Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848

When Catherine died in November 1796, her son Paul ascended the throne and promptly embarked on a course that was to make him one of the most unpopular rulers in Russian history. He banned almost the entire canon of French literature, and established censorship offices at every port to scour imported goods for subversion. He proscribed foreign music and the use of words such as ‘citizen’, ‘club’, ‘society’ and ‘revolution’. Russians were forbidden to study abroad. He issued imperial decrees, which he frequently revised, governing manners and mealtimes, hairstyles, the wearing of moustaches, beards and sideburns, and clothes. People would suddenly learn that the style of their garments had been banned, and would have to frantically cut off tails and lapels, add or remove pockets, and pin hats into the prescribed shape before they could go out.

Gradually, Alexander came to realise that he must assume the responsibility fate had reserved for him. ‘I believe that if my turn to rule ever came, instead of going abroad, I would do better to work at making my country free and thereby to preserve it from being in the future used as a plaything by lunatics,’ he wrote to La Harpe. He began to see his life’s task as that of transforming the Russian autocracy into a constitutional monarchy and freeing the serfs. His turn came in 1801, following Paul’s assassination, in which he was passively complicit. He liberated political prisoners, repealed much of his father’s repressive legislation, lifted censorship and restrictions on travel, brought in educational reforms, founded universities, set up a commission to codify the laws, and commissioned his friend Aleksandr Vorontsov to draw up a charter for the Russian people modelled on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man.11

In 1804, when negotiating an alliance with Britain, he put forward a project for the transformation of Europe into a harmonious federation that would make war redundant. In 1807, when he signed a treaty with Napoleon at Tilsit, he believed that he was entering into a grand alliance of the Continent’s superpowers to ensure peace and progress. He gradually changed his view, and came to see the Emperor of the French as evil. He endured Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 with readings from the Bible and fervent prayer as his army was defeated and Moscow burned, and celebrated the French army’s expulsion with thanks to the Lord. Instead of making peace with Napoleon, a peace he could have dictated to great advantage for Russia (as many in his entourage wished), Alexander prosecuted the war. ‘More than ever, I resign myself to the will of God and submit blindly to His decrees,’ he announced in January 1813 as he set out to liberate Europe from the French ‘ogre’: he was convinced that he was merely a tool in the hands of the Almighty. Once he had achieved his purpose of forcing Napoleon to abdicate, he demonstrated (in a way that was to cost the allies dear in 1815) the spirit of Christian charity by granting him generous terms and sovereign status on the Mediterranean island of Elba.12

While he continued to hold Orthodox services, Alexander sometimes combined them, as on 10 April 1814, when according to both the Julian and the Gregorian calendars Easter fell on the same day, with Catholic and Protestant ones. In London, which the victorious allies visited following the defeat of Napoleon, he attended Bible Society meetings and communed with Quakers. In Baden on his way back to Russia he was introduced to the German Pietist Johann Heinrich Jung Stilling, with whom he held long discussions on how to bring about the kingdom of God on earth.

Over the next months Alexander would follow a path he believed to be dictated by God. He was frustrated by the practical difficulties he encountered at the Congress of Vienna, and believed that Napoleon’s escape from Elba was God’s punishment for the venial behaviour of its participants, himself included. At Heilbronn, on his way to join Wellington before Waterloo, he met Baroness Krüdener, who convinced him that he was the elect of God, and that he must concentrate on carrying out His will. Alexander was at the time absorbed in a book by the German philosopher Eckartshausen, which put forward the thesis that some people were ‘light-bearers’ endowed with the capacity to see Divine Truth through the clouds obscuring it from the multitude. That and the baroness’s words only reinforced his sense of being marked out by the Almighty. They knelt together to give thanks on hearing news of Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, and she followed him to Paris afterwards, moving into a house next door to the Élysée Palace where he took up his quarters. They saw each other every day, praying and holding often bizarre services, culminating in the spiritual jamboree on the plain of Vertus.13

Wellington, Castlereagh and many others thought the tsar had gone a little mad. Metternich had long regarded him as a child in thrall to dangerous enthusiasms. A cynical pragmatist, the Austrian foreign minister had no time for such nonsense, confident as he was that with Napoleon removed from the scene everything would return to normal. But in 1815 Alexander was probably the only one among the Continent’s monarchs and chief ministers who understood something of the longings and anxieties agitating European minds, and that many wanted something more than just peace, order and a full stomach.

