Adolf Franz von Knigge, alias ‘Philo’, began to transform the Order, imposing on it his own doctrine that all political states were unnatural and perverse creations which should be swept away. They should be replaced by a miasma of mutual respect and love which would bring about universal happiness. This supposed panacea to the world’s ills attracted large numbers of supporters, and seeped into the Masonic network of Germany, and thence into those of Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, northern Italy and even France. Adepts included Goethe, Schiller, Mozart, Herder and many other notables.

In 1785 the Elector of Bavaria suppressed the Order, thereby according it a notoriety and validation it hardly deserved. Spine-chilling tales began to circulate as to its occult aims. An anonymous book entitled Essai sur la secte des Illuminés, published in Paris on the eve of the Revolution, traced the origins of the sect to the Freemasons and dwelt with evident glee on its induction rituals and ordeals, describing how occult symbols were painted on the body of the novice in his own blood, and so on. It revealed that the Illuminati had a castle outside Paris with underground oubliettes into which those who had betrayed its secrets were thrown and forgotten. The author affirmed that the sect ‘has conceived the plan of taking over minds, and of conquering not kingdoms, not provinces, but the human spirit’, with the ultimate aim of destroying all thrones and governments, and then society itself. It operated through a network of circles in every country, each controlling a cluster of subsidiary circles, which he listed meticulously, giving the impression that the whole of Europe was comprehensively covered.10 (#litres_trial_promo)

This chimed with a fashion for the occult and a fascination with ancient Orphic and Egyptian cults, with Eleusinian and Rosicrucian ‘mysteries’, and with secret societies of every kind, whose most famous expression is Mozart’s Magic Flute. In Germany it gave rise to a literary genre, the Bundesroman, to which Schiller, Jean-Paul Richter and Goethe contributed works. Its most commercially successful product was Carl Grosse’s novel Der Genius (1791–95), whose aristocratic young protagonist’s picaresque adventures include not only much curious sexual activity but also involvement in an order which compels him to assassinate the King of Spain. Such books helped to propagate a belief in the ubiquity and omnipotence of the secret societies allegedly operating in the shadows, and a shelf of supposedly more factual publications established a connection between them and politics, confirmed in the minds of many by the fact that a majority of the prime movers of the French Revolution had been Freemasons. Some asserted that the ideological powerhouse of the Revolution, the Club des Jacobins, named after the former Dominican convent they met in, was actually an offshoot of Freemasonry. ‘The political committees that gave rise to the Jacobin Club had their origins in Illuminism which started in Germany, and, far from having been snuffed out, they are operating underground and have become all the more dangerous,’ wrote Leopold Alois Hoffmann. He pointed out that one of the leading Illuminati, Johann Christoph Bode, had visited Paris two years before the outbreak of the Revolution to confer with French Freemasons, and that the prominent revolutionary the marquis de Mirabeau had visited Berlin shortly before the fall of the Bastille.11 (#litres_trial_promo)

When, on 16 March 1792, King Gustavus III of Sweden was shot at a masked ball, it was evident to many all over Europe who was behind it. Later that year, when the Duke of Brunswick, a former Freemason who commanded the royalist forces invading France to crush the Revolution, drew back after the inconclusive Battle of Valmy, leaving the revolutionary army triumphant, it was again obvious that he had followed an occult order from above. A spate of sensationalist ‘revelation’ literature spoke of dark arts, secrets, spells and poison, and of their involvement in the unexpected deaths of various kings. The writers defended themselves against the charge of vagueness by hinting that their own lives were at risk, fuelling the growing myth of the ‘sect’s’ omnipresence and omnipotence. While many of the books and pamphlets convinced only the converted, a wider readership was persuaded by an authoritative and seminal work by the former Jesuit Abbé Augustin Barruel.12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Barruel had been combating the Enlightenment in print since 1781, and kept up his critique in the first years of the Revolution, which he saw as God’s punishment on the French for having tolerated and embraced its false philosophy. In 1792 he fled to England, where he published his two-volume Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme. It was reprinted six times in the space of a year and translated into all the major European languages, and continued in print for decades. Barruel’s writing has a tone of authority that brooks no argument, and his assertions, extravagant and improbable as they might appear, carried conviction.

