The Holy Roman Emperor Francis II. Portrait by Johann Baptist Edler von Lampi, 1816. (© DHM/Bridgeman Images)
William Pitt the Younger. Portrait by John Hoppner. (Rafael Valls Gallery London/Bridgeman Images)
An explosion in the rue Saint-Nicaise in Paris on 24 December 1800, the work of French royalists and Pitt’s agents bent on assassinating Napoleon. (The Art Archive/Alamy)
Joseph Fouché, the prototype of the modern secret policeman. Engraving by Philippe Velyn, c.1810. (akg-images)
The murder of August von Kotzebue at Mannheim on 23 March 1819. (akg-images)
The Wartburg Festival, held on 18 October 1817 to celebrate the tercentenary of the Reformation and the fourth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig. Woodcut c.1880. (akg-images)
Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich, chancellor of Austria. Portrait by Josef Danhauser. (© DHM/Bridgeman Images)
Two Men Contemplating the Moon (detail), by Caspar David Friedrich, 1819. The painting exercised the Prussian police, as the two men are wearing the banned ‘Old German’ costume and might be plotting. (Fine Art/Alamy)
The Radical’s Arms by George Cruikshank, published 13 November 1819 by George Humphrey. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
Drawing of an ‘anti-cavalry machine’. (The National Archives, Kew. TS II/200)
The Duke of Wellington, arch-reactionary and apologist for the ‘Peterloo Massacre’. Attributed to Thomas Lawrence. (Huntington Library/Superstock)
The Peterloo Massacre, 16 August 1819. By George Cruikshank, published 1 October 1819 by Richard Carlile. (Manchester Art Gallery/Bridgeman Images)
Radical Parliament!! 1820. By George Cruikshank, c.1820. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
The murder of the duc de Berry on 13 February 1820. By Louis Louvel. (RA/Lebrecht Music & Arts)
A document purporting to be a copy of the hieroglyphs used by a secret society. (Documents from Archives nationales, Paris, F/7 Police Générale 6684, Sociétés secrètes, Dossier 4)
A meeting of the Carbonari, as imagined by a contemporary illustrator. (Private Collection/Archives Charmet/Bridgeman Images)
A drawing supplied to the French police by an informer, supposedly of daggers being forged by French and Italian secret societies for the murder of European monarchs. (Documents from Archives nationales, Paris, F/7 Police Générale 6684, Sociétés secrètes, Dossier 4)
General Alexei Arakcheev, by an anonymous artist, 1830s. (© Fine Art Images/AGE Fotostock)
Russian political prisoners in the dungeons of the Schlusselburg fortress. (Everett Collection Historical/Alamy)
The Peter and Paul fortress in St Petersburg. (RIA Novosti)
Count Alexander von Benckendorff, head of the notorious Third Section. Portrait by Yegor Bottman. (Fine Art Images/AGE Fotostock)
Tsar Nicholas I. Portrait by Vassily Tropinin, 1826. (© Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy)
Russian troops parade following the suppression of the Polish insurrection of 1830. Painting by Nikanor Grigorievich, 1837. (akg-images)
The remains of the ‘machine infernale’ used by Giuseppe Fieschi in his attempt to murder King Louis-Philippe. (Roger-Viollet/REX)
Infortunées victimes du 27, 28 et 29 Juillet 1830, by Grandville. (Bibliothèque nationale de France)
The folkloric and nationalist jamboree held at the castle of Hambach in May 1832. After a drawing by F. Massler. (akg-images)
Bombarding the Barricades, or the Storming of Apsley House, published February 1832 by J. Bell. (© The Trustees of the British Museum)
Barrikade in der Burggasse zu Altenburg am 18 Juni 1848. (akg-images)
Political prisoners at Trier following the suppression of the local revolt in 1848. By Johann Velten, 1849. (akg-images/De Agostini Picture Lib./A. Dagli Orti)
Patrol of the Vienna National Guard on 14 March 1848. (akg-images)
The Great Water Snake as it Appeared to Many in 1848. Published 30 December 1848. (akg-images)
General Survey of Europe in August 1849, by Ferdinand Schroeder, 1849. (akg-images)
The Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon’s final nemesis, also marked the defeat of the forces unleashed by the French Revolution of 1789. This had challenged the foundations of the whole social order and every political structure in Europe. It had opened a Pandora’s Box of boundless possibilities, and horrors: the sacred was profaned, the law trampled, a king and his queen judicially murdered, and thousands of men, women and children massacred or guillotined for no good reason. The two and a half decades of warfare that followed saw thrones toppled, states abolished and institutions of every sort undermined as the Revolution’s subversive ideas swept across Europe and its colonies.
The reordering of the Continent by those who triumphed over Napoleon in 1815 was intended to reverse all this. The return to a social order based on throne and altar was meant to restore the old Christian values. The Concert of Europe, a mutual pact between the rulers of the major powers, was designed to ensure that such things could never happen again.
Yet the decades that followed were dominated by the fear that the Revolution lived on, and could break out once more at any moment. Letters and diaries of the day abound in imagery of volcanic eruption engulfing the entire social and political order, and express an almost pathological dread that dark forces were at work undermining the moral fabric on which that order rested. This struck me as curious, and I began to investigate.
The deeper I delved, the more it appeared that this panic was, to some extent, kept alive by the governments of the day. I also became aware of the degree to which the presumed need to safeguard the political and social order facilitated the introduction of new methods of control and repression. I was reminded of more recent instances where the generation of fear in the population – of capitalists, Bolsheviks, Jews, fascists, Islamists – has proved useful to those in power, and has led to restrictions on the freedom of the individual by measures meant to protect him from the supposed threat. A desire to satisfy my curiosity about what I thought was a historic cultural phenomenon gradually took on a more serious purpose, as I realised that the subject held enormous relevance to the present.
I have nevertheless refrained from drawing attention to this in the text, resisting the temptation, strong at times, to suggest parallels between Prince Metternich and Tony Blair, or George W. Bush and the Russian tsars. Leaving aside the bathos this would have involved, I felt readers would derive more fun from drawing their own.
In order to avoid cluttering the text with distracting reference numbers, I have placed all notes relating to quotations and facts contained in a given paragraph under a single one, positioned at the end of that paragraph. For the sake of simplicity, I have used the Gregorian calendar throughout when referring to Russian events and sources. I have not been as consistent on the transliteration of Russian names, using those versions with which I believe the reader will be most familiar – the Golitsyn family have appeared in Latin script for over three