Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848. Adam Zamoyski
understand. There was certainly some subversive activity by the detritus of the radical groups of the 1790s and the United Irishmen, those of Despard’s associates who had not been hanged, Spenceans and others. They were joined by returning transportees of 1793 and 1794 whose sentences had expired, many of whom were eager to resume the struggle where they had left off. But the authorities knew who they were, and had spies in every cell, so they would have been aware that there was no connection between them and the Luddites, and that they did not even try to exploit the disturbances. The only reformist activity and political opposition to the government in the past decade had been carried on at Westminster by the likes of Burdett, and in the open by Cartwright and others. The Revolution in France had been shackled by Napoleon, and now Napoleon himself no longer represented a threat to Britain. In October he suffered a crushing defeat at Leipzig that put his own future in question.
The bumper harvest of 1813 and the influx of cheap grain from the liberated Continent ensured that there would be no food riots, and without the spur of hunger the lower orders were generally docile. ‘I defy you to agitate a fellow with a full stomache,’ Cobbett famously complained. Not only had they failed to be stirred by slogans crossing the Channel from France, they stolidly clung to their own cherished shibboleths. The Royal Jubilee held in 1809 to mark the fiftieth year of the reign of George III had unleashed a quite unexpected effusion of patriotism and attachment to the monarchy in all classes. As the end of the war and the prospect of peace drew near, people of conservative bent all over the United Kingdom could congratulate themselves that the storm had been weathered. In June 1815 the final act of Waterloo would only serve to place a gilded full stop at the end of the story. Yet the fear would not subside.22
‘The revolutionary ideas of France have already made but too great a progress in the hearts of men in all countries, and even in the very centre of every capital,’ warned a leading article in The Times a couple of weeks before the momentous battle. ‘It is not Bonaparte that at present forms the danger of Europe: he is unmasked. It is the new opinions; it is the disorganisation of men’s minds; it is the making revolt a calculation of private interest; it is the most deadly of all contagions, the contagion of immorality, of false philanthropy, of a perfidious self-styled philosophy; from all of which the world requires to be protected. This is the true hydra which must be destroyed, or it will destroy all Europe. The cause of morality is the cause of God; it is the cause of all men, of all nations, of all thrones!’23
Such a cause could not be defeated in the field, and, spectacular as it was, the victory of Waterloo did not alter the attitude of the cabinet, which refused to abandon its fable of a seething mass of revolutionaries bent on overthrowing the British constitution and murdering the king and most of the aristocracy.
7
The wars that came to an end in 1815 had been no ordinary wars. For the best part of a quarter of a century, military operations had swept across Europe, from Lisbon to Moscow, from the Baltic to the toe of Italy: if Sweden, Norway, England, Sardinia and Sicily had been spared invasion, Finland, Wales, Ireland, Malta, Egypt and Palestine had not, and the entire population of the Continent had been affected in material terms. The fighting took in almost all of Europe’s colonies, from Florida in the west to Java in the east, and much of it took place at sea. It lasted six times as long as would the First World War, and four times as long as the Second. Battlefield casualties were not as great, but deaths among soldiers and civilians from wounds, disease, famine and exposure were comparable in relative terms, and certainly unprecedented.
The end of hostilities brought a change for the worse in material terms for the majority of the population of Europe, particularly of the poor. Markets closed by war reopened; others, created by the need for armament and military supplies, collapsed, giving rise to economic dislocation on a vast scale. War had been waged at the economic level, with both sides imposing blockades designed to ruin the other. While Britain did everything to starve France of its colonial trade, Napoleon had excluded British trade from mainland Europe. Items traditionally imported from Britain or the colonies had to be produced at home, and the absence of British competition brought prosperity to parts of Saxony, Austria, Switzerland and Catalonia, to the wool, iron and steel industries of Prussia. Belgium went through an industrial revolution caused by the demand for military goods. Rural areas benefited as the lack of colonial trade gave a boost to the sugar beet industry. The length of the wars lent these provisional developments an element of permanence.
The coming of peace removed trade barriers and flooded hitherto protected areas of Europe with colonial goods and cheap English imports, wreaking havoc with local economies. Yet it did little to alleviate hardship in England. While European markets opened up to English goods such as textiles and steel, it was stocks piled up during the blockade that were exported, and there was therefore no corresponding boost in production or reduction in unemployment. Meanwhile, imports of cheap European corn threatened to ruin British farmers.
The wars had coincided with the introduction of labour-saving machinery and of significant increases in population, and the resulting downward pressure on wages was increased by the influx of disbanded soldiers. The burdens placed on poor households were added to by the return of maimed men unable to work but needing to be fed. Dramatic fluctuations in the currency supply over the period and the introduction of paper money by revolutionary France and then Britain added to the instability and sapped confidence. Every government in Europe taxed whatever it could to pay off wartime borrowing. Britain had spent more in real terms than it would on the First World War, and its national debt was astronomical. Russia’s had multiplied by twenty times between 1801 and 1809, and would more than double again by 1822. Austria was technically bankrupt: over the next three decades an average of 30 per cent of state revenue would be siphoned off to service its debt.1
The social consequences, both of the wars and of the peace, were far-reaching. Young men, and the women who often followed them, were plucked out of their families and communities, away from their restraints and taboos. They were often obliged to serve not the interests of their own ruler, but those of his ally, with the result that Portuguese peasants would find themselves fighting in Russia, and Poles in Spain. Their experiences both emancipated and brutalised them. Those who avoided conscription by running away from home and going into hiding lived by banditry, and would never again be susceptible to control by traditional means such as the influence of the Church or deference to local hierarchies and institutions. The same went for deserters, who were forced into a life of crime in order to survive. When peace came, such people drifted back not to their villages but to large towns, where they could lose themselves and hope to satisfy some of the aspirations encouraged by the slogans of the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras, and the mood of the times.
The urban population was also swelled by economic migration from the countryside, which not only lowered the standard of living of the poorer sections by creating downward pressure on wages and severe overcrowding leading to disease, but also had some unexpected consequences. The move from country to town usually severed or at least weakened not only family ties but also links to traditional forms of religious observance. Established Churches had either been abolished, as in revolutionary France, or seen their property and status dramatically reduced, as well as their social role as providers of education and health care; their influence had shrunk as a result. They had lost control of the poorest sections of the population in large towns, leaving these prone to a variety of new religious movements and political philosophies.
The wars had been preceded by the outbreak of the French Revolution, and were in many ways a continuation of it. They brought in their wake colossal disruption of all social and political relations throughout the Continent and its dependencies overseas: rulers were humbled or toppled, established religion undermined or abolished, hierarchies of every sort weakened or dismantled; individuals, classes, minorities and nations were liberated in one sense or another. This not only aroused dormant disputes and hatreds, it opened to question every aspect of social, political and spiritual practice, introducing an ideological dimension and intensity of