In the opening sentence, he declares that the French Revolution was the fruit of a vast conspiracy carried out by a sect which had latterly taken the name of Jacobins, whose aim was to overthrow all existing thrones and altars and unleash anarchy. According to him, it consisted of 300,000 active leaders manipulating a further two million. ‘In this French Revolution, everything, including its most frightful crimes, was foreseen, premeditated, calculated, resolved, decreed,’ he affirmed, ‘everything was the consequence of the most profound perfidy, since everything was prepared and brought about by men who alone had knowledge of the conspiracy long planned in the secret societies, and who knew how to choose and bring on circumstances favourable to their plans.’13 (#litres_trial_promo)

Barruel believed it all began in the late 1720s, with Voltaire, who enlisted the support of Frederick II of Prussia and recruited D’Alembert and Diderot, who compiled the Encyclopédie, which under the guise of scientific knowledge and reason undermined religion, social hierarchy and most human institutions. The next step was the dissolution of the Jesuits, brought about by the manipulation of public opinion and statesmen. According to Barruel, the benign Freemasons interested in human welfare were the ‘useful idiots’ who helped destabilise society by creating spurious hierarchies and undermining existing institutions, above all the Church, with their pseudo-religious foolery. The Illuminati were more focused, and Weishaupt’s philosophy more dangerous. Barruel defined it thus: ‘Equality and liberty are the essential rights which man, in his original and primitive state, received from nature; the first blow to equality was dealt by property; the first attack on liberty by political society and governments; the only bases for both property and governments are the religious and civil laws; thus in order to re-establish man in his primitive rights of equality and liberty, one has to begin by destroying religion and civil society, and finish by abolishing property.’14 (#litres_trial_promo)

According to Barruel, the Illuminati were well organised and intelligent. In the interests of making useful converts to their cause they would gather information on persons of influence, meticulously recording their likes and dislikes, dietary preferences, sexual habits and so on, so as to be able to approach them in the most appropriate way, to manipulate them, and even blackmail them. They also meant to introduce women into their order, in two separate categories: one of virtuous high-born ladies who would help to make converts and raise money, the other of dissolute women and prostitutes who would pander to the needs of the members.

Barruel’s book was not meant as history: it was a clarion call demanding action. He warned that ‘the French Revolution is still no more than a trial of strength for the sect; its conspiracy covers the entire universe’. It was already preparing the subversion of other states, sending out envoys and using Masonic networks in countries the French were intending to invade – he claimed there were five hundred adepts in London waiting for the signal to act. ‘It is still possible to crush this sect which has sworn to destroy your God, your motherland, your families and the whole edifice of your communities,’ he warned his readers, but time was running out and they must face up to the threat. ‘The danger is certain, it is continuous, it is terrible, and it menaces each and every one of you,’ he hectored.15 (#litres_trial_promo)

The Anglican minister and distinguished astronomer Francis Wollaston, Fellow of the Royal Society, wholeheartedly agreed. ‘To the liberty and equality of original Freemasonry; to the fierce rancour of Voltaire and his self-called philosophers against Jesus Christ and his religion; to the democratic principles of Rousseau, and his visionary schemes about the origin of all government’, the Jacobins had added ‘the rage of Weishaupt and his pretended more enlightened followers, against all kings, or rather against all who under any title bear any rule among men’.16 (#litres_trial_promo)

If educated people could view what was taking place in such wildly conflicting ways, it is hardly surprising that the ignorant and those living in rural areas adopted even more extreme positions. While some embraced the new shibboleths of freedom and the sovereignty of the people as though they were a new religion, others saw them in terms of Satanic wickedness threatening everything they held dear. Rumour and imagination conjured dread of what one historian has recently described as ‘the eighteenth-century equivalent of a Martian invasion’. The word ‘Jacobin’ joined those of ‘Freemason’ and ‘Illuminato’ in the conservative canon of horrors, and came to stand for any member of what was increasingly referred to as the ‘sect’. Blind fear set the seal of veracity on untested assumptions, and in the prevailing psychological climate every coincidence had the power of proof: there is a point at which fear becomes a social pathology that floats entirely free of evidence. A powerful conviction took root in conservative thought that a vast conspiracy was afoot. The concept of an occult association working for the overthrow of the social order entered the imagination, never to leave it.17 (#litres_trial_promo)

