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