Urojone widmo rewolucji: Tajne spiski i tłumienie ruchów wolnościowych 1789-1848

by Adam Zamoyski

Kto winien jest WSZYSTKIEMU?

Jakobińscy rewolucjoniści, iluminaci, masoni, polscy spiskowcy, bolszewicy lub reakcjoniści, terroryści… Od wielu pokoleń państwa Zachodu walczą z prawdziwymi i urojonymi zagrożeniami. Rządy straszą swoich obywateli wizją wyjścia z cienia sił, które zburzą nasz spokój i porządek. Krok po kroku ograniczają nasze wolności, inwigilując, a w ostateczności – sięgając po rozwiązania siłowe. Kiedy to się zaczęło i jakie wynikają z tego nauki?

Adam Zamoyski, znakomity znawca XIX-wiecznej historii, jako pierwszy opisuje genezę i pierwsze dziesięciolecia wojny europejskich władców z widmem terroru rozpętanego przez buntowników. Od rewolucji francuskiej do Wiosny Ludów, autor prowadzi nas przez historię wielkiego zderzenia sojuszu konserwatywnych dworów monarszych z walczącymi o wolność społeczeństwami i narodami Europy oraz opisuje obsesyjne lęki monarchów przed siłami dążącymi do zagłady cywilizacji tronu i ołtarza.

To przede wszystkim historia klęsk – zarówno autentycznych powstańców i rewolucjonistów, jak i władców kontynentu, którzy swoimi opresyjnymi działaniami przyspieszyli własny upadek, a w dłuższej perspektywie doprowadzili do największych tragedii dwudziestego wieku.

Ta opowieść miejscami przeraża, ale również wywołuje śmiech, a na pewno w atrakcyjny sposób uzmysławia, jak współczesne państwa ewoluowały dzięki poszerzaniu narzędzi kontroli nad obywatelem.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Politics, European History, France, 19th Century, French Revolution

712 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2014

About the author

A historian and a member of the ancient Zamoyski family of Polish nobility. Born in New York City and raised in England. He is Chairman of the Board of the Princes Czartoryski Foundation. On June 16, 2001, in London, England, he married the artist Emma Sergeant.

Reviews

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full Circle.

The Storming of the Bastille on 14/07/1789 is traditionally seen as the beginning of the French Revolution and was supposed to represent a new, free, fair France. However three and a half years later in 1793 King Louis XVI was executed and the reign of the Jacobins and their terror began. This caused a ripple across the other states of Europe who feared, for valid reason that at any point revolutionaries could stage a coup and topple their governments. As a result, a sweeping rise in state control, censorship and intrusion developed across the continent from 1789-1848 as kings, princes and politicians feared what Count Adam Zamoyski has called ‘The Phantom Terror’. If the fight agains their greatest fears, European society and history was transformed.

Zamoyski’s main argument is that the threat of revolution was a construct of overly paranoid European leaders following the terror or the French Revolution and the nearly twenty years of warfare that followed. Statesmen such as Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Duke of Wellington and the Duke of Richelieu feared reform and change so much they went to extreme and sometimes laughable lengths to interrogate and survey their subjects in an attempt to prevent an plots or revolts from breaking out. Often they misunderstood movements, who generally had simple and understandable desires, causing a wedge between them and fuelling more rebellious ideology, which ultimately caused their downfall. One can understand this thought process as they wanted to prevent the horrors of the previous decades from repeating. But as Zamoyski writes the paranoia skewed political thinking way too much. In the end it caused their own downfalls and cause for change again with the explosions of the 1848 revolutions.

Who better to write a enthralling political history of the Napoleonic period than Zamoyski. He has proven his worth with his Napoleon and 1812 histories, alongside his look at the Congress of Vienna in ‘Rites of Peace’. Using the masses of material available he has been able to strip it down to the more interesting or important instances to build his arguments. This has also allowed him once again to add the human and poignant touches to his work. The reader also gets close to the thinking of those at the top. Their rationale provides empathy. However the mass surveillance and suspicion they delved into created a society of anxiety and leaders bogged down with pessimism, that enemies were everywhere. A fracture in a solid states was cut. The power keg was packed for a fuse. The star of Zamoyski’s book is Metternich who he does admire. A titan of these times and one who very much spoke of the ‘phantom terrors’. But as I have alluded to above, Metternich was very much the master of his own downfall and his grip was too tight, people could not breathe.

I felt that Zamoyski has a flair of hindsight in his text, but I would argue that this world was difficult to navigate and it is understandable in the circumstances how they reacted. Even if this seems absurd, oppressive and completely off the mark. However, how many plots did they uncover and prevent, this is something which is unquantifiable. Ultimately this is a fascinating read which each stare facing fits own challenges and acting similar ways to tackle them. It is also a sad story as they worked so hard to prevent rebellion, which by their very actions ultimately caused. As ever Zamoyski writes well. This is a must have for anyone interested in political history or the Revolutionary, Napoleonic or early 19th century eras.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am writing this review to dissipate my nervous energy while waiting for election returns. It only seems appropriate to review a book about political paranoia and surveillance states, extrajudicial imprisonment and exile at this moment.

This is an outstanding description of the explosion of internal spying on citizens and curtailment of rights during the period between Waterloo and the revolutions of 1848. Czar Alexander and Metternich were the leaders of efforts to root out and quash any revolutionary ideas that might bring about a 1789 in their countries, but France and England also employed plenty of spies and agents provocateurs. Zamoyski makes the argument that in many cases the ‘insurrections’ they discovered were of their own spies' making, since their rewards often depended on the quantity of rebels they reported, and Metternich in particular was gullible and seldom analyzed the probability of the reports he received.

Some of the early content sounds so familiar. Writers churned out best sellers by fabricating tales of cabalistic, fantastic initiation rites and conspiracies that they tied to Masonic offshoots. The most widespread belief was in the Illuminati, secret cells of which were supposedly spread all over Europe, planning total revolution, and managed from Paris. Thus the governments set up massive structures to vet travelers and mail; Metternich managed things so that almost all mail in Europe travelled through post offices he controlled, where armies of clerks steamed open any suspicious mail, copied it and routed it on its way in a matter of hours.

Much of the material through 1825 meshed with the history of four actual revolutionary events that I had already read about in The Four Horsemen, Riding to Liberty in Post-Napoleonic Europe by Richard Stites. These were the revolts in 1822-25 in Naples, Spain, Greece, and Russia. Zamoyski covers these as well as the 1830 unrest in France, and the various ongoing agitations in England. He is careful to point out that frequently the problems were generated by lack of jobs, famine, and working conditions, rather than desire to change the political structure.

His research is extensive. Much of the book is devoted to detailed explanation of the apparatus of spying and censorship, along with the various high level conferences at which Metternich schemed and tried to strong-arm his counterparts into duplicating his almost absolute opposition to political change. (Actually this is where there is a bit of inconsistency, because in some cases he did allow some easing to stave off revolts.)

There is so much more here than just the points I’ve touched on. It’s comprehensive and well written.

I found the detail and year by year extension of the surveillance state fascinating. It seemed to make later developments in Germany and Russia, in particular, more understandable. The spying and reporting on neighbors, the visits in the night to haul away dissidents, the cultivation of fear and paranoia, had these deep roots established decades before.

Highly recommended.

[Liam Ostermann · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is timely and brilliant work history examining how 19th century monarchs and governments tackled the apparently existential threat they faced from a universal almost occult like conspiracy of terrorists and revolutionaries. Sound familiar? You don't have too, and the author doesn't, draw the lines or connect the dots with what we are supposed to be facing today but Zamoyski to good a historian and writer for the intelligent reader not to make those connections. Of course the real threat to the regimes of the 19th century was their own selfish blindness to wrongs crying out for rectification - again all to familiar. The cry 'why do they hate us?' is not new, nor is the ignorance that makes those who asked it then or now seem so ridiculous. Why do they not hate you/us more? Look at what we have done and be grateful how little anyone remembers or how few seek vengeance.