Having alerted society to the danger, Barruel suggested how it should be met. As the Jacobins were waging ‘a secret war of delusion, error and darkness’ against the mind, people should respond with ‘wisdom, truth and light’. As they were unleashing ‘impiousness and corruption’ against the faith, the faithful should respond with morality and virtue, and strive to convert the enemy. ‘The Jacobins are waging on Princes and the Governments of nations a war of hatred of the law and society, a war of rage and destruction, I want you to oppose them with society, humanity and conservatism,’ Barruel wrote.18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Princes and governments did not heed his advice. Their response to the events unfolding in France was dictated almost entirely by fear, and fear breeds irrationality and aggression. It thrives on the notion that aside from identifiable threats there are others lurking in the shadows. The need to uncover these unknown dangers and to identify them becomes compulsive. This, and the compulsion to strike back at the source of their fears, was to dominate their policies over much of the next half-century, and was to play a decisive role in transforming the way European societies ordered themselves.

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

No European state was remotely prepared to meet the challenge posed by the French Revolution, let alone that suggested by Barruel and other conspiracy theorists. Rulers and ministers interfered minimally in the lives of the majority of their subjects: cities administered themselves, outside them a semblance of order was maintained by a combination of local nobles, parochial institutions, religious constraint and custom. Central organs of control barely existed. The French monarchy had introduced a force dedicated to maintaining order when, in 1544, it set up the Maréchaussée (marshalcy), a body of mounted men whose task was to keep roads safe and an eye on who was using them. Paris acquired police in 1667 to contain the plague then ravaging the country. Police commissioners were appointed in St Petersburg in 1718, Berlin in 1742, and Vienna in 1751. But the word ‘police’ is misleading.

In his monumental four-volume Traité de la police, published in Paris between 1705 and 1738, Nicolas de La Mare explained that ‘police’ meant the ordering of public space for the benefit of all who occupy it. The word encompassed the regulation of the width, length and layout of streets, the way they should be signposted, lit, repaired, swept and sprayed with water on hot days; how houses should be built and how they should be lived in so they did not present a danger to anyone (people should not place flowerpots on their window ledges lest they fall and cause injury). It stood for laying down precise instructions as to how food was to be produced, transported, processed and sold; how livestock was to be slaughtered and dressed; how and where fish could be caught, with what tackle, and how they were to be salted and preserved; how gardens were to be cultivated and what was to be grown in them; how firewood and coal were to be procured and stored; what precautions were to be taken against flooding; how industry was to be carried on in the urban space; how wine shops and eating houses were to be run; how standards of hygiene were to be maintained in brothels and prostitutes checked for disease – in other words, everything necessary to keep the citizens fed, healthy and safe.1 (#litres_trial_promo)

In the course of the eighteenth century the Paris police extended their brief, building and supervising markets, a stock exchange, a fire service, a veterinary school and a hospital. They regulated every trade, and obliged practitioners to wear their identifying plaque. They set up the Mont de Piété, a nationwide network of pawn shops that would not cheat the poor. They intervened in family disputes and put away troublemakers and brutal husbands. In the interests of containing the spread of venereal disease, they classified prostitutes – according to age; who had recruited them, how, when and where; by their state of health; their specialities and their clients – and expended much energy on catching unlicensed ones.2 (#litres_trial_promo)

Only rarely did governments extend the concept of ‘police’ to embrace the political. In the reign of Elizabeth I, Sir Francis Walsingham used ‘intelligencers’ to detect plots against her. Cardinals Richelieu and later Mazarin operated similar networks to deal with the dissident nobility of the Fronde. The Russian monarchy introduced laws to make its subjects denounce each other. The Habsburgs set up a regular secret police service in 1713. But what these bodies focused on was the detection of conspiracies by leagues of nobles against the ruler, not information on what his subjects thought. The established Churches were more concerned with such things, but as the state gradually took over from these as the guardian of morality and conscience, so the police began to take on a more sacerdotal role. It was only in the second half of the eighteenth century, when debate about the way the world was constituted and organised began to involve more than a tiny educated elite and the opinions of greater numbers of people began to matter, that the authorities applied themselves to the task of finding out what these might be.

