Kitabı oku: «Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848», sayfa 3
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Contagion
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Religious instruction, which had been banished from it by Joseph II, was brought back into the school curriculum. The imperial resolution of 10 March 1796 established a school police, whose job it was to invigilate ‘the moral and orderly behaviour’ of pupils at primary and secondary schools, and to keep watch over the morals as well as the political attitudes of their teachers. Just as actors were forbidden to ad-lib, teachers were forbidden to ‘improvise’. They were to use only approved textbooks, and avoid touching on political subjects even if they took an orthodox line, since they might inadvertently give their pupils the wrong idea. The Court Decree of 17 December 1794 stipulated that the text of any proposed lecture must be shown to the authorities not less than four weeks before it was to be delivered. Saurau pointed out that the state ‘pays public teachers to teach that which is agreeable to the Church and the government of the state, and it is a dangerous fallacy for a teacher to believe that he can teach the youth which has been entrusted to him along the lines of his own convictions and his own views’.21
The surveillance of foreigners was taken over by the Fremdenpolizei or foreigners police. Embassies were infiltrated by agents in the guise of servants, who were to report the most banal goings-on, scour the wastepaper baskets and fireplaces for ‘chiffons’, scraps of paper that might prove of interest, and purloin letters and other documents, which were passed to what was popularly known as the Schwarze Kabinette, the Black Cabinet. Here, letters would be expertly opened, copied and resealed in a matter of minutes so they could be replaced before anyone noticed their disappearance. The Fremdenpolizei was also to make use of informers belonging to every social sphere, who could be rewarded with money, but were preferably motivated by the conviction that they were working for the good of the empire.22
This was now under serious threat, and not only from the ‘errors’ of the Enlightenment and the ‘poison’ being manufactured in France. During a meeting in the magnificent baroque palace of Pillnitz in Saxony in August 1791, Francis’s father Leopold and Frederick William II of Prussia had issued a joint declaration in which they warned the French not to allow any harm to come to Louis XVI and his family. They also agreed to make common cause if either were to be attacked by France. Taken together, these amounted to a challenge, and it was taken up. Within the year France had issued a defensive declaration of war on Francis.
There was little enthusiasm in Austria for this war, still less when it led to the loss of the Austrian Netherlands, present-day Belgium. Rather than provoking a desire for revenge, the French successes were accepted with resignation, and officers as well as soldiers discussed the Revolution in a way that suggested Francis’s prophylactic measures had been of little use in keeping the ‘poison’ out. There were instances of his troops fraternising with French prisoners, and when these were marched across Habsburg dominions they aroused the sympathy of the population. They would give away their brass buttons, stamped with the slogan ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’, which were accepted with reverence by the emperor’s subjects. The police carried out frantic searches for these unholy relics and confiscated them as though they were dangerous weapons.23
Baron Johann Amadeus Thugut, who took over the direction of Austria’s foreign policy in 1793, quickly realised that this was no conventional war. He had spent some time in Paris in 1791, and understood that the Revolution represented a powerful new force and a menace unlike any other. The French had, in the words of one of his advisers, ‘made a discovery more menacing to human existence than powder’. ‘If they had invented some new war machine, we could have made one just like it,’ but by galvanising citizen-soldiers fighting for their own cause, not that of some crusty ruler, they had done something that ‘no one dares copy’.24
The slogan of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity proclaimed by the French appealed to those living under oppressive regimes, and paved the road to victory for their armies, which seemed to be inspired by an entirely novel zeal. ‘[The French generals] Custine and Dumouriez, at the head of troops that know the value of victory, seem to be inflamed with a kind of zeal like that of Omar, and hitherto they have preached this new species of Mahometanism with a degree of success equal to that of the Arabian,’ wrote William Augustus Miles, the British minister in Frankfurt. ‘If the fury of these modern Caliphs is not successfully & speedily checked, every sceptre in Europe will be broken before the close of the present century, and the Jacobins be everywhere triumphant.’ The analogy was not misplaced. While conservatives shuddered at the implications of the various conspiracy theories, the paladins of revolution, far from being ordered about by occult sects, were fired by a message which some referred to as their ‘Khoran’.25