To be specific this is a marvellous history of European powers between the fall of Napoleon and the revolutions of 1848 and the way they viewed the existential threats they faced from calls for change to their very existence. It also looks at the various individuals and culture forces that defined the threat of revolution or were seen as creating it. Wonderful fascinating story even without the painful relevance to current events (this last paragraph was added in February 2023 while the first paragraph goes back to 2016. The actual events I was thinking of back then we're entirely different to those on mind now but the relevance of this history still stands. Maybe it just emphasises how good and relavant a history it is).

[Domhnall · Rating 3 out of 5]

I am always a little suspicious when I read a history of the distant past which claims to offer insights into our present times. I wonder what it is trying to persuade me to accept, what assumptions does it want me not to challenge, or even not to notice. I have concluded that this book sets out to demolish ideas of revolutionary change so beloved of the revolutionary Left, while representing industrial capitalism and its liberal ideology as the inevitable and common sense basis for modernity and progress. To resist modernity is, of course, stupid. The censors of the authoritarian states in the early 19th Century are merely the pantomime villains in this morality play but they are highly entertaining.

The French Revolution was received by its contemporaries as the inversion of all social values and an existential threat to the entire basis for order throughout Europe. Napoleon defeated the French Revolution, though he went on from that to defeat his European neighbours as well, and for some things it might have served the other powers better if he was allowed to retain his imperial throne after Waterloo, albeit restrained within the French borders, since the Bourbon restoration was not a success from any point of view. For the crowned heads of Europe, the fear of a new revolution, this time in their own territories, dominated their thinking for the next fifty years and they developed an entirely imagined conspiracy theory to explain any and every form of social disturbance or innovation as a step towards catastrophe. In order to sustain their fantasy of universal revolution, they each invested in the creation of a network of spies and informers, with a large element of agents provocateur, through whom to generate the necessary self fulfilling prophecies, few of them bearing even a remote connection to social reality. They were unable to conceive that the reason so many similar problems arose across all of their territories was not because of an evil genius based in Paris, but because they consistently repeated the same repressive and unbelievably ignorant government policies.

This book offers an entertaining and rather sobering account of the efforts to control the lives of Europeans through the apparatus of a police state, which however incompetent and counter-productive they were, nevertheless bequeathed a legacy of repressive tools which helped to shape the history of the coming century and that legacy remains important today. It is not hard to relate these anecdotes to stories of Stalin’s confrontations with artists of his day, or the rigid opposition to change in the German Democratic Republic under the Stasi, the fate of artists in the USA’s McCarthyite era or Theresa May’s Islamaphobic Commission for Countering Extremism. The book does a great job of explaining the context in which Coleridge and Wordsworth could be investigated as spies, Shelley write The Mask of Anarchy or Byron lose his life in the struggle to liberate Greece from the Turks. It gives insights into the histories of Italy, Poland and Belgium. It makes a normally dry and tedious period of European history much more lively and interesting, and also much more understandable than usual.

The sheer stupidity of the reactionary project described here is so staggering that it is at the same time both hilarious [but in a very dark way] and tragic. The monstrous obstruction of social development was never justified by the existence of an authentic threat. In so far as there was popular agitation and support for revolutionary change, it was largely provoked by the very apparatus of repression and control without which social change could have been managed or at least tolerated in more constructive and productive ways.

But the implicit corollary of this argument is that there was a more constructive and indeed benign option available, had the Russian and Austrian Empires in particular been led by individuals of better education and more rational thinking. By contrast, Britain’s flexible adaptation to the crescendo of modern industrial capitalism and the associated liberal values is rather uncritically accepted as sensible and even progressive, even though we know it was in fact deeply reactionary, while France’s periodic transformations and Prussia’s acceptance of change under duress are similarly presented as necessary concessions to the inevitable, although in all these cases any concessions to the emerging wealth of industrial capitalism are to be set alongside continuing and very harsh repression of any movement for the benefit of the peasantry or the mass of workers and the multiplying urban poor. [Britain's abolition of the slave trade is mentioned, but not its imperial aggression, nor France's atrocious occupation of Algeria in this period to initiate over a century of brutal oppression.]

Most importantly this book mocks the very idea of a coherent revolutionary movement, covert or overt, to challenge inequality and champion the rights of the masses. With each self-styled revolution in turn, culminating in those of 1848, the book argues for a total absence of leadership or coherent programmes for change. In short, the authoritarian measures were not required because there was no convincing threat to authority. This book is therefore mocking the Left and its various interpretations of this period, no less than it mocks the long departed authorities, while leaving unquestioned the benefits of Capitalist ideology, which is simply equated with modernity and progress.

I would not argue this is exactly false, because it is interesting and worth exploring, so much as it is deceptive. There is a sleight of hand here, because of the things that are not said. The bizarre conspiracy theories which were so attractive to the establishment in this authoritarian era are indeed ridiculous, but the whole point is precisely the failure of the authorities to understand the societies and the forces for social change which confronted them. The developing theories of the constitutionalists, the nationalists, Rights of Man advocates, the early communists, the anarchists, the social democrats, the trades unionists, the early sociologists and theorists of society and of politics, the changing theories about social values and the role of religion, changing attitudes to poverty and the early government sponsored investigations of life in the growing cities, movements to address public health and to begin confronting the challenges of urban development, all these and many more movements were fizzing away alongside the industrial revolution, the forces of capitalism and the liberal ideology of property rights and profit – all this and more serving to utterly transform Europe.

The stupidity of the authorities merely establishes that their police files, spies’ reports and government papers are an unreliable source from which to examine the changes across the whole political spectrum taking place in this period of political repression. For that reason, the book’s claim to demonstrate that there was never a serious revolutionary movement challenging the reactionary authorities is simply not justified by the evidence it relies on.

The inclusion of a frontal attack on Marx in the final pages of the book confirms the presence of an agenda, since the relevant passages are entirely rhetorical and tendentious, opening with the outrageous phrase “With his ponderous urge to classify” and continuing in that vein, making a string of misleading assertions that really cannot be analysed without seeming to be a bore.

With his ponderous urge to classify, Karl Marx delivered his own verdict on the causes. ‘The eruption of the general discontent was finally accelerated and the sentiment for revolt ripened by two economic world events,’ he wrote in his Class Struggles in France. ‘The potato blight and the bad harvests of 1845 and 1846 increased the general ferment among the people.’ It had been ‘a struggle for the first necessities of life.’ This was nonsense and does not explain why the barricades in Dresden were manned by Marx’s capitalist friend Friedrich Engels, the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin and the composer Richard Wagner, none of whom would have agreed on a single policy and all of whom certainly did not lack for the first necessities of life. [pp497,498]

What a shame. The book could so easily have been good.

=============

A few quotes

One who might have been expected to go the same way was Metternich’s closest collaborator and alter ego, Friedrich von Gentz... ‘I shall stand or fall with Metternich,’ he wrote on New Year’s Day 1832, ‘but nowadays he is a fool. If I were to write the history of the past fifteen years it would be one long indictment of Metternich.’ [pp389, 390]

Judging by the information in their files, the French police never managed to recruit agents among the émigrés in their midst, or even to find spies with a command of the relevant languages, which seriously limited the amount of intelligence they could gather, while their agents’ inability to spell foreign names rendered all their lists of suspects worthless. Even more astonishing, given that the Habsburg monarchy reigned over speakers of every language of its supposed revolutionary enemies, is that the Austrian police files are full of ludicrously misspelled Italian and Polish names. [p432]

A word of warning to Goodreads enthusiasts:

Metternich raged at ‘the spirit of association which is in evidence everywhere, and did everything he could to prevent the formation of any kind of institution or society, even small-town reading clubs, for, as Sedlnitzky put it, ‘people would read and read until they became murderers’.[p437]

One has to worry about all those murderous small-town reading clubs springing up in our own time.