In the interests of controlling the spread of undesirable attitudes, the Paris police confiscated unauthorised literature. Books which undermined the orthodox view on religion, the law, the monarchy, history, philosophy, science and morality might be banned, and were liable to seizure and burning. Their authors and publishers might be gaoled, but few were, most of those under threat preferring to spend a few months abroad, and enforcement of this legislation being among the police’s least favourite tasks.3 (#litres_trial_promo)

The Paris police prided themselves on keeping abreast of what was going on in the capital. The routine inspection of inns, wine shops, eating houses and brothels yielded information on what was said and done within these establishments, while a network of spies, called mouches (flies) and later mouchards, provided additional information. One eighteenth-century lieutenant general of police allegedly boasted that when three people came together for a conversation, one of them was sure to be one of his agents. These showed a pronounced appetite for catching amorous priests or prominent noblemen in flagrante, and describing in graphic detail exactly what they did with their partners. Antoine de Sartine, lieutenant general of police during the reign of Louis XV, was particularly active in this respect, ‘spying on the shameful secrets’ of his subjects ‘to amuse a king even more libertine than himself, with all the nudities of vice’, in the words of a later commissioner of police who had immersed himself (with evident relish) in the reports.4 (#litres_trial_promo)

Both the lieutenant general of the police of Paris, who by the end of the century commanded some 1,200 men armed like soldiers, and the four inspecteurs, who marshalled the mouches, bought their posts from the crown, and their principal concern was to recoup that investment and make a fortune by accepting bribes. In the words of the historian Richard Cobb, whose knowledge of the subject was unmatched, the inspecteur ‘was out for a quiet life, and asked only to be left alone with his pregnant girls, his drunks, his dead horses and run-over errand boys, his filles de joie, his runaway children, and his everlasting plaques’. The police were an administrative corporate concern rather than an instrument of state control. And if the capital was being more and more regulated and invigilated, this was not true of other towns, and rural areas never saw more than the occasional troop of Maréchaussée trotting down the road.5 (#litres_trial_promo)

The only other major state to have a police force was Austria, or rather the Habsburg monarchy. Following her defeat at the hands of Prussia in the mid-eighteenth century, the Empress Maria Theresa had felt an urgent need to modernise the administration of her dominions, which involved an extension of state control. She too felt a need to know what was being thought and said. While her police relied on spies, known as ‘bluebottles’, she had issued a direct appeal to her subjects to assist them by sending in anonymous information on anything they believed might be of interest, and the response was enthusiastic. Her successor Joseph II carried on in this vein, and created a police force unlike any other in Europe.6 (#litres_trial_promo)

It owed its structure to Johann Anton, Count von Pergen, who believed that the state could not function properly unless the government controlled every aspect of the lives of the emperor’s subjects. They were therefore required to register by place of residence, and householders were made responsible for their lodgers and guests. Pergen wished to know everything they were doing, and his spies lurked in shops, coffee houses, gardens, theatres and any other place where people might meet. They were recruited from every class of society, and included members of the nobility as well as priests, doctors, shopkeepers, prostitutes and servants of all kinds. In addition, ordinary citizens were encouraged to report on their peers, and this practice became a vital element in the police’s information-gathering work.7 (#litres_trial_promo)

The Emperor Joseph believed in shielding his subjects from what he saw as the false philosophy and ‘fanaticism’ of the Enlightenment. He circumscribed the educational system and in 1782 abolished the University of Graz. He strengthened an already strict censorship, which came naturally to him in view of his loathing for ‘scribblers’. As well as covering the usual subjects such as religion and the monarchy, it was focused on promoting ‘the right way of thinking’. He was wary of ‘sects’, as he referred to almost any association, from Masonic lodges to reading clubs, in the conviction that they spread ‘errors’. Foreigners were the subject of intense suspicion, and they were watched assiduously, as were the clergy.8 (#litres_trial_promo)

Elsewhere in Europe, what police supervision there was tended to be restricted to towns and was in the hands of guilds and magistrates. In Italy, the only force fighting crime were sbirri employed by the senate of a city or regional potentates. They were variously described as ‘infamous’, ‘profligate’ and ‘corrupt’; and their behaviour differed little from that of the brigands they were supposed to combat. Any need to impose order by force was met with troops, usually the ruler’s guards stationed in the capital, or by some kind of more or less volunteer parish or corporate watch.9 (#litres_trial_promo)

In England, nothing much had changed in this field since the Middle Ages. According to the principle set down in the Statute of Winchester of 1285, every parish and city was responsible for policing itself. Magistrates, or Justices of the Peace, drawn from the propertied classes and often clergymen, appointed constables who were ordinary citizens serving yearly terms of office in rotation. The magistrates had the power to enrol additional constables and to issue warrants for the arrest of individuals. They could also order the dispersal of mobs by reading the Riot Act of 1714, and call on the country yeomanry, the militia or regular troops if they did not do so within the hour. The other regional authority was the lord lieutenant, a Tudor creation. Usually the foremost landowner in the county, he represented the crown and presided over the meetings of the county’s magistrates.

