Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848. Adam Zamoyski
French victory, which had also been assisted by the Illuminati. The London Corresponding Society and the other English reform movements were naturally involved too.29
In his Reflections on the Political and Moral State of Society at the Close of the Eighteenth Century, published in 1800, John Bowles asserted that modern philosophy was ‘corrupting the heart of Europe’, a view shared by many. Not far behind lurked the notion that this disease was being spread by a conspiracy. Burke admitted that people of intelligence and talent were naturally drawn towards what he termed ‘the Cloacâ Maximâ of Jacobinism’. But most preferred the metaphor of seduction, and in otherwise serious arguments about the evils of the Revolution writers would effortlessly fall into the imagery of French wolves preying on innocent sheep, of corrupt conspirators ensnaring the pure. The publication of Barruel’s book was followed by that of a number of others, most of them précis or derivations of it, which confirmed the existence of a ‘diabolical’ conspiracy. The Jacobins were fearsome, according to Bowles, as ‘the cultivation of their talents, the extent of their knowledge, their advancements in science, only enable them the better to pursue their projects of destruction, more effectually to attack Religion, Government, and Social Order, and to establish more firmly their horrid sway of impiety and vice’. More terrifying still, the Jacobins were not merely a group of people, they were a monstrous entity. Jacobinism, according to another tract, ‘is not merely a political, but an anti-social monster, which, in pursuit of its prey, alternately employs fraud and force. It first seduces by its arts, then subdues by its arms. For the accomplishment of its object it leaves no means unemployed which the deep malevolence of its naïve sagacity can devise. It pervades every department of literature and insinuates itself into every branch of science. Corruption is its food, profligacy its recreation, and demolition the motive of its actions, and the business of its life.’ In consequence, anyone who raised in some circles the subject of prison reform, abolition of the slave trade or the regulation of child vagrancy could expect to be accused of peddling ‘French philosophies’.
Like the politicians, the authors of these novels and tracts display what seems to have been a common instinct to avoid confronting the phenomenon of the French Revolution in the spirit of analysis. They prefer the parable of a mass explosion of every kind of wickedness, caused by the breakdown of the mesh of moral and social structures brought about by ‘philosophy’ concocted by the Illuminati and disseminated by Jacobins. It was a simpler explanation, and, implausible as it might appear, it was comfortingly understandable.
It also confirmed the necessity of pursuing the war and slaying the dragon. ‘It is not the Cause of Nation against nation, but as you well observe, the cause of mankind,’ explained Edmund Burke. ‘We are at war with a principle. And an example, which there is no shutting out by Fortresses or excluding by Territorial Limits. No lines of demarcation can bound the Jacobin Empire. It must be extirpated in the place of its origin, or it will not be confined to that place.’ There had, in his opinion, never been a war like it, and other conflicts had been ‘the games of Children in comparison to it’.30
One of the worst things about the war as far as Burke was concerned was that it was in effect a civil war, since there was a home front. And even when, in 1802, the Treaty of Amiens brought an end to hostilities with France, the war at home continued. Food riots and disturbances in Lancashire and Yorkshire in 1801–02 were rumoured to be the fruit of a conspiracy by a society calling itself ‘the Black Lamp’. On 16 November 1802 Colonel Edward Despard, an Irish landowner and British officer of some distinction, who had been a member of the London Corresponding Society and been gaoled without charge for three years in the 1790s, was arrested in a public house in Lambeth along with a handful of soldiers and labourers. According to government informers, he believed that by seizing the Tower of London and the Bank of England he could bring about revolution, but it is not clear that he actually had any intention of doing so. He was also supposedly linked with the Black Lamp conspiracy. There is considerable disagreement among historians as to whether the Despard plot had any real substance, and whether the Black Lamp was an organised working-class movement or just the figment of an informant’s imagination. The government was taking no chances. Despard and six others were found guilty of treason and executed. Although there was little evidence as to his designs and connections, the government’s fears are well attested by the presence in the crowd at his execution of agents armed with rockets which they were to fire, should the need arise, to summon troops concentrated nearby in large numbers.31
War was declared against France once more in 1803. The threat of invasion galvanised patriotic fervour as Napoleon Bonaparte massed a large force in a camp outside Boulogne and set about building a fleet of barges in which to convey it across the Channel. That of moral contamination appeared slight, given that in 1803 the British government raised 85,000 men in the Militia, and over 400,000 volunteers. In the southern counties, about 50 per cent of all men aged seventeen to fifty-five came forward in what was an extraordinary social movement and demonstration of political will. In order to protect his flotilla of ungainly transports Napoleon needed the main French battle fleet. But this was disastrously defeated off Cape Trafalgar on 21 October 1805, a victory that removed the threat of armed invasion. Yet this did nothing to alter what seems to have become a convenient paradigm for the government.32
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While Trafalgar saved Britain from the threat of invasion, it also led to Napoleon’s domination of Europe. Denied the opportunity to get to grips with his English enemy on land, he struck the camp at Boulogne and marched off to deal with Britain’s Austrian and Russian allies. He forced half of the Austrian forces to surrender at Ulm, and defeated the rest, along with a large Russian army, at Austerlitz. He then turned on their new Prussian ally, whose forces he destroyed at Jena and Auerstadt, and crushed the last, Russian, army of the coalition on the fields of Eylau and Friedland.
Between 1805 and 1807 the triumphant Emperor of the French redrew the map of Europe and imposed his will on the Continent. He dismantled the Holy Roman Empire, turning its Emperor Francis II into Francis I of Austria. He reduced Prussia to the status of a second-rank power and garrisoned Berlin with French troops. And he forced Alexander I of Russia into an alliance which effectively set up a common security system dominated by France. In 1809 Austria tried to take advantage of Napoleon’s involvement in Spain by attacking his forces and allies in Germany, only to be defeated at Wagram. The future of the monarchy hung in the balance, and was only bought by the sacrificial offering of the emperor’s daughter Marie-Louise, who became Napoleon’s consort. This amounted to official sanction of his imperial status: their son was given the title of King of Rome, which proclaimed him as the next Emperor of Europe and heir to Charlemagne. If Old Europe did not like it, it had at least to concede one thing – Napoleon had put the evil genie of the Revolution back in the bottle and sealed it.
When he became First Consul and effective dictator of France in 1799, Napoleon had been faced by indescribable chaos, resulting from ten years of revolution and counter-revolution, internecine political struggle, random political terror, class war and open civil war in some parts of the country. The authority of the state had been undermined by the rapid succession of governments, each of which overturned the legitimacy of its predecessor. The law had been turned into a tool by rival political factions and justice had been politicised. Napoleon may have been a product of the Enlightenment and what conservatives saw as its depraved values, but he was a pragmatist. If he did not believe in Divine Right, he certainly had no time for Jacobin ideology, Illuminati, or dreamers of any kind. He believed in order, and he knew how to impose it.
The key to restoring the rule of law, stability and public confidence was efficient policing. Yet the police he inherited had for a decade been used almost exclusively for factional political ends. Their intelligence-gathering was geared to monitoring the attitude of the population to the incumbent government and looking out for sources of potential opposition. Unlike the detection of crime, this activity was not subject to the disciplines