As far back as 1809 the then police chief Baron Hager had warned the emperor that such a system endangered the future of the state itself, as those preparing for a career in public service made a point of avoiding broadening their minds through education and reading, fearing that it might lay them open to suspicion and spoil their prospects. The consequence was that the administration was in the hands of uneducated men, and very little of the political thought of Western Europe penetrated Austrian society, which became atrophied and inward looking. Hermetically sealed off behind a great wall of repression and censorship, by the 1840s the country had, as the saying went, become ‘the China of Europe.’ [p443]

A love poem was returned with a litany of objections, beginning with the fact that a woman could not be described as divine, since only God was; that her looks could not be heavenly, because only that which emanates from God is; that ‘one tender look’ could not be ‘worth more than the attention of the entire universe’, because the universe contained the tsar and other ‘lawful authorities’ which would be insulted by the notion; and that the desire to retire from the world to be alone with the undivine lady suggested a wish to shirk duty to the state. [p452]

[Czarny Pies · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is a deeply ingrained prejudice among Poles of the generation of my wife and historian Adam Zamoyski that police who spy on common citizens are profoundly evil and stupid in roughly equal measures. In reading the Phantom Terror which is a brilliant history of the savage oppression of political dissent and cultural expression that existed in the Russian and Austrian-Hungarian Empires in the first half of the nineteenth century the reader is struck on almost every page by Zamoyski's visceral dislike of police states.
Despite his rage, Zamoyski does a marvellous job describing the enormous apparatus created to monitor and intimidate the population in Central and Eastern Europe. Thousands of individuals were employed at tremendous cost to the Austrian and Russian imperial treasuries t to open, decrypt, copy and reseal letters. Similarly the Romanov and Habsbourg regimes recruited large numbers of informants to spy on their citizens. Zamoyski's descriptions of the various categories of liers, lunatics and other lowlifes that acted as spies are delightfully comic. If nothing else, the book is great fun.
Russian Tsar Nicholas I and Austro-Hungarian Chancellor Klement Metternich are the principal villains of Phantom Terror. In Zamoyski's view the pair were dim-witted and delusional creating backward tyrannical regimes that did irreparable damage to the economy and society. Supremely convinced of the correctness of their views, both men became cross with the English for not following suit.
What surprised me most about the book was Zamoyski's revelation that Nicholas I and Metternich both subscribed to the theory of a "comité directeur" supposedly directing a liberal conspiracy from Paris to overthrow the legitimate monarchs of Europe much like the Judeo-Masonic-Templar conspiracy described by Alexandre Dumas in the Joseph Balsamo novels. I had always thought that this conspiracy theory had been concocted by Europe's legitimist politicians for the public. Presenting excerpts from the correspondence of Nicholas I and Metternich, Zamoyski does an excellent job of persuading the reader that these two leaders believed in it as much as anyone.
Zamoyski should be acknowledged for what he is: a neo-Whig historian. He believes that the aristocracies of Europe were fundamentally enlightened at the end of the eighteenth century and wished to progressively lead their countries to material prosperity and liberal democracy. This is of course what the first generation of Whig historians insist happened in England and to a lesser degree in France. However in the Russian and Austrian empires, autocratic rulers acted to reduce the independence of the nobles and to avert any devolution of power to the middle classes. Consequently, the Austrian and Russian Empires lagged behind Western Europe and the US in terms of economic infrastructure (notably railways), democratic institutions, literacy and most visibly prosperity.
Zamoyski's book is profoundly old fashioned. He sees events in the same way as Lord Byron, Giuseppe Verdi, Elisabeth Barrett Browning, Alexandre Dumas, George Eliot, William Wordsworth and the other artists who lived through them. I feel better knowing that the version of European history that I got at the opera house was perhaps after all the right one.

[Thoth Harris · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first thing I will say is oddly contradictory compared with the two-star rating I am giving it: This is a very, very important book. In it, there is a great, even brilliant book somewhere, and the message that is overall conveyed in glimmers and glimpses emerges here and there.

The author spends too much of his time researching and recording every odd, tangentially related anecdote about police investigations, nobles’ and diplomats’ opinions. The message, concerning how paranoia, fake news, over-zealous police investigation, etc. are nothing new these days, and that our current grappling with struggles among elites vs. ordinary citizens is a product, structurally and psychologically, of the traumas experienced by all sides in the French revolutionary period. I am simplifying it a fair bit, and there is a lot more of an important message there that can be gleaned in valuable insight, for conservative-minded, liberal-minded, libertarian-minded readers, and many others besides.

The problem, is, however, that the author does not edit, or consider it wise to hire someone to brutally edit out the extraneous heft in this tome. The style, while grammatically adequate and not overly pretentious, is plodding and non-engaging. The general narrative of this book is fuzzy and it takes days, weeks, and even months to try and weed out some form purposeful readerly analysis, and by that time, one retains a sense of impatience, exhaustion, and ennui, and is just grateful to be finally finished.

[Jennifer · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the introduction, Adam Zamoyski says that he's not going to deliberately point out the parallels between our current era and the events in Phantom Terror--though he does call one of the chapters 'Evil Empire,' it's drawn from a quote by one of the leaders in the book. (I don't recall which offhand, but probably Metternich.)

Anyway, while the subject matter is often grim, and the reader feels frustrated both for the people in it and for the implications for our own time, it's also peppered with anecdotes that, with dark humor, illustrate the absurdity of life under a repressive but incompetent government. But more than a timely warning, it also illuminates the ways in which decisions in the early 19th century often led to unexpected and far worse consequences, culminating in the horrors in 20th century Europe.

It's a warning we'd do well to heed.

[Gavin Armour · Rating 4 out of 5]

Adam Zamoyski konnte mit dem 2004 im Original erschienenen Werk MOSCOW 1812: NAPOLEON`S FATAL MARCH nicht nur seine Kollegen aus der Zunft der Historiker, sondern auch die Kritik und ein breites Publikum europaweit überzeugen. Danach legte er ein weiteres erfolgreiches Werk zum Wiener Kongreß 1815 vor und um das Triptychon zu vollenden nun also PHANTOM TERROR: THE THREAT OF REVOLUTION AND THE REPRESSION OF LIBERTY 1789-1848. Ein in sich logischer Abschluß, ging die Zeit der Restauration, ja, der Reaktion, doch unmittelbar aus den Wirren des späten 18. Jahrhunderts und der Französischen Revolution hervor.

Napoleon als Geschöpf dieser Revolution, der Wiener Kongreß und seine Ergebnisse als Folge der Napoleonischen Kriege, diese wiederum direkte Entwicklungen der Koalitionskriege, in denen sich das revolutionäre Frankreich gegen die europäischen Mächte zur Wehr setzen musste – daß diese ebenso aufregenden wie gefährlichen Zeiten bei den europäischen Herrschern, Machthabern und Verantwortlichen, der herrschenden Klasse auf dem Kontinent ein tiefes Mißtrauen und den unbedingten Wunsch, die alte Ordnung wiederherzustellen, hervorriefen, wer wollte es ihnen verdenken?

Zamoyski folgt also in weiten, elliptischen Bewegungen den Entwicklungen nach den „Hundert Tagen“ erneuter Napoleonischer Herrschaft, die ihr blutiges und endgültiges Ende auf dem Schlachtfeld im belgischen Waterloo fand. Angeführt vom Grafen Metternich, der in Diensten des Österreichischen Hofes der Habsburger der führende Staatsmann Europas nach 1815 wurde, und dem russischen Zar Alexander I., erlebte Europa außerhalb Frankreichs und Großbritanniens einen immensen Restaurationsdruck, der von Paranoia und teils berechtigten Ängsten befeuert zu einer wahren Flut an Repression, Verfolgung und Denunziation führte. Nicht nur wurde militärisches Eingreifen in die inneren Angelegenheiten anderer Länder zu einer routinierten Maßnahme im Repertoire der kontinentalen Großmächte, es wurden auch erstmals flächendeckend Polizeieinheiten aufgebaut, die eher frühen Geheimdiensten ähnelten und die Aufgabe hatten, revolutionäre Umtriebe aufzudecken, Geheimbünde zu desavouieren und ununterbrochen furchteinflößende Meldungen zu generieren, die wiederum von Metternich geradezu aufgesogen wurden. Schwer zu beurteilen, ob hier ein getriebener Geist nur mit Randständigem gefüttert werden musste, um immer stärker in ein fast apokalyptisch anmutendes Wahngebilde abzudriften, oder aber, ob hier ein bis in den blanken Zynismus hinein realpolitisch denkender Machtpolitiker Furcht und Schrecken verbreiten will, wohl wissend, daß der „Ausnahmezustand“ die Mittel weitgehend deckt. Und mit Fug und Recht kann man behaupten, daß Europa mit der Französischen Revolution derart erschüttert worden war, daß von einem „Ausnahmezustand“ zu sprechen nicht unbedingt eine Übertreibung darstellt. So wird wohl letztlich beides eine Rolle gespielt haben: Ein paranoider Geist wusste sich, realpolitisch bewandert, seiner schlimmsten Ängste so zu bedienen, daß seine Machtstellung darob immer weiter ausgebaut und gesichert wurde.