The administration of law and order in towns was on a similarly archaic basis, and only in London, the most populous city in Europe, had it been modernised, by Sir John Fielding, half-brother of the novelist Henry, a Justice of the Peace who in 1748 took over as chief magistrate, sitting at Bow Street. He persuaded retiring constables to stay on, and built up a force of some 150 experienced and salaried ‘runners’, as they were known, supplemented by over eight hundred volunteers. The inadequacy of these forces was exposed by the Gordon Riots of 1780, when a mob went on the rampage. It was only after several days and the intervention of troops that order was restored: 210 rioters were killed and 245 wounded, of whom seventy-five subsequently died. The physical damage caused to the capital was, according to a recent study, not surpassed until the Blitz in the 1940s. In 1785 the government introduced a Bill to establish a regular police force, but this was thrown out by Parliament: there was a deep-seated feeling that such a body would be an affront to English liberties.10 (#litres_trial_promo)

The ease with which the Revolution had taken place in France demonstrated that for all the boasting about knowing everything that went on in Paris, the authorities had been taken entirely unawares. (This was grist to the mill of those who believed in the Illuminati conspiracy, who argued that the Revolution could only have been carried out without the police knowing what was brewing by an efficient and ramified secret organisation.) Those who had seized power were made uncomfortably aware of their own vulnerability. Two days after the Bastille was stormed, the lieutenant general of police resigned, and the task of keeping order was entrusted to the armed civilians of the newly formed National Guard.

Less than ten days after the fall of the Bastille, the National Assembly decreed the crime of lèse-nation, high treason against the new sovereignty. This introduced a novel twist into Europe’s political culture: as the nation was embodied by the government of the day, that government automatically assumed the status of sovereign, and with it some of the numinous qualities associated with it. Any attack on the government was an attack on the nation, and its critics were by definition guilty of high treason. That the nation itself was not under any identifiable threat was a strength: hidden danger might lurk anywhere, and it was the sacred duty of the government to seek out and destroy any dark forces that might be scheming in the shadows. This allowed it to create a climate of fear in which nobody felt safe and the masses could be galvanised into aggressive action. It also transformed the police into a political tool dedicated to hounding anyone who might be out of sympathy with the government. On 28 July the National Assembly set up a Comité de recherches, which took over the intelligence-gathering network and personnel of the former lieutenant general of police with the brief of regaining control of the turbulent political situation in the capital. This would in time become the Comité du salut public (Committee of Public Safety). After the fall of Robespierre in July 1794, the functions of the Comité were gradually brought under central control, and in January 1796 the Directory established a ministry of police. But this did not denote a return to traditional modes of policing. The minister’s principal duty was to foil plots against the government: henceforth, ‘police’ in France would be more about political than venereal contagion.

The form of contagion feared most by France’s neighbours was the example set by the French – news of what had taken place was embellished and distorted as it passed from ear to ear, with the result that within a few months of the fall of the Bastille, peasants in lower Austria were refusing to carry out their feudal obligations and slaves in the Spanish colonies of South America were stirring. States bordering France struggled to impose a general quarantine. The Spanish government prohibited the wearing of ‘foreign outfits and caps’, and a royal decree of August 1790 forbade ‘the importation into these dominions or the export to America of waistcoats with the word “liberté”, or any other effects with pictures alluding to the disturbances in France’. The King of Sardinia took similar measures, as did various reigning princes in Germany. Bavaria banned books which so much as mentioned the French Revolution, and in so doing relegated Burke’s Reflections to the forbidden list. Further afield, Catherine II of Russia put in hand measures to prevent the spread of what she termed the ‘epidemic’ of new ideas. But none took the threat as seriously as the Habsburg monarchy.11 (#litres_trial_promo)

The political edifice over which the Habsburg dynasty reigned consisted of the largely titular Holy Roman Empire, an assemblage of hundreds of duchies, principalities, margravates, counties, baronies, bishoprics, abbeys, free cities and other political units dating from the Middle Ages. It also ruled the Habsburg family possessions, a basket of fiefdoms acquired over the centuries by conquest, marriage, treaty or exchange, scattered from what is now Belgium through Austria and Hungary down to Italy and Croatia. It reigned over Germans, Flemings, Walloons, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Croats, Italians and Magyars. The status of the monarch was different in each province, which had its own language and constitution, and often very little connection to any of the other provinces.

