One March morning in 1819, a young radical activist named Karl Ludwig Sand knocked on the door of the home of August von Kotzebue, the famous royalist writer, in the German city of Mannheim. Presenting himself as an admirer of the great dramatist, Sand asked to speak to Kotzebue, but was told he would be out until later. Sand returned that afternoon and, upon meeting his literary hero in the drawing room, stabbed Kotzebue with a dagger before plunging the weapon into his own stomach. A member of one of the Burschenschaften, Germany’s nationalist student groups, Sand wanted to punish Kotzebue’s mockery of liberal ideals. Though he failed to kill himself, he succeeded in murdering Kotzebue.
Responding to this act of suicide terrorism, Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian Empire’s foreign minister, asked, “What can one do against men who kill themselves?” It is in moments like this that the reader of Phantom Terror is most tempted to see in 19th-century Europe an analogue of today’s protracted struggle against Islamic fundamentalism. In the preface, however, Adam Zamoyski announces that he will restrain himself from mentioning George W. Bush. He will, instead, allow the reader to supply his or her own connections.
The setting is the roiling half-century after the French Revolution. Having seen the Old Regime fall to the Jacobins, as well as Napoleon’s revolutionary imperialism, European monarchies feared subversion and terror inspired by the French example. The Enlightenment had encouraged belief in republican government all over Europe: Great Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Austria, the Prussian and German states, and Russia. Though their wishes were often less radical than the Jacobins’, reformers wanted a unified nation-state—the modern reader must remember that nationalism originated on the left—and a government defined by a liberal constitution.
Continental rulers reacted with all manner of repressive tactics, censoring books, restricting travel, and purging universities of “immoral” faculty. One result of their fears was the inauguration of the modern secret police force. Any fair-minded reader, when learning about 19th-century espionage, sees how fatuous it is to claim that the contemporary United States is a “police state.” If you want to know how a real police state operates, consider how the Bourbon monarchy watched over French citizens after the Napoleonic Wars. In huge backroom operations, state agents carefully opened loads of civilian mail. Informants called mouchards (derived from the French word for “fly”) were recruited from the streets to spy on everyone, especially the denizens of brothels, pubs, and coffeehouses. Other reactionary governments created their own versions of this repressive apparatus.
The late Richard Grenier once wrote that conspiracy theories are the sophistication of the ignorant; but at this time in Europe’s history, they were also the ignorance of the sophisticated. Monarchs and their courtiers believed in them as intensely as the man on the street. The storming of the Bastille (July 14, 1789) had helped incubate a conspiracist impulse in Europe that became a fixture in political thinking. Some noted that the Bastille fell on the same day that Jerusalem had fallen in the First Crusade. Encouraged by lurid books, people believed that the Illuminati, Masons, and Templars had long ago taken control of history and, from Tuscany to Moscow, were guiding current events.
It is difficult to overstate the power these fantasies exerted in the decades after 1789. The murder of Kotzebue is one of the few acts of genuine terror documented here; most of the era’s anxiety was generated by hysterical tales of secret societies. Being unfalsifiable by definition, conspiracy theories only grow more potent with each debunking. A perverse feedback mechanism existed in which more counterrevolutionary “security” only worsened people’s sense of insecurity. As for Metternich, Zamoyski writes, “Instead of reassuring him, lack of evidence of conspiracy tended to make [him] more suspicious.”
The “intelligence” gathered by the continent’s legion of spies was largely junk, the result of fevered imaginations and greed for money and approval. Zamoyski is a master at conveying the absurdity and stupidity of these agents, whose extant reports show the worthlessness of their work. (It was not uncommon for two informants to mistake one another for subversives and file reports on each other’s feigned plotting.) Much of the holdings of the Paris police archives, on which Zamoyski relies for primary sources, burned during the Paris Commune. But as the author wryly notes, “There is no reason to suppose that what perished was of a superior quality to what remains.” Austrian police archives contain similarly useless reports, usually long lists of misspelled names with no other information, much less evidence of wrongdoing.
Time and again, rulers construed uprisings not as expressions of discontent—the stimulus for action was more likely to be a bad grain harvest than a radical pamphlet—but as grand conspiracies hatched by shadowy maestros. The locus of Europe’s subversion was thought to be a body called the comité directeur. From its perch in Paris, this imagined group was the alleged central committee of European discontent, the heirs of Robespierre and Saint-Just.
Like all fantastical masterminds, the comité was everywhere and nowhere. Utterly convinced of its existence, European authorities whiffed its influence in every protest and every disturbance. A firework hidden behind a laundry basket in the Tuileries was interpreted as an attempt to overthrow the king. When, as the Austrian Army marched toward Naples, Metternich learned of an uprising in Piedmont, he met with Emperor Francis and immediately blamed the nefarious comité. He responded by dispatching another 60,000 Austrian troops to Lombardy, from which location they could strike Piedmont. Czar Alexander, in a frenzy of his own about this obscure body, was at the ready with 90,000 Russian troops, should backup prove necessary.
Alexander comes across as the most paranoid of the absolutist monarchs. His writing brims with bombast and hyperbole. Responding to a mild mutiny among a guard regiment, the czar speaks of an “empire of evil” emanating from French salons. In another instance, after denouncing the dreaded comité, he compares his plight with that of Job. By the 1820s, he had grown so fanatical about fending off imaginary revolutionaries that he declared it to be “the only glory to which I aspire.”
Metternich, too, seems to verge on the monomaniacal. Normally the subject of staid works of diplomatic history, Metternich is a frivolous figure in these pages, ranting about cabals and obsessed with illusory threats. Still, his instinct for realpolitik tempered his paranoia. McGeorge Bundy, long before he became John F. Kennedy’s national security adviser, described Metternich as “the last great servant of a worn-out, sterile system of royalist repression.” Henry Kissinger, another practitioner of cynical realism, wrote of Metternich that his often lofty pronouncements were simply “self-serving rationalizations” for Habsburg policies.
Indeed, no matter how worried Metternich was by “the vast and dangerous conspiracy” he saw gripping Europe, he never forgot about the balance of power. He dismissed Alexander’s pitch to turn Europe into a Christian federation, calling it a “high-sounding nothing.” (Metternich, however, eventually proposed a pan-European intelligence agency.) And he quietly hoped that Polish revolts would divert Czar Nicholas I, Alexander’s successor, from interfering with Austrian influence elsewhere on the continent, especially in Italy.
An able chronicler of Polish history, Zamoyski has also written studies of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, giving him the fluency to balance stories of bumbling brothel tipsters with accounts of aristocratic conferences in Troppau and Laibach. It is this blend of high politics and sordidness that makes Phantom Terror so enjoyable a narrative. And although it sometimes labors under the sheer weight of its subject matter—the nonspecialist reader will likely be overwhelmed by the territory it covers—Zamoyski delivers on a relevant topic. In a time when hashtags are replacing summits, it is tempting to hear names like Metternich and Castlereagh and yearn for the age of competent stewardship. The author shows us the folly of this nostalgia.
Robert Wargas is a writer in New York.