Doch bleibt festzuhalten, daß man es bei Metternich offenbar mit einem ausgewachsenen Verschwörungstheoretiker zu tun hatte, der sogar ein klassisches „Mastermind“ hinter sämtlichen in Europa zu beobachtenden Verwerfungen sozialistischer, nationalistischer oder jakobinischer Art vermutete. Das „Direktoriat“, eine aus Freimaurern und anderem von ihm als solches angesehenem Geheimgesindel gebildete Gesellschaft, soll das Netz internationaler Revolten nicht nur geplant, sondern seine Agenten auch überall und nirgendwo im Einsatz gehabt haben. Klassische rechte Agitation: Der Feind sitzt überall, hat seine Fäden weit gesponnen und verfügt über immense ökonomische, militärische und intellektuelle Kräfte, die ihm enorme Machtfülle verleihen. Der antisemitische Reflex war hier noch nicht relevant, immerhin wandte Metternich sich mehrere Male an das Bankhaus Rothschild, um nicht nur den Habsburgern Überbrückungskredite zu verschaffen. Doch Vieles, was sich andeutet, verweist schon auf die weitaus griffigeren und auch gefährlicheren Entwicklungen des späteren 19. Jahrhunderts.

Zamoyski weist im Vorwort zu seiner Studie ausdrücklich darauf hin, daß er eine Unmenge an Analogien zur Gegenwart gefunden habe während seiner Beschäftigung mit den Napoleonischen Kriegen und dem Wiener Kongreß. Er habe eigentlich auf genau diese Analogien hinweisen wollen, doch seien diese derart offensichtlich, daß er dem Leser den Spaß nicht verderben wolle, selbst darauf zu stoßen. So ist dies also eine Art Nachklapp zu den Studien europäischer Restaurationspolitik der vorangegangenen Werke. Hier allerdings – und diese Kritik muß sich Zamoyski gefallen lassen – wird ein extrem kompliziertes und in sich widersprüchliches Geflecht aus entstehendem Patriotismus, man kann auch sagen: Nationalismus, ohne diesen mit dem gleichzusetzen, der das späte 19. Und das 20 Jahrhundert beherrschen sollte, aus Konservatismus, Liberalität, sozialen Ängsten und der intellektuellen Bewältigung neuer Ideen, enggeführt und nahezu ausschließlich auf den Kampf ultrakonservativer Kräfte gegen die der Erneuerung beschnitten. Dabei nutzt Zamoyski eine manchmal fast spöttelnde Sprache, beim Leser entsteht momentweise der Eindruck, der Autor nehme das alles nicht wirklich ernst und mache sich gar über die Protagonisten seiner Erzählung lustig.

Dennoch entsteht ein weitestgehend spannend zu lesendes Panorama jener Jahre zwischen dem Aufbruch der Französischen Revolution und den Biedermeierjahren des 19. Jahrhunderts, die den Kontinent zu ersticken drohten und deren Auswüchse schließlich über den Imperialismus des späten 19. Jahrhunderts zu den Katastrophen des 20. Jahrhunderts führte. Daß sich Mächtige gern die Ängste ihrer Untertanen zu eigen machen, nutzen, um dadurch Repression und Spitzelei zu rechtfertigen – eine Binse mittlerweile. Dennoch kann man hier noch einmal genau nachlesen, wie diese Binse zustande kam. Daß es gerade die Briten waren, denen ein weitgehend entspanntes Verhältnis zu möglichen revolutionären Umtrieben gelang, daß sie sich aus den Aufgeregtheiten heraushielten – es mag der Insellage geschuldet sein, vielleicht auch der Tatsache, daß die britische Monarchie schon damals eine konstitutionelle war und der „common man“ somit zumindest den Eindruck hatte, gehört zu werden. Es gelingt Zamoyski, die spezifischen Unterschiede zwischen den unterschiedlichen Königshäusern und ihren Bedürfnissen auszuleuchten und dadurch ein recht eindringliches Bild von der Entwicklung der europäischen Mächte zu vermitteln. Man vergleiche nur die Karten, die in den Deckblättern des Buches abgedruckt sind und man erkennt schnell, wie sich Europa in den knapp 60 Jahren seit Ausbruch der Französischen Revolution verändert hatte, als 1848 Metternichs Furcht vor der kommenden, wirklich großen Revolution bestätigt zu werden schien. So sehr Zamoyski die Erhebungen von 1830 herunter zu spielen vermag, die großen Umwälzungen und die für Liberale fürchterlichen Folgen der Ereignisse von 1848 beschreibt er durchaus angemessen. Vielleicht liegt hier schon die Saat für einen weiteren Teil dieses weit ausschweifenden europäischen Panoramas.

[Nilesh Jasani · Rating 2 out of 5]

While on an important topic, the book is for the scholars and experts in the field. The main premise is clear from the backcover - the 1890s' revolution in Paris caused aristocrats and rulers all across Europe to obsess over threats against their own influence. Oftentimes, they were jumping at the shadows. They created institutions and practices that are existent even now.

The subject is fascinating prima facie but the details are absolutely overbearing. As the author goes from one state to the other and one decade to the next, the list of names change along with some variations in their individual storylines but there is almost nothing materially new to the basic themes once outlined in the early pages.

In this work that must have been a result of years of research, there is a plethora of information for those mastering this era but not for general readers like this reviewer.

[Smiley III · Rating 5 out of 5]

Essential reading: On a par — and companion piece with — Philipp Blom's Fracture: Life and Culture in the West, 1918-1938 insofar as a person is curious about seeing How We Ended Up Here.

BIG REVELATION: Know how all this stuff about the Masons and The Illuminati have been kicked around, ever since undergraduates needed better things to do and JFK got assassinated and Roky Erickson found an audience? Well ... apparently, that sorta thing is what the ruling classes — and, at times, ruling families — worried about like the dickens. Particularly this Metternich fellow, who nobody's ever heard of but was second in command to the Foreign Minister of Austria and takes up three full columns in the index. He worried about them all the time everywhere and everyway, and tried to convince all the other heads of state they should keep up with what this comité directeur, these Jacobíns, these keepers-of-the-flame of the Enlightenment and etc. folks who were "clearly pro-French Revolution!" were up to, driving everyone else nuts about pretty much nothing ... Looks like the paranoia drifted down, a century later, to us common folk so we could worry — not unlike reading a "Silver Spoon" novel, in its cachet and appeal, but otherwise worthless, unless you wanted to hire agent provocateurs to have dinner with other agent provocateurs so each'd bring back reports on the other (happened often enough!) or drive a French king, Charles X, into exile in England because he was scared of his own shadow (Not. Making. This. Up.: There. Was. No. Threat!).

Great read, effortless for the reader, intriguing and — get this — totally free of cant or academic ponderousness. Will fuel historical dramas for generations to come. Believe this!

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

A remarkable combination of social and political history, that despite its emmense historical and geographic scope, nonetheless feels very thorough and detailed.

Adam Zamoyski is an author that's been on my radar for quite some time. I've seen several interviews with him and have been interested in his work, as one of the world's pre-eminent historians on the Age of Revolution (my favourite topic). This book was my first, and it did not dissapoint!