His Holy Alliance was a genuine attempt to put the world to rights. He believed that only a system built on Christian morality could hope to bind the wounds opened up by the events of the past quarter of a century and restore harmony to a profoundly fragmented world. And although his approach may have been naïve and his solution half-baked, he alone among the monarchs and ministers who fashioned the Vienna settlement appreciated that no peace treaty, however equitable, could alone hope to bridge the chasm that had opened up in 1789.

2

Fear

News of the fall of the Bastille on 14 July 1789 had had an electrifying effect as it travelled across Europe and beyond, over the Atlantic to the United States and the European colonies of the Americas. Although the event did not in itself amount to much more than an alarming outbreak of rioting, mutiny and mob rule, it was universally interpreted as standing for something else, and accorded immense significance. The English statesman Charles James Fox declared it to be ‘the greatest event that ever happened in the World’. Rather than wait and observe further developments before reaching an opinion, most educated people immediately took up one of two diametrically opposed positions. It was as though they had seen a long-awaited signal.1

To those who identified with the ideological canon of the eighteenth-century European Enlightenment, the grim old fortress (which was largely redundant) was an emotionally charged symbol of the oppressive and iniquitous ancien régime whose institutions and practices were unacceptable to the modern mind. It stood for everything that was wrong with the world. Its fall was therefore seen as the harbinger of a new age, immeasurably more just and moral in every way than the existing one. There was nothing logical or reasoned about their response.

‘Although the Bastille had certainly not been a threat of any sort to any inhabitant of Petersburg,’ noted the French ambassador to the Russian court, ‘I find it difficult to express the enthusiasm aroused among the shopkeepers, merchants, townsfolk and some young people of a higher class by the fall of this state prison.’ He went on to describe how people embraced in the street as though they had been ‘delivered from some excessively heavy chain that had been weighing them down’. Even the young Grand Duke Alexander greeted the news with enthusiasm.2

From London, the barrister and legal reformer Sir Samuel Romilly wrote to his Genevan friend Étienne Dumont: ‘I am sure I need not tell you how much I have rejoiced at the Revolution that has taken place. I think of nothing else, and please myself with endeavouring to guess at some of the important consequences which must follow throughout Europe … the Revolution has produced a very sincere and very general joy here … even all the newspapers, without one exception, though they are not conducted by the most liberal or the most philosophical of men, join in sounding forth the praises of the Parisians, and in rejoicing at an event so important for mankind.’3

This view was echoed in Germany, where poets such as Klopstock and Hölderlin hailed the Revolution as the greatest act of the century, and numerous Germans flocked to Paris to breathe the air of freedom. ‘If the Revolution should fail, I should regard it as one of the greatest misfortunes that had ever befallen the human race,’ wrote the Prussian civil servant Friedrich von Gentz in a letter to a friend on 5 December 1790. ‘It is philosophy’s first practical triumph, the first instance of a form of government based on principles and on a coherent and consistent system. It is the hope as well as the consolation for so many of the old evils under which humanity groans.’4

To the young in particular, the sudden explosion of energy in the French capital held enormous appeal, and it set their collective imagination on fire. ‘A visionary world seemed to open up’ to the young poet Robert Southey, and according to Mary Wollstonecraft ‘all the passions and prejudices of Europe were instantly set afloat’. The news from Paris was greeted with almost religious fervour, and William Wordsworth spoke for many of his generation when he wrote: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’. The Second Coming could hardly have elicited greater ecstasy.5

The excitement was driven by emotions of an essentially spiritual nature – similar to those which would drive so many young people in the second half of the twentieth century to embrace without questioning a ‘socialism’ they were usually at a loss to define, but which they believed held out the promise of a better world. Convinced as they were that it was the ‘right’ way forward for humanity, many of those who hailed the French Revolution would not only seek to justify its worst atrocities, they would brand those who did not share their faith as ‘enemies of the people’.