This edifice was the embodiment of everything the French Revolution challenged, and the implied threat made Joseph II halt his programme of administrative reform and partially reverse it. On his death in February 1790, his successor, Leopold II, concentrated on the preservation of the existing order. In one of his first decrees, on 2 May 1790, he ordered that ‘all suspicious or dangerous persons must be removed from the country’, and that foreigners, particularly French subjects, should not be allowed in.12 (#litres_trial_promo)

Resident foreigners, who included French and Italian actors and musicians, were placed under close surveillance and in some cases deported. Among those told to pack their bags was Mozart’s librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, director of the Italian theatre in Vienna. Those, such as the young composer Ludwig van Beethoven, who came into contact with them, and therefore with the ‘French way of thinking’, were treated as political contaminees who might pass on the pestilence. Another to be expelled, even though he was an Austrian subject, was the celebrated hypnotist Dr Franz Anton Mesmer.

Matters were complicated by the influx into Germany and central Europe of large numbers of aristocratic fugitives from revolutionary France. While those who had fled at the first sign of trouble were presumed sound on the political count, subsequent waves included many who had gone along with or played a part in the initial stages of the Revolution. However aristocratic their origins, such people were seen as a danger to the Habsburg monarchy and could not be tolerated. The marquis de Lafayette, who had played a prominent part in the revolutionary Assembly and served in its armed forces before making his escape from the rough justice of the Jacobins, was considered to be so virulently contagious that he was clapped in irons and kept in solitary confinement, hermetically isolated underground in the fortress of Olmütz.

Even among the first wave lurked danger. In June 1790 the imperial commissioner Count Metternich reported from Koblenz, where the French king’s brothers had rallied an army of noblemen to reconquer France, that there were revolutionary agents concealed among them. A similar report was received not long after from the Austrian minister in Turin. These agents were, the reports assured, being sent out by a ‘club de propagande’ in Paris with the aim of spreading revolution to the rest of Europe. From Strasbourg, the Austrian police chief Count von Pergen received reports that French agents were subverting the lower orders. ‘All the methods used by Europeans to seduce the inhabitants of the Coast of Angola are deployed to intoxicate the senses of the inhabitants of the countryside,’ one of them wrote. ‘Trinkets, ribbons, cockades, feathers of every hue, ridiculously tall plumes, uniforms with golden epaulettes are given out to those peasants chosen to command in the villages.’ The population on the west bank of the Rhine appeared to be accepting French rule, and there were indications that it would be popular elsewhere, with disturbances breaking out in other parts of Germany.13 (#litres_trial_promo)

In Austria itself, bands of peasants marched on manors and demanded or simply took and destroyed the documents in which their feudal dues were set down. The troops called out to disperse them were sympathetic and reluctant to use force. Pergen resigned as Leopold adopted a fresh approach, based on looking to the welfare of his subjects and protecting them from evil influences. Mozart’s opera La Clemenza di Tito, written for his coronation, was meant to convey the message that people were better off placing their confidence in a good monarch than in a democratic rabble.

In a decree of 1 September of the same year, Leopold struck the keynotes which were to resonate through the thousands of directives issued by the Austrian authorities over the next fifty years: the whole Enlightenment and its spawn in the shape of the French Revolution were a malevolent manipulation on a gigantic scale by evil forces intent on destroying the European social order by tricking people into believing that this would lead to their liberation and happiness. It was termed the ‘Freedom Swindle’, Schwindelgeist, and since upheaval of any kind provided fertile ground for its propagation, all available measures must be taken against anything that might ‘disturb the peace’.14 (#litres_trial_promo)

Leopold died unexpectedly on 1 March 1792, and was succeeded by his twenty-four-year-old son Francis, the product of a rigorous and not particularly happy upbringing at the hands of his uncle the Emperor Joseph II. This had left him with a deep sense of his own significance as the linchpin of the whole enterprise that was the Austrian monarchy. It had also left him with a very strong sense of duty, which he fulfilled by working hard, often at quite pointless tasks, sometimes ones his ministers were performing already. This made him a difficult man to work with, particularly as he was slow-witted, meticulous, pedantic and strong-willed, not to say stubborn.