Zamoyski's writing is detailed, well-grounded, and even funny at times. His thesis is strong and straightforward, but he brings the receipts to back up his claims. I have mostly come around to his line of thinking on both major figures like Metternich (whom I previously had a more admiring view of) as well as his main argument: the reactionary backlash toward all radical activity in the post-French Revolution period was a paranoid, self-fulfilling prophecy.

I really liked how he focused every chapter on a different European country, while still mostly sticking to a chronological narrative. His characterization of the key players is also solid, though I would have loved to see even more exploration into the psychology of characters like Tsar Alexander, Metternich, Canning, etc.

Other than that though, a great book! I can't wait to read some more stuff by him.

[CFaust · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was intrigued by the premise of this book, but I found the actual content to be dreadfully dull. The majority of the book is repetitive accounts of incompetent spy networks investigating (or creating) equally incompetent attempts at revolution. I'm almost willing to suggest that the author was trying to get the reader to sympathize with the police and spymasters by forcing them to investigate seemingly endless accounts of pathetic revolutionaries and conspiracies that never went anywhere, but I doubt that was Zamoyski's intention.

Outside of the descriptions of Tsar Alexander's development there's very little here that rewards the reader for making it through the five hundred pages of text. I liked the conclusion of the book and the parallels to the modern world are very interesting, but it's probably better to just read a summary of the book or skim it because Zamoyski's writing style isn't very engaging and the accounts of Metternich's various romantic affairs didn't add much spice to the dry proceedings.

[Joel · Rating 3 out of 5]

After the French Revolution the governments of Europe were paranoid about future revolutions in their own nations. As a result, they instituted police forces, spying, censorship and other means of control. Instead of helping, these measure produced resentment and helped fuel the very thing they were afraid of.

[Mathijs Loo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Het is werkelijk een fantastische inkijk op het eerste gedeelte van de lange negentiende eeuw uit een veiligheidsperspectief. Doormiddel van archiefonderzoek weet Zamoyski een interessante inkijk te geven in de politieorganisaties en ontevredenheid in deze periode. Het enige nadeel is dat Zamoyski echt nalaat om een analyse te maken van deze verschillende organisaties

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many consider the French Revolution to be the birth of modern politics in the Western world. It was a traumatic birth, though, and resulted in the Napoleonic Wars and the reactionary, reestablishment of monarchical rule in Europe. Adam Zamoyski’s Phantom Terror addresses the repercussions of those events on the general populace and the governments of that era.

One social level that gets written about extensively by Zamoyski is the European aristocracy and how they devised plans to maintain power. The middle and lower classes were seen as a threat. Ideologies of nationalism and liberal democratic government made them worry that their status as monarchs and government officials was under attack. The main actor in Zamoyski’s drama is Metternich, the Austrian diplomat for the Habsburg Empire. His authoritarian tendencies led him to hold the Congress of Vienna, as well as conferences in Toplitz and Karlsbad, where all the leaders of Europe met to divide up territory and scheme up ways to keep the common people down. Another important figure in this book is Tsar Alexander of Russia, the paranoid Christian mystic who at first felt sympathetic to liberalism but switched to conservative totalitarian politics towards the later years of his life. Russian troops at the time were spread all over Europe in an effort to prevent any uprisings and to spread the Russian empire farther west. Also involved were King Frederick William of Prussia, King Ferdinand of Spain, the French Bourbon monarchy, Castlereagh of Great Britain, and a whole host of other minor political functionaries. Italy and Germany were little more than a handful of small kingdoms with no concept of nationality.

On the other side were the lower and middle classes of Europe. Demonstrations, riots, terrorist attacks, assaults, assassinations, and minor uprisings were common in those times. Most of them were of small consequence, often happening because of low wages or high food prices. Some of them were the result of students asserting a national identity as a form of resistance to the rule of the Habsburg Empire. A small number of disturbances were the result of activists wanting a republic characterized by democratic rule. Zamoyski drives home the point that the turbulence and violence of that era could have been minimized if the citizens had had more political representation. The dictatorial policies of the conservative aristocracy and their bureaucracies caused more problems than they solved.

Metternich and Alexander saw things differently. They were convinced that a secret committee of conspirators were planning and directing all the controversies in order to persecute and eventually overthrow the monarchies of Europe. Those rulers became obsessed with conspiracy theories and saw the machinations of Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, the Templars, Luddites, Jacobins, Jews, and Jesuits behind every event that happened no matter how small or trivial. They set up an extensive police force and network of spies to search for this secret committee and wasted a lot of time and money because no such organization ever existed. Some secret societies, like the Italian Carbonari, really did exist but their lack of organization, insularity, and small numbers never led to any substantial action. The governments involved themselves in the extensive reading of people’s mail, entrapment through the use of agents provocateurs, and paying informants for information that usually proved to be false or misleading . They instituted a massive surveillance state and wound up with troves of worthless documents describing nothing of any importance. They also engaged in extensive censorship of books, art, theater, and schools. Their efforts nearly bankrupted the Habsburg bureaucracy without producing any worthwhile results. By the middle of the 19th century, nationalist movements were causing the Habsburg and Russian Empires to weaken and decline anyhow.

Zamoyski makes a good case for the idea that political mismanagement and lack of freedom eventually resulted in the problematical governments of fascism and communism in the 20th century. He makes his point a little too bluntly though. Most chapters are pretty much the same. Political disturbances occur while the paranoid government officials send out their spies to locate the secret society that instigates all the chaos. No book club, discussion group, student fraternity, cafe conversation, barroom brawl, or fist fight is too trivial for Zamoyski to ignore. Descriptions of upper-class conspiracy theories, mail reading committees, or plots to infiltrate suspect organizations are redundant to an extreme. The same basic ideas and events get repeated over and over again from the first chapter to the last and it goes on for 500 pages.

Phantom Terror addresses a fascinating subject. The reading gets bogged down by too much detail, a lot of it repetitious and unnecessary. Zamoyski could have made his point in half as many pages without succumbing to the temptation to over-document so much of what happened in those times. Still, the issue he raises is worth considering; at the start of the 21st century our governments appear to be making some of the same mistakes that were made back then in Europe. Some results appear to be the same too while the internet and surveillance cameras are just making espionage and paranoia all that much easier.

https://grimhistory.blogspot.com/

[molosovsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superinteressante Anekdoten-Sammlung zum Teil aberwitziger Szenen, Ansichten, Korrespondenzen und Charakter-Eigentümlichkeiten. So gesehen ziemlich beunruhigende Lektüre, bzw. erhellend, weil eben konservative Ideologen der Reichen und Mächtigen bis heute von wie im Buch geschilderten irrational-paranoiden Ängst vor ›dem Mob‹, ›den Terroristen‹, ›totalen Unordnung‹, ›Untergang von allem, was gut und wertvoll ist‹ ect. getrieben werden.

[Rindis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an interesting companion to Zamoyski's Holy Madness. That book looked at all the leftover idealists of post-Napoleonic era revolutions, their passions, and their repeated attempts at change through coercive rebellion. This book is about governmental paranoia from the French Revolution to 1848.

He starts out with idea of policing being fairly new to the Eighteenth Century and at that point it encompassed a number things not associated with it today (including a lot of civil engineering, as it was supposed to work at the ordering of public spaces for public benefit). He also gives a background of the conspiracy theory of the time: the Illuminati.

And the book goes downhill from there. Well, no, not the book, but the paranoia and repression caused by the conspiracy theories rife in European governments for the next half-century. Zamoyski quotes a fair number of reactionary sources with wild accusations of vast networks of hundreds of thousands of conspirators working for anarchy and the overthrow of all social order.

An interesting part is how consistently liberal ideas are seen as a pathological contagion, which must be stopped and rooted out at all costs. (...Which, I suppose, is actually a primitive form of meme-theory.) This leads into the major theme of the book, which is how the concept of police-state comes out of this period as various governments try to clamp down on public opinion, and more importantly institute ever-wider ranging secret police branches to find and arrest the massive revolutionary conspiracies that they know are out there plotting against them.

