Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848. Adam Zamoyski
of Prussia had issued a joint declaration in which they warned the French not to allow any harm to come to Louis XVI and his family. They also agreed to make common cause if either were to be attacked by France. Taken together, these amounted to a challenge, and it was taken up. Within the year France had issued a defensive declaration of war on Francis.
There was little enthusiasm in Austria for this war, still less when it led to the loss of the Austrian Netherlands, present-day Belgium. Rather than provoking a desire for revenge, the French successes were accepted with resignation, and officers as well as soldiers discussed the Revolution in a way that suggested Francis’s prophylactic measures had been of little use in keeping the ‘poison’ out. There were instances of his troops fraternising with French prisoners, and when these were marched across Habsburg dominions they aroused the sympathy of the population. They would give away their brass buttons, stamped with the slogan ‘Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité’, which were accepted with reverence by the emperor’s subjects. The police carried out frantic searches for these unholy relics and confiscated them as though they were dangerous weapons.23
Baron Johann Amadeus Thugut, who took over the direction of Austria’s foreign policy in 1793, quickly realised that this was no conventional war. He had spent some time in Paris in 1791, and understood that the Revolution represented a powerful new force and a menace unlike any other. The French had, in the words of one of his advisers, ‘made a discovery more menacing to human existence than powder’. ‘If they had invented some new war machine, we could have made one just like it,’ but by galvanising citizen-soldiers fighting for their own cause, not that of some crusty ruler, they had done something that ‘no one dares copy’.24
The slogan of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity proclaimed by the French appealed to those living under oppressive regimes, and paved the road to victory for their armies, which seemed to be inspired by an entirely novel zeal. ‘[The French generals] Custine and Dumouriez, at the head of troops that know the value of victory, seem to be inflamed with a kind of zeal like that of Omar, and hitherto they have preached this new species of Mahometanism with a degree of success equal to that of the Arabian,’ wrote William Augustus Miles, the British minister in Frankfurt. ‘If the fury of these modern Caliphs is not successfully & speedily checked, every sceptre in Europe will be broken before the close of the present century, and the Jacobins be everywhere triumphant.’ The analogy was not misplaced. While conservatives shuddered at the implications of the various conspiracy theories, the paladins of revolution, far from being ordered about by occult sects, were fired by a message which some referred to as their ‘Khoran’.25
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‘It cannot be denied that the intoxication of the French in these unfortunate times is a real fanaticism, and that those who are styled patriots really do form a sect,’ noted the young duc de Richelieu, who was in Germany at the time. But he did not join the other aristocrats forming a royalist army at Koblenz. ‘It will be with this one as it has been with all those which have agitated the world. If it is left to itself it will die and vanish into the void from which it should never have emerged; if, on the contrary, it is persecuted, it will have its martyrs, and its lifespan will be prolonged far beyond its natural term.’ Thugut took a less relaxed view. As far as he could see, Austria now faced ‘a nation which has not only become utterly fanatical but which tries to drag along with it other people and which has prepared its current efforts for a long time in all of Europe through the voices of its prophets’. The Habsburg monarchy ruled a great many ‘other people’, and some were highly receptive to the message ringing out from France.1
That message had already taken effect in neighbouring Poland, which had, in May 1791, passed a new constitution embodying many of the ideas of the Enlightenment. It was in no way revolutionary, having been drawn up by the king and voted in by the nobility, led by the greatest aristocrats in the land. It enshrined Catholicism as the religion of state, and the king asked the pope to bless it, which he did. It had been praised by Edmund Burke, the most stalwart defender of the monarchical order in Europe.
This did not satisfy the Empress Catherine II of Russia. She concluded that Warsaw was ‘a brazier of Jacobinism’ and sent in her armies, which quickly overwhelmed the small Polish forces. She then set about rooting out all traces of ‘Jacobinism’: those involved in passing the constitution had their estates confiscated and were stripped of their rank, houses of prominent figures were searched and their private papers scrutinised for dangerous material, and everyone had to sign a declaration abjuring the ideals enshrined in the constitution and giving thanks for her intervention. The principal Polish constitutionalists had taken refuge in Dresden, where, through the good offices of the King of Saxony, they tried to negotiate a compromise, to no avail.2
Catherine’s intransigence had the effect of leaving them with nowhere to go but France, where they began to plot a real revolution in Poland. This broke out in March 1794 when the veteran of the American War of Independence Tadeusz Kościuszko proclaimed an act of insurrection in Kraków’s market square. If his intentions were no more radical than those of the American colonists with whom he had fought in the 1770s, those of the Warsaw mob which rose in support went a great deal further. After two days’ fighting it expelled the Russian troops from the city, set up a Jacobin Club and began lynching assorted aristocrats, labelled as ‘traitors’ to the nation.
‘The whole business in Poland is the same as the French Revolution,’ reported the Austrian minister at Warsaw, Benedikt de Caché, adding that there were French advisers, French officers and French money involved. An Austrian spy code-named ‘Cézar’ reported from Warsaw that the Poles were receiving arms and money as well as military advisers, particularly artillerymen, from France (there is no evidence of this). Thugut and Francis ignored the fact that far from being molested or harmed in any way the King of Poland had associated himself with the national cause, and even donated his jewels and plate to it. They were greatly relieved when Catherine sent in her troops, which prevailed over the Polish army and retook Warsaw, putting an end to the insurrection.3
Pergen had been more preoccupied with some Hungarian Jacobins who in the early summer of 1794 hatched a plot to overthrow the Habsburg dynasty, led by the former secret police operative and one-time Franciscan friar Ignác Martinovics. Martinovics may or may not have been working for the police, but one of his accomplices, Joseph Degen, certainly was. The conspiracy, such as it was, was nipped in the bud, and ended in seventy-five arrests and seven executions. Whether it had been initiated by his agents or not, it vindicated Pergen’s policies, and the prestige of his police system was enhanced. ‘Our Police safeguard our physical health,’ the minister of justice Count Clary wrote to Francis, ‘and I do not think that I am taking excessive liberties if I lay at Your Majesty’s feet my humble suggestion that the Secret Police, this essential pillar of the Throne and our general security, should be entrusted with the task of looking after the spiritual and moral welfare of our citizens too.’4
Pergen and his deputy had identified a number of ‘suspects’ in Vienna itself, but had no case against them. In June 1794 Saurau’s agents began spreading the rumour that there was a plot to set various buildings alight and in the ensuing confusion assassinate the imperial family and selected notables. Agents provocateurs were set in motion to elicit less than loyal responses, and the first suspects were arrested. Pergen urged the emperor to bypass legal process and have them tried by a special tribunal, in effect by the prosecution, but several highly placed persons, led by the eminent jurist Karl Anton von Martini, protested vigorously. The ensuing trial fell apart. All that could be proved against the ‘Jacobins’ was that one of them had written a bad poem in which there was a phrase about all men being equal, and others had made inflammatory statements of one sort or another.5