To these, news of the upheaval in Paris came not only as a terrible shock, but as confirmation that a long-prepared onslaught on the ideological basis of their universe had begun. Monarchs reacted with predictable outrage. The British chargé d’affaires in Vienna reported that the Austrian Emperor went into ‘transports of passion’ and uttered ‘the most violent Menaces of Vengeance’ when he heard the news. The King of Sweden had not been able to sleep after reading reports of the goings-on in Paris, and the Empress of Russia had stamped her foot in rage.6

Barely more measured were the reactions of many who had less to lose. ‘If the French delirium is not properly repressed, it may prove more or less fatal to the heart of Europe,’ the philosopher Baron Melchior Grimm warned, ‘for the pestilential air must inevitably ravage and destroy everything it approaches.’ In England, Edmund Burke thundered against the ‘Venom’ being spewed out by ‘the Reptile Souls moving in the Dirt of the Obscure Vices in which they were generated’, as he described the French revolutionaries. Even in faraway North America the news from France divided those who, in the words of Edmund Quincy of Massachusetts, saw it ‘as another Star in the East – the harbinger of peace and good-will on earth’, from those for whom it was ‘a baleful comet that “from its horrid hair shook pestilence and war”, shed its influences for good or evil upon the New World as well as the Old’. ‘It inspired terror or joy, according as the eyes which watched its progress looked for its issues of life or of death in faith or in fear,’ he concluded.7

A notable feature of the gulf which had opened up was that while the discussion, if one can call it that, was conducted between people of considerable intellectual standing, it was carried on along almost entirely irrational lines. While partisans of the Revolution praised its vices as well as its virtues in poetic and quasi-religious terms, its enemies responded in the language of the Inquisition.

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, Edmund Burke warned that everything being perpetrated in Paris violated fundamental laws and undermined the twin pillars of religion and property on which the social order of Europe rested. History would vindicate his prediction that the road the revolutionaries had taken would lead them to commit untold horrors and to the eventual emergence of a brutal dictatorship. But long before this happened, his tone would change and his diatribes against the Revolution degenerate into hysterical rants.

Another prominent defender of the ancien régime, the Savoyard nobleman, lawyer, diplomat and philosopher Joseph de Maistre, propounded a spiritual view of the events. A devout Catholic, he had in his youth been an enthusiastic supporter of the American Revolution, and even welcomed the fall of the Bastille before identifying the evil lurking behind it. He now condemned the entire canon of the Enlightenment, arguing that God presided over a natural order of things, departure from which was perverse, and that the Catholic faith was ‘the mother of all good and real knowledge in the world’. He believed the eighteenth century would come to be seen by posterity ‘as one of the most shameful epochs in the history of the human mind’. As for the French Revolution, it was, according to him, an ‘inexplicable delirium’, ‘an atrocity’, ‘an impudent prostitution of reason’ and an insult to the concepts of justice and virtue. ‘There is in the French revolution,’ he concluded, ‘a satanic character which distinguishes it from everything we have seen and, perhaps from everything we will ever see.’8

Like those of Burke, which sold in great quantities and were translated into the principal European languages, the writings of Maistre echoed and gave form to the feelings of many who had viewed the progress of the Enlightenment with suspicion. As they watched events unfold during the 1790s they were confirmed in all their earlier objections to the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau and other eighteenth-century philosophers. With the benefit of hindsight, they could chart how the spread of their teachings had led to the catastrophe which had shattered their world.