Of course, people with little investigative training, paid directly for information they bring in are a great way to get results that would be hilariously off-kilter and transparently fallacious if the results weren't tragic. Even better, one of the major results of all the internal spying was to make people suspicious and circumspect, and therefore good at hiding if they did start plotting something.

Much of the book is a continual recounting of the various conspiracy theories that these informers invented and governmental authorities convinced themselves were real. One lesson: a good judiciary is a grand thing, as a number of cases get thrown out when they hit the courts and the 'evidence' is quickly demolished.

There are weaknesses to the book. Zamoyski is obviously enjoying skewering all these shibboleths of yesteryear, but it's hard to tell if he's skipping over some genuine 'conspiracies' they uncovered (as unlikely as it seems). He does have some interesting viewpoints on the later revolutions that were largely missed by this activity, and how, quite often, any leadership they had was at least partly accidental. In fact, the book is an interesting take on the entire period and well worth a look.

[Antonio Nunez · Rating 5 out of 5]

Zamoisky’s Phantom Terror is a history of Europe between 1815 (Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon’s exile to Saint Helena and the Restoration) and 1848 (the revolutionary Spring of Nations). It moves from Portugal to Russia and from Sweden to Greece. It also covers some events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era, and some from the period after 1848. The Restoration was an attempt to reset Europe after Revolution had broken it down. The leading classes (aristocrats and the clergy) wanted to put the revolutionary genie back into his bottle. They were aware that Napoleon had already done that, but then went on to upset Europe in almost 20 years of wars. So they wanted the Napoleonic internal peace but without the Napoleonic external mayhem. They were certain the Revolution had come about because of a conspiracy by obscure yet powerful individuals, as described by abbé Barruel in his monumental Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. According to Barruel, an alliance of Freemasons and Illuminati had brought low the established order and would do so again if allowed. Its members were truly Satanic in their conceit and disregard for the costs of their ambitions. So in the Congress of Vienna Metternich and his allies agreed that foreign policy should be guided by the principle of stability: no changes in the constitution of any European country should be permitted, and if any country tried to implement significant reforms (such as Spain under Riego in 1820-1824 or Naples and Sicily in 1820-1821), the others (mainly the central powers France, Austria and Russia) should rein them back to the status quo ante. In a series of meetings from 1816 to 1830 led mostly by Czar Alexander I and Metternich decisions were made and implemented, although progressively interests diverged. The Britons were not really committed to Europe and were most unwilling to go to war on the account of despotic and incompetent governments. The Austrians did all they could to divide Italy and Germany, whereas the Russians promoted mischief in Southern Germany to sabotage the Austrians. Internal politics in European countries at the time were mostly repressive. Proper police forces appeared in most countries (most notably London’s metropolitan police in 1822). But there were separate police forces for spying on the citizenry, censoring the press and applying savage violence to dissenters. Yet it was never proven that there was a continent-wide revolutionary conspiracy. There were conspiratorial movements such as the Italian Carbonari or Mazzini’s Giovane Italia (which would span national wings in many countries that would join as a continental movement, La Giovane Europa), and similar nationalist movements in occupied or divided countries such as Ireland, Germany or Poland, but these movements were much more nationalist than revolutionary. Proper revolutionary movements were quite strong in heavily industrialized countries such as England (the Chartists). The author describes in detail several episodes such as the Manchester Peterloo Massacre or 1822, where boneheaded police ineptitude actually did more to create the tragedy than revolutionary zeal. The author’s point is that repression and obtuseness did lead to the formation of underground revolutionary organizations, notably in Russia: specially fascinating is that Czar Nicholas I so hated France and the French (because he thought they were incorrigible revolutionaries) he forbade his subjects to study in France, so many ended up in Germany instead, where they were fascinated first by Hegel and then by Marx, much headier thinkers than Blanc or Proudhon. Also the paraphernalia of a police state (a secret police, citizen informants spying on each other, pervasive censorship and corruption) that we associate with totalitarian regimes of the XX century existed in full form (although with more primitive technologies) in the first half of the XIX.

The period covered in this book (1815-1848) divides neatly into almost two halves. The first “half” 1815-1830 is the high point of the Vienna system, with its Holy Alliance protocol. Then the system had not yet fossilized and worked quite well. It was fortunate that France had an intelligent king, Louis XVIII, who was aware of just how tenuous was his authority and how easily he could lose it (as happened in 1814, when Napoleon escaped Elba). Sadly, King Louis had no children of his own, and his younger brother Charles X was a shallow, arrogant man. In 1830 he enacted reactionary measures but failed to prepare for the unavoidable reaction he must have known they would generate. He was overthrown in just 3 “glorious” days in July 1830. I was fascinated by the king decamping to his Rambouillet palace without having informed his prime minister or his police, basically assuming that nothing would happen. Something similar happened to Alexander I. He was an intelligent, hard working man, unstable but more likable than his successor. He received multiple admonitions that a conspiracy was brewing, yet he abandoned his capital in 1825 without informing anyone. When he died (if he died- it is said he fled to live as a hermit) the Decembrist explosion came about, and nearly topped his brother, turning him into an arch- reactionary, here we see the remote origins of the Narodniki movement of the 1860, the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorists of the 1870s onwards, and then the Bolsheviks. The fanatic neo-medieval German students of the 1830s would morph into the arch-militarists of the 1870s, the imperialists of the Wilhelmine period, and later into the Nazis. Much of the blame for conspiracies was laid at the hands of restless, ambitious Jews, such as the Rothschilds and left wing anarchists and socialists. How these groups could have had a common agenda was never explained.

While there is usually no direct causality in history, there is a sort of determinism that can be clearly seen here. The worst governed countries (such as Russia, Austria and the Italian and some of the German states) would be most hardly hit in 1914-1945, one century after Metternich’s era). Censorship promotes stagnation (as was evident in Spain in Portugal due to the Inquisition). Internal spying promotes a culture of apparent submission but conflicts and millenarian aspirations are pushed underground, into actual conspiracy, violence and terrorism. Intervention in the affairs of foreign states may have begun with noble objectives but end up submerged in realpolitik concerns. All of these would have been valuable lessons for the US and their allies during the Cold War, but they were not learned: some countries, like Italy, developed internal conspiracies, such as the Gladio soldiers, the P-2 Masonic lodge and the use of agent-provocateurs, as is said to have happened with the bloody Red Brigades terrorist organization. They kidnapped and murdered left-Christian Democrat union leader and former prime minister Aldo Moro. It is said that the group was riddled with agent-provocateurs from the Italian state’s intelligence organs and that Moro’s abduction and killing was inspired by rival Christian Democracies such as the sinister Giulio Andreotti. This Italian obsession with conspiracies may be seen in works of Umberto Eco such as Foucault’s Pendulum, the Prague Cemetery and his final work Numero Zero. In the US and Britain, the most famous conspiracies were those of blue-blooded bolsheviks and Cambridge spies (this doesn’t mean they weren’t real, just that they were not as pervasive as was thought by Joe McCarthy and James Jesus Angleton). For many years this conspiratorial mindset was marginal, endemic in nutty circles. Social networks brought it back and allowed its adepts to take power in several major countries, and now it is central and may not be ignored. Zamoisky shows how this begun and the damage it caused to all involved.

[Emmanuel Gustin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a book about a paranoia. After the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Era, the powers that met in Vienna the establish the settlement of 1815 tried to turn back the clock. But the conservative governments clearly lacked confidence that they had achieved a stable solution, and in hindsight they had good reason to doubt it. Adam Zamoyski tells the story of their fears, their attempts at policing and repression, and their tendency to hypnotise themselves with lurid conspiracy theories.

It is an account that strips many of the protagonists of their dignity. Metternich emerges not as a diplomatic genius, but as an increasingly irrational statesman, constantly panicking at small incidents and derided for it by his more cool-headed colleagues. The drift into mysticism of Czar Alexander and his growing belief in his own martyrdom is described mercilessly, and his successor does not get any clemency either. Zamoyski's study of the police archives delivers a large list of ridiculous accusations and absurd conspiracies.