To those who did not have to deal with him he appeared a kindly, paternalistic figure, a devoted husband and father, nowhere happier than in the bosom of his family. But he was by nature joyless, humourless and impervious. Described by one diplomat as being ‘without vices, without qualities, without notable passions’, he possessed all the middle-class virtues in the most damning sense of the phrase.15 (#litres_trial_promo)

Francis honestly believed that the Enlightenment was a swindle and that his benighted subjects had to be protected from it. He saw education as inherently dangerous, and viewed all private philanthropic activity with deep suspicion. In his scheme of things, the people should remain in the care of their God-given monarch and nobody else. A few days after mounting the throne, he ordered the police to maintain a constant and thorough watch for the spread of ‘the fanatical pseudo-enlightenment’ and any other ideas that might threaten public order, the maintenance of which he identified as the prime duty of the state.16 (#litres_trial_promo)

Before resigning, Pergen had presented Leopold with a memorandum alerting him to the possibility that a major conspiracy was brewing. Intelligence he had gleaned connected Freemasons and members of other secret societies in various countries with every civil disturbance since the American Revolution, and there were suggestions that they were now set on world revolution. French Freemasons were allegedly using their brethren in other countries as a kind of fifth column to prepare the ground for French military invasion by demoralising and subverting their populations and their armies. Leopold had not responded to this memorandum, but Francis was greatly taken with its contents.17 (#litres_trial_promo)

One of his advisers, Count Sauer, had been warning him that ‘there can be no doubt about the presence of several French emissaries here, who conceal their activities in such a way that only prolonged and close observation can lead to their discovery’. This kind of logic – according to which a supposition, once put forward, was deemed to be true; that it was unverifiable only served to confirm its truth, and indeed its significance – was to become a hallmark of Austrian police thinking over the next half-century.18 (#litres_trial_promo)

Francis was duly alarmed, and on 3 January 1793 Pergen was back as minister of police in charge of a new department, the Polizeihofstelle, with a large budget for the employment of undercover agents. He was to operate independently of the normal organs of state, and answer only to the emperor. On 1 April he appointed as his deputy Count Franz Joseph Saurau, and put him in charge of investigating all associations and societies. Feeling the chill, the Austrian Freemasons stopped holding meetings. Not the least discouraged, Saurau infiltrated their homes with his spies.19 (#litres_trial_promo)

Pergen’s assessment was that most of the emperor’s subjects were well-intentioned (Gutgesinnte) and desired the same as their master, a state of undisturbed order. However, they could be turned away from this, and that order could be disturbed, by nefarious outside influences, such as the Schwindelgeist of the Enlightenment or various nebulous fantasies (Schwärmerei). They therefore needed to be protected from these at all costs.

Censorship was tightened and extended, with particular stress laid on the protection of ‘morality’. This necessitated censorship not only of the printed word, which was relatively easy, but also the more complex area of words spoken out loud in a theatre or sung in an opera. These could assume or be given all sorts of significance by the mere fact of being uttered before a large gathering, and the censor, Court Councillor Hägerlin, came up against formidable problems. Nothing that could be thought to constitute a bad example was allowable, which ruled out plays and operas whose plots involved rebellion against authority (paternal, religious or political), murder, adultery, incest, and any other vice unless it was fittingly punished or the criminal repented in the last act. Only in the court theatre was it possible for a character to exclaim ‘Oh, God!’; in the public theatres, it had to be ‘Oh, Heavens!’ The line ‘Long live liberty!’ in Schiller’s Don Juan was changed to ‘Long live joy!’ Relationships between dramatis personae were altered in order to avoid placing them in morally unacceptable positions. The villain of Schiller’s The Robbers, Franz, could not be called a blackguard as the emperor bore the same name. Schiller’s Faust was deemed potentially heretical, since Mephistopheles is cleverer than the angel. Almost every play of his contained an alarming theme: political revolt in Fiesco, the execution of a monarch in Mary Stuart. Lessing’s Nathan could not be performed at all, on account of its discussion of different religions.20 (#litres_trial_promo)