While some saw it as an unfortunate process fostered by impious or misguided intellectuals, others saw it all in terms of a conspiracy against not only the established political order but against the very bases of European society and civilisation. Voltaire had waged a lifelong war which verged on the pathological against the Catholic Church, which he referred to as ‘l’Infâme’ (the infamous one). His influence was clearly discernible in the virulently anti-Christian tenor of the Revolution. Some related this not just to his writings and the secularising influences of the Enlightenment: Louis de Bonald saw everything that had happened since the first breaths of the Reformation in the fifteenth century as a gradual decline into the abyss. Others reached further back, tracing the rot to Jan Hus, John Wycliffe and the Lollards.9

There were those who pointed out that the date of the storming of the Bastille, 14 July, was the same as that on which Jerusalem fell to the First Crusade in 1099, suggesting some kind of revenge of the Infidel. To the more fanciful, the fall of the French monarchy was the outcome of ‘the curse of the Templars’, who had been destroyed by it nearly five centuries earlier. The Templars no longer existed, but there was a theory that while awaiting execution in the Bastille in 1314, the last Grand Master of the Order had founded four Masonic lodges to avenge its dissolution and his death on the French royal family.

Freemasonry had originated in Scotland at the beginning of the eighteenth century, spread to every country in Europe, and grew rapidly. As the movement attracted the intellectual elites, its membership was overwhelmingly secularist and freethinking, a loose brotherhood vaguely dedicated to the betterment of humanity through the spreading of reason, education and humanist values. Its members were grouped in lodges which met to listen to lectures and discuss anything from social problems to the latest fashions in the arts. Some came together for purposes of social networking, others in order to pursue more sensual interests such as drinking or sex. There was ritual involved, much of it extremely silly, purporting to have medieval or even Biblical origins. Freemasons often met in temples, crypts or artificial grottos, which added a whiff of the occult, and initiation rites involved blindfolding novices who were made to swear solemn oaths amid a panoply of gothick props, including cloaks, daggers, axes, burning braziers and cups of red wine symbolising blood – although real blood was sometimes drawn too.

As the lodges were founded by groups of individuals rather than by any organised system of delegation or procuracy, they evolved markedly different styles. In France, Freemasonry was generally social and often frivolous. In countries such as Poland and Russia it had more to do with aping French fashions than anything else. But in Germany it was taken very seriously. It reflected and partially overlapped religious trends seeking a return to a ‘purer’ form of Christianity and genuinely aspired to some kind of spirituality.

In 1776 Adam Weishaupt, Professor of Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt in Bavaria, started a student society, the Order of Perfectibles. There was nothing remarkable in this, as German universities pullulated with such confraternities. In 1778 he changed its name to the Order of the Illuminati, and introduced grades, along with an elaborate system of signs and passwords. There were also synonyms for people and places: Bavaria was ‘Greece’, Munich ‘Athens’ and Weishaupt himself ‘Spartacus’.

In 1780 a new recruit, Baron Adolf Franz von Knigge, alias ‘Philo’, began to transform the Order, imposing on it his own doctrine that all political states were unnatural and perverse creations which should be swept away. They should be replaced by a miasma of mutual respect and love which would bring about universal happiness. This supposed panacea to the world’s ills attracted large numbers of supporters, and seeped into the Masonic network of Germany, and thence into those of Austria, Bohemia, Hungary, northern Italy and even France. Adepts included Goethe, Schiller, Mozart, Herder and many other notables.

In 1785 the Elector of Bavaria suppressed the Order, thereby according it a notoriety and validation it hardly deserved. Spine-chilling tales began to circulate as to its occult aims. An anonymous book entitled Essai sur la secte des Illuminés, published in Paris on the eve of the Revolution, traced the origins of the sect to the Freemasons and dwelt with evident glee on its induction rituals and ordeals, describing how occult symbols were painted on the body of the novice in his own blood, and so on. It revealed that the Illuminati had a castle outside Paris with underground oubliettes into which those who had betrayed its secrets were thrown and forgotten. The author affirmed that the sect ‘has conceived the plan of taking over minds, and of conquering not kingdoms, not provinces, but the human spirit’, with the ultimate aim of destroying all thrones and governments, and then society itself. It operated through a network of circles in every country, each controlling a cluster of subsidiary circles, which he listed meticulously, giving the impression that the whole of Europe was comprehensively covered.10