Zamoyski believes that the fears of conservative governments were misguided because there was no grand international conspiracy to overthrow the existing order, nor a comité directeur in Paris to lead it. But the stark reality was that they were sitting on a volcano, or, as the British government described it to Metternich, a "pressure vessel without a safety valve", they just misjudged what the threat was. A later generation of historians and theoreticians would start to think in terms of the great impersonal forces of history and the evolution of society, which would ultimately sweep away the absolute monarchies of Europe. Most of the statesmen of 1815 had not learnt to think in these terms. Confronted with the forces of nationalism, liberalism and socialism that would ultimately defeat them, they struggled to give them a face, and in doing so they often fell victim to conspiracy theories.

For the modern reader too, the lack of clear protagonists and antagonists makes the story confusing. Zamoyski describes the ebb and flow of popular opinion, the interactions of movements and counter-movements. He occasionally devotes longer sections of text to particularly important personalities (such as Metternich and Alexander), but on the whole this is the story of a society on the boil, with its bubbles, turbulence and steam. It is hard to get a clear view and some sections of the book are, in consequence, rather dull. Others are hilarious. (I'm still inclined to recommend Mike Duncan's excellent Revolutions podcast, which among its many chapters also includes sections on the revolutions of 1830, 1848, and 1871. It's really good and very entertaining.)

Ultimately, the book is somewhat lacking in theme and conclusion. Zamoyski in his own conclusions merely argues that the climate of conservative repression that beset Europe in the late 19th century was harmful. It's hard to dispute that, but still a somewhat weak conclusion about the emerging police state.

[Joshua Neil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phantom Terror is an exploration of the repressive methods used by European governments from 1797, the fall of the Bastille, to the mid-1800s and the sudden creation of Napoleon III's government. It's a wide-ranging account of the paranoia that gripped the old order in the wake of the French revolution, the conspiracies they saw in every corner and the methods they used to crack down on any hint of liberalism or revolt.
Phantom Terror can really be divided into three parts: the backstory of the revolution and the immediate reactions to it, which takes up perhaps the first quarter of the book; a spiritual successor to Zamoyski's previous book on the Congress of Vienna, looking at what happened to that treaty in the years following its creation; and a critique of the methods employed by governments to suppress liberalism and Jacobinism, looking at the effects and effectiveness of secret police, spies, suppression and the threat of violence. It is when the first part is over that the book really starts to shine: the background exploration of the French revolution and surrounding events is a little scattered, moving backwards and forwards in time somewhat confusingly, despite as usual being written in Zamoyski's fantastic prose. But after this is becomes an excellent account of the events following the Napoleonic Wars, giving varied and interesting details about the paranoia that gripped Metternich, Alexander and the other great leaders of what they saw as a worldwide liberal conspiracy: the absurdities they believed and the extents they went to to crush it.
This book is, as usual with Zamoyski, fantastically written, engaging and very careful to keep an exceptional human element to it, filled with interesting accounts and humorous stories from the time. It is fantastic as a follow up to the Congress of Vienna, seeing the ramifications of that event and what happened to the characters who had a part in it afterwards.
Unfortunately this book does suffer from a few problems not inherent in the other two I have read of his. Throughout, dates are never given often enough, often leading to confusion about what year the events he is describing are occurring in (his penchant for skipping backward and forward in years very often does not help this). There is also an unfortunate habit in here to repeat certain elements which could easily have been mentioned once and then skipped over - how governments over-used spies is detailed maybe three times.
Overall, however, the book is another fantastic read for those interested in the period, full of engaging stories and fascinating details.

[Scott Pomfret · Rating 3 out of 5]

Phantom Terror describes the paranoid reaction of other European states to the terror of the French Revolution. Seeing Jacobin (and later Napoleonic) conspiracies everywhere, the governments reacted by establishing surprisingly similar surveillance states, propagating unfounded stories of vast liberal conspiracies, and persecuting and executing not only the liberals but also nationalists and middle class aspirants to power such as lawyers, doctors, printers, and the like. The chief figure in this tale is Austrian foreign minister and chancellor Prince Metternich, who dominated his country's response to perceived threats for just short of four decades.

Zamoyski has delved deep into primary sources and recounts example after example of the invention of conspiracies to justify repressions in the UK, Germany, Italy, Austria, and Russia. Many of the actions the governments took were either absurd in themselves or led to absurd results in their execution. Zamoyski covers the rise of police forces and secret police, the rise of German nationalism, the role of peasants as a populist tool of the repressive governments particularly against the middle class, and the role of religion throughout these affairs.

However, the narrative seems to go in endless circles, because Zamoyski makes his point about the confabulated conspiracies, the overzealous repression, and its unfortunate results in intervals of about every five years, such that by 1848, where this book finishes, it feels like the reader hasn't learned anything new conceptually in three decades. Zamoyski also has an annoying habit of dismissing views and justifications as "nonsense" without fully explaining why the reader, too, should adopt his view.

That said, this is a fascinating period of European history, and Zamoyski makes a good case that all the repression had the unintended consequences of creating the modern nationalist united German state that led to two world wars as well as the conditions that led to the Russian revolution. As such, Zamoyski persuasively argues, we continue to feel the effects into the present day.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've read quite a bit on the French Revolution and Napoleonic era, and this detailed study of post-Napoleonic reactionary politics is an excellent bridge to the study of nineteenth-century European politics. Many historians correctly point to 1789 - 1815 France as the origin of the modern left/right factional politics and the centralized, bureaucratic nation states that are with us today. Zamoyski shows us that this understanding is, at best, incomplete.

The post-Napoleonic reaction, coordinated to various degrees by Metternich, Czar Alexander I, Pope Leo XII, and conservative circles in London and Paris, were determined to crush any and all European liberal political movements. The trauma and disruption of the Napoleonic wars bred paranoia, conspiracy and counter-conspiracy at the highest levels of the European power. These powers in turn created the sort of centralized political surveillance and repressive internal security apparatuses that have been with us to varying degrees ever since. Zamoyski's account of Metternich's manipulation of postal routes and prices which resulted in all mail between France, Germany, and Italy passing through areas of Austrian control, where various techniques of postal manipulation and forgery were developed to perfection. Despite this, "The Phantom Terror" proves that much the intelligence of supposed revolutionary threats were laughably inaccurate (once again, amplified by paranoid conspiracy mongering), and replete with score settling and base greed for gold and power. Tragically, we see even now that delusional power is still power, and the lives it ruins aren't restored by future returns to sanity.

I learned a lot from this book. The paranoid, repressive projects undertaken by the decrepit powers of Europe resulted in a vast injustice, state violence, and human misery - and perhaps greater radicalism when the dam finally broke in 1848.

[Niall · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great history book with much' to teach us about the modern world.

Zamoyski deftly takes us through the post Napoleonic Europe where the reactionary forces, desperate to wind the clock back resort to increasingly police state tactics. Indeed he argues that this period saw the start of the police state, with investment into regular police and secret police by nations across Europe, censorship and attacks on academia and other forms of expression.

Core to his argument is that overwhelmingly these fears were based on nothing than fears and so to justify their repression the main actors convinced themselves of secret societies headed by a grand conspiracy in Paris. In turn secret police and informers, eager to earn payments and justify their jobs encouraged all sorts of suspicions and accusations rarely bothering to validate which provided more fuel for their master's fears and so the cycle continues.

Even when rebellion happened it was localized and rooted in local issues or response to heavy handed repression or advance what we would now say are standard rights (suffrage, private voting etc).

This period saw the legitimisation of conspiracy theories that are essential unchanged today. Illuminati, secret societies and later on accusations against Jews. The main difference that struck me was in this period the believers in these conspiracies were ardent defenders of the national institutions while these days the conspiracies seek to undermine and destroy institutions but both cases are 'right wing' opposed to left wing movement (not saying there aren't overlap and separate theories on the left).

[Toby · Rating 3 out of 5]

A very readable account of political repression during the era of the revolutions, 1789-1848. For those who have studied this at A-level or degree level there will be comparatively little that is new, and Zamoyski's gossipy style sometimes irritates. Zamoyski wisely refrains from drawing parallels across the two centuries, although draws the readers attention to this in his introduction and hints at it again in the epilogue.

