Book Review
Phantom Terror:
Political Paranoia and the Creation Of the Modern State 1789 - 1848
by Adam Zamoyski
Many consider
the French Revolution to be the birth of modern politics in the
Western world. It was a traumatic birth, though, and resulted in the
Napoleonic Wars and the reactionary, reestablishment of monarchical
rule in Europe. Adam Zamoyski’s Phantom Terror addresses
the repercussions of those events on the general populace and the
governments of that era.
One
social level
that gets written about extensively by
Zamoyski is the European aristocracy and how they devised plans to
maintain power. The middle and lower classes were seen as a threat.
Ideologies of nationalism and
liberal democratic government made them worry that their status as
monarchs and government officials was under attack. The main actor in
Zamoyski’s drama is Metternich, the Austrian diplomat for the
Habsburg Empire. His authoritarian tendencies led him to hold the
Congress of Vienna, as well
as conferences in Toplitz and Karlsbad,
where all the leaders of Europe met to divide up territory and scheme
up ways to keep the common people down. Another important figure in
this book is Tsar Alexander of Russia, the paranoid Christian mystic
who at first felt sympathetic to liberalism but switched to
conservative totalitarian politics towards the later years of his
life. Russian troops at the time were spread all over Europe in an
effort to prevent any uprisings and to spread the Russian empire
farther west. Also involved were King Frederick William of Prussia,
King Ferdinand of Spain, the French Bourbon monarchy, Castlereagh of
Great Britain, and a whole host of other minor political
functionaries. Italy and
Germany were little more than a handful of small kingdoms with no
concept of nationality.
On
the other side were the lower and middle classes of Europe.
Demonstrations, riots, terrorist attacks, assaults, assassinations,
and minor uprisings were common in those times. Most of them were of
small consequence, often happening because of low wages or high food
prices. Some of them were the result of students asserting a national
identity as a form of resistance to the rule of the Habsburg Empire.
A small number of
disturbances were the result of activists wanting a republic
characterized by democratic rule. Zamoyski drives home the point that
the turbulence and violence of that era could have been minimized if
the citizens had had more political representation. The dictatorial
policies of the conservative
aristocracy and
their bureaucracies
caused more problems than they
solved.
Metternich
and Alexander saw things differently. They
were convinced that a secret committee of conspirators were planning
and directing all the controversies in order to persecute and
eventually overthrow the monarchies of Europe. Those rulers became
obsessed with conspiracy theories and saw the machinations of
Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, the Templars, Luddites,
Jacobins, Jews, and
Jesuits behind every event that happened no matter how small or
trivial. They set up an extensive police force and network of spies
to search for this secret committee and wasted a lot of time and
money because no such organization ever existed. Some secret
societies, like the Italian Carbonari, really did exist but their
lack of organization, insularity, and small numbers never led to any
substantial action. The governments involved themselves in the
extensive reading of people’s mail, entrapment through the use of
agents provocateurs, and
paying informants
for information that usually proved to be false or misleading
. They
instituted
a massive surveillance state and wound up with troves of worthless
documents describing nothing of any importance. They also engaged in
extensive censorship of books, art, theater, and schools. Their
efforts nearly bankrupted the Habsburg bureaucracy without producing
any worthwhile
results. By the middle of the 19th
century, nationalist movements were causing the Habsburg and Russian
Empires to weaken and decline anyhow.
Zamoyski
makes a
good case for the
idea that political mismanagement and lack of freedom eventually
resulted in the problematical governments of fascism and communism in
the 20th
century. He makes his point a little too bluntly though. Most
chapters are pretty much the same. Political disturbances occur while
the paranoid government officials send out their spies to locate the
secret society
that instigates all the chaos. No book club, discussion group,
student fraternity, cafe conversation, barroom brawl, or fist fight
is too trivial for Zamoyski to ignore. Descriptions
of upper-class conspiracy theories, mail reading committees, or plots
to infiltrate
suspect organizations are redundant to an extreme. The same basic
ideas and events get repeated over and over again from the first
chapter to the last and
it goes on for 500 pages.
Phantom
Terror addresses
a fascinating subject. The reading gets bogged down by too much
detail, a lot of it repetitious
and unnecessary. Zamoyski
could have made his point in half as many pages without succumbing to
the temptation to over-document so much of what happened in those
times. Still, the issue he raises is worth considering; at the start
of the 21st
century our governments appear to be making some of the same mistakes
that were made back then in Europe. Some results appear to be the
same too while the
internet and surveillance cameras are just making espionage and
paranoia all that much easier.
Zamoyski, Adam. Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation Of the Modern State 1789 - 1848. Basic Books, New York: 2015.
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