This chimed with a fashion for the occult and a fascination with ancient Orphic and Egyptian cults, with Eleusinian and Rosicrucian ‘mysteries’, and with secret societies of every kind, whose most famous expression is Mozart’s Magic Flute. In Germany it gave rise to a literary genre, the Bundesroman, to which Schiller, Jean-Paul Richter and Goethe contributed works. Its most commercially successful product was Carl Grosse’s novel Der Genius (1791–95), whose aristocratic young protagonist’s picaresque adventures include not only much curious sexual activity but also involvement in an order which compels him to assassinate the King of Spain. Such books helped to propagate a belief in the ubiquity and omnipotence of the secret societies allegedly operating in the shadows, and a shelf of supposedly more factual publications established a connection between them and politics, confirmed in the minds of many by the fact that a majority of the prime movers of the French Revolution had been Freemasons. Some asserted that the ideological powerhouse of the Revolution, the Club des Jacobins, named after the former Dominican convent they met in, was actually an offshoot of Freemasonry. ‘The political committees that gave rise to the Jacobin Club had their origins in Illuminism which started in Germany, and, far from having been snuffed out, they are operating underground and have become all the more dangerous,’ wrote Leopold Alois Hoffmann. He pointed out that one of the leading Illuminati, Johann Christoph Bode, had visited Paris two years before the outbreak of the Revolution to confer with French Freemasons, and that the prominent revolutionary the marquis de Mirabeau had visited Berlin shortly before the fall of the Bastille.11

When, on 16 March 1792, King Gustavus III of Sweden was shot at a masked ball, it was evident to many all over Europe who was behind it. Later that year, when the Duke of Brunswick, a former Freemason who commanded the royalist forces invading France to crush the Revolution, drew back after the inconclusive Battle of Valmy, leaving the revolutionary army triumphant, it was again obvious that he had followed an occult order from above. A spate of sensationalist ‘revelation’ literature spoke of dark arts, secrets, spells and poison, and of their involvement in the unexpected deaths of various kings. The writers defended themselves against the charge of vagueness by hinting that their own lives were at risk, fuelling the growing myth of the ‘sect’s’ omnipresence and omnipotence. While many of the books and pamphlets convinced only the converted, a wider readership was persuaded by an authoritative and seminal work by the former Jesuit Abbé Augustin Barruel.12

Barruel had been combating the Enlightenment in print since 1781, and kept up his critique in the first years of the Revolution, which he saw as God’s punishment on the French for having tolerated and embraced its false philosophy. In 1792 he fled to England, where he published his two-volume Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire du Jacobinisme. It was reprinted six times in the space of a year and translated into all the major European languages, and continued in print for decades. Barruel’s writing has a tone of authority that brooks no argument, and his assertions, extravagant and improbable as they might appear, carried conviction.

In the opening sentence, he declares that the French Revolution was the fruit of a vast conspiracy carried out by a sect which had latterly taken the name of Jacobins, whose aim was to overthrow all existing thrones and altars and unleash anarchy. According to him, it consisted of 300,000 active leaders manipulating a further two million. ‘In this French Revolution, everything, including its most frightful crimes, was foreseen, premeditated, calculated, resolved, decreed,’ he affirmed, ‘everything was the consequence of the most profound perfidy, since everything was prepared and brought about by men who alone had knowledge of the conspiracy long planned in the secret societies, and who knew how to choose and bring on circumstances favourable to their plans.’13

Barruel believed it all began in the late 1720s, with Voltaire, who enlisted the support of Frederick II of Prussia and recruited D’Alembert and Diderot, who compiled the Encyclopédie, which under the guise of scientific knowledge and reason undermined religion, social hierarchy and most human institutions. The next step was the dissolution of the Jesuits, brought about by the manipulation of public opinion and statesmen. According to Barruel, the benign Freemasons interested in human welfare were the ‘useful idiots’ who helped destabilise society by creating spurious hierarchies and undermining existing institutions, above all the Church, with their pseudo-religious foolery. The Illuminati were more focused, and Weishaupt’s philosophy more dangerous. Barruel defined it thus: ‘Equality and liberty are the essential rights which man, in his original and primitive state, received from nature; the first blow to equality was dealt by property; the first attack on liberty by political society and governments; the only bases for both property and governments are the religious and civil laws; thus in order to re-establish man in his primitive rights of equality and liberty, one has to begin by destroying religion and civil society, and finish by abolishing property.’14