In fact, the conflict between an organised state that brings order and the aspirations and desires of the populace, whether or not a minority, is a recurring theme throughout political history from the Greek city states through to Elizabethan England and the Catholics, Nineteenth Century Europe and the libertarians and Twentieth Century America and the communists. The present worries concerning radicalised Islam and terrorism are nothing new in that regard. What is new is the power of the Internet and social media to shape, inform and distort, something which would have absolutely horrified Clemens von Metternich.

[Michał Hołda · Rating 4 out of 5]

In times of oppression, Bonaparte was called a man, then when people were punished for mentioning him, he was inconspicuously called a man, a son of man. - I know it from another book by Zamoyski, I have read previously.

In April 1814, the French Senate announced the dethronement of Emperor Napoleon and brought in the brother of the guillotined Louis XVI to take over. Napoleon abdicated on April 6, retaining his imperial title, and received the island of Elba in the Mediterranean Sea for life.
If Napoleon had returned to Paris itself, there would have been no legal basis to wage war with him. Louis XVIII and Talleyrand himself would have no problem.

Talleyrand stated that: "This treaty is certainly the most severe measure of repression ever taken against an individual." - initiated the phenomenon of political excommunication. Yes this Talleyrand I have read a lot about and who is personal "the cleverest and most intelligent human on earth" for my family, these who read.

Now the king of French, who was that? The last king of France from XIX c , Louis Philippe chosen for his chose of French flag and service to people and not only state.

Still, those were the times when stupid questions from police inspectors were answered with a joke and with facial expressions of mockery or laughter, and then police files appeared in such cases that the person being interrogated had a facial expression as if he was hiding something and the files suggested that he knew something or was part of the conspiracy, sick .

Louis XVIII dismissed Fouché as soon as he felt that he was no longer a threat, and appointed in his place a much less capable man, the thirty-five-year-old lawyer Eli Decazes (Élie, duc de Decazes), who held an insignificant official position under Napoleon's rule.

"Police agents had to deliver reports every day to prove their zeal and earn wages," Fouché wrote. "If there were no reports, he made them up. If by chance he discovered something, he inflated the discovery, thus giving it meaning."

Also, when writing letters to Decazes, the King referred to him with terms such as my child, my son, and ended with your father.
Decazes, a lawyer and judge, was appointed Minister of Police in 1815 and was influential in the French government even before he became (1819) Prime Minister.

Decazes was the leader of the liberal Doctrinaire party during the Bourbon Restoration, they were French royalists who shared a monarchy with the French Revolution and power with liberty.
---
And there is this man, given by Tsar himself power over governing whole Russia :

While the Tsar was abroad, absorbed in waging war and making peace, internal affairs were managed by General Alexei Andreevich Arakcheev, a brutal servant, commonly known as the vampire, whom Alexander placed at the head of the council of ministers. Although he scrupulously avoided showing initiative and only followed his ruler's orders, he quickly spread his influence over all areas of the government. His presence was felt everywhere, and he was feared everywhere. Returning to Russia, the Tsar left the running of the state in his hands and focused on the reform program.

Alexei Andreevich Arakcheyev, general of the army of the Russian Empire, Minister of War of Russia, one of the closest associates of Tsar Alexander I in the second period of his rule.

He came from a noble family. His father, Andrei Andreevich, served in the Preobrazhensky Leib Guard Regiment and resigned from the service as a lieutenant, and then he married Yelizaveta Vitlicka. - His Majesty's Preobrazhensky Life Guards Regiment - an infantry regiment of the Russian Empire, formed in 1687 during the reign of Tsar Peter I the Great. The Lejb-Guards Preobrazhensky Regiment took part in military operations during the Napoleonic era and during World War I.

On May 14, 1803, Arakcheev was accepted into service with a nomination to his current position, that is, inspector of all artillery and commander of the Life Guard artillery battalion. In 1805 he took part in the Battle of Austerlitz and commanded an infantry division.
---
Fortunately English are always good and caring for people. Even though Polish fought with Russian usurper over in Uprising and people died in Prague districts of Warsaw in tents of townsends, English gave second home to people.

The repeal of the Act on Foreigners in 1826 was a milestone because it proved that the authorities were not afraid of subversive forces and the revolutionary plague they spread.

Only in England could immigrants continue political work.

The first wave of political refugees were Italians, after the unsuccessful revolutions of 1820 and 1921. They were mostly educated people.

They were followed by Germans and Spanish, and after 1831 also a large group of Poles.

The Polish uprising aroused considerable emotion and sympathy in England, both among the aristocracy and among representatives of the politically conscious working class. Members of a five-hundred-person group of refugees who arrived in the early 1830s received military pensions by virtue of a resolution of parliament. With the exception of a handful of newcomers associated with the aristocracy and the constitutionalist Polish party, which was considered a natural ally by the Whigs, most Poles had Republican views and aroused the interest of radicals and Chartists.

Poles willingly joined the agitation conducted among the working class, giving it a spontaneous, revolutionary character. They encouraged uprisings and took part in most of the riots, including the march on Newport.
---
It is very good book, book that teaches about what was it about from perceptive of under the curtain, or in the shadows, if you will. That is one grate part of history lesson, it is build out of information that back then was entirely not known or just to one, few people on earth. Like a play. With players that ruled the spot, times.

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book covers the history of Europe from the French revolution through the revolutions of 1848. It covers the main countries, such as France, England, and the Habsburg Empire, but also Spain, the Polish provinces, and some of the northern European countries like Belgium and the Netherlands. The book is very well-written and easy to follow for a reader with even minimal knowledge of the period. The author's argument is that the masses were restless throughout this period, and did not truly support the restoration of old world monarchy, but that many of the conspiracies that politicians believed in were not real either. I wish the author would have focused more on the growth of the modern state as a response to political leaders' fears of restive masses, but he mostly focused on outright rebellions and wars.

[Piotr · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nie powiem... Pana Hrabiego czyta się naprawdę świetnie. Chociaż namawiałbym wydawcę do zmiany redaktorów (a może tłumacza...) Bo czasami ten polski za bardzo przypomina angielski - jakby w pośpiechu niektóre fragmenty były tłumaczone 1:1.
Ale to betka. Zanurzamy się w fascynującą epokę, gramolimy się do salonów, podglądamy w gabinetach władców i polityków, wyczytujemy niedyskrecje w prywatnej korespondencji, zachodzimy w głowę nad durnotą policyjnych donosicieli. To jest dopiero Grand Tour! Od Petersburga, przez Berlin, Wiedeń, Rzym, Neapol, Madryt ... po Paryż i Londyn. Z nieodzownym w tej opowieści - wątkiem polskim.
Niezwykle ciekawa książka. (A gwiazdkę zabieram wydawcy!)

[Theo · Rating 3 out of 5]

Een overdaad aan ontwikkelingen en anekdotes, vaak onderhoudend, adembenemend zelfs om te zien hoe reactionaire overheden in de ban raakten van totaal ongefundeerde samenzweringstheorieën, met verreikende gevolgen. Een niet al te bekende invalshoek die die het postnapoleontische tijdperk in een ander licht laat zien. Heel interessant en onderhoudend dus, maar door de overdaad aan archiefmateriaal gaat het boek vermoeien.

[Benjamin Julian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I gave up two thirds of the way through.

This book is relentlessly anecdotal and very thin on thought or analysis. It is well sourced, so it might contain useful pointers for further reading and study. I'd have preferred for Zamoyski to take a short breath between one story and the next -- and to cast the occasional glance back on what sort of terrain has just been crossed.

[Mateusz Dymczyk · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nie skończyłem jeszcze bo to jebany blok. Anyway czyta się świetnie, autor zarysowuje różne narrację tamtejszych czasów, przez co można wczuć w perspektywę wielu środowisk- od monarchów i biurokratów cesarskich, przez mieszczan i dworzan, aż po zwykłych chłopów. Między ogólnymi fakta przeplatane są ciekawostki i dziwactwa władz starego świata. Jeszcze 2 razy wypożyczę i w końcu skończę.