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

Leopold died unexpectedly on 1 March 1792, and was succeeded by his twenty-four-year-old son Francis, the product of a rigorous and not particularly happy upbringing at the hands of his uncle the Emperor Joseph II. This had left him with a deep sense of his own significance as the linchpin of the whole enterprise that was the Austrian monarchy. It had also left him with a very strong sense of duty, which he fulfilled by working hard, often at quite pointless tasks, sometimes ones his ministers were performing already. This made him a difficult man to work with, particularly as he was slow-witted, meticulous, pedantic and strong-willed, not to say stubborn.

To those who did not have to deal with him he appeared a kindly, paternalistic figure, a devoted husband and father, nowhere happier than in the bosom of his family. But he was by nature joyless, humourless and impervious. Described by one diplomat as being ‘without vices, without qualities, without notable passions’, he possessed all the middle-class virtues in the most damning sense of the phrase.15

Francis honestly believed that the Enlightenment was a swindle and that his benighted subjects had to be protected from it. He saw education as inherently dangerous, and viewed all private philanthropic activity with deep suspicion. In his scheme of things, the people should remain in the care of their God-given monarch and nobody else. A few days after mounting the throne, he ordered the police to maintain a constant and thorough watch for the spread of ‘the fanatical pseudo-enlightenment’ and any other ideas that might threaten public order, the maintenance of which he identified as the prime duty of the state.16

Before resigning, Pergen had presented Leopold with a memorandum alerting him to the possibility that a major conspiracy was brewing. Intelligence he had gleaned connected Freemasons and members of other secret societies in various countries with every civil disturbance since the American Revolution, and there were suggestions that they were now set on world revolution. French Freemasons were allegedly using their brethren in other countries as a kind of fifth column to prepare the ground for French military invasion by demoralising and subverting their populations and their armies. Leopold had not responded to this memorandum, but Francis was greatly taken with its contents.17

One of his advisers, Count Sauer, had been warning him that ‘there can be no doubt about the presence of several French emissaries here, who conceal their activities in such a way that only prolonged and close observation can lead to their discovery’. This kind of logic – according to which a supposition, once put forward, was deemed to be true; that it was unverifiable only served to confirm its truth, and indeed its significance – was to become a hallmark of Austrian police thinking over the next half-century.18

Francis was duly alarmed, and on 3 January 1793 Pergen was back as minister of police in charge of a new department, the Polizeihofstelle, with a large budget for the employment of undercover agents. He was to operate independently of the normal organs of state, and answer only to the emperor. On 1 April he appointed as his deputy Count Franz Joseph Saurau, and put him in charge of investigating all associations and societies. Feeling the chill, the Austrian Freemasons stopped holding meetings. Not the least discouraged, Saurau infiltrated their homes with his spies.19

Pergen’s assessment was that most of the emperor’s subjects were well-intentioned (Gutgesinnte) and desired the same as their master, a state of undisturbed order. However, they could be turned away from this, and that order could be disturbed, by nefarious outside influences, such as the Schwindelgeist of the Enlightenment or various nebulous fantasies (Schwärmerei). They therefore needed to be protected from these at all costs.

Censorship was tightened and extended, with particular stress laid on the protection of ‘morality’. This necessitated censorship not only of the printed word, which was relatively easy, but also the more complex area of words spoken out loud in a theatre or sung in an opera. These could assume or be given all sorts of significance by the mere fact of being uttered before a large gathering, and the censor, Court Councillor Hägerlin, came up against formidable problems. Nothing that could be thought to constitute a bad example was allowable, which ruled out plays and operas whose plots involved rebellion against authority (paternal, religious or political), murder, adultery, incest, and any other vice unless it was fittingly punished or the criminal repented in the last act. Only in the court theatre was it possible for a character to exclaim ‘Oh, God!’; in the public theatres, it had to be ‘Oh, Heavens!’ The line ‘Long live liberty!’ in Schiller’s Don Juan was changed to ‘Long live joy!’ Relationships between dramatis personae were altered in order to avoid placing them in morally unacceptable positions. The villain of Schiller’s The Robbers, Franz, could not be called a blackguard as the emperor bore the same name. Schiller’s Faust was deemed potentially heretical, since Mephistopheles is cleverer than the angel. Almost every play of his contained an alarming theme: political revolt in Fiesco, the execution of a monarch in Mary Stuart. Lessing’s Nathan could not be performed at all, on account of its discussion of different religions.20

Religious instruction, which had been banished from it by Joseph II, was brought back into the school curriculum. The imperial resolution of 10 March 1796 established a school police, whose job it was to invigilate ‘the moral and orderly behaviour’ of pupils at primary and secondary schools, and to keep watch over the morals as well as the political attitudes of their teachers. Just as actors were forbidden to ad-lib, teachers were forbidden to ‘improvise’. They were to use only approved textbooks, and avoid touching on political subjects even if they took an orthodox line, since they might inadvertently give their pupils the wrong idea. The Court Decree of 17 December 1794 stipulated that the text of any proposed lecture must be shown to the authorities not less than four weeks before it was to be delivered. Saurau pointed out that the state ‘pays public teachers to teach that which is agreeable to the Church and the government of the state, and it is a dangerous fallacy for a teacher to believe that he can teach the youth which has been entrusted to him along the lines of his own convictions and his own views’.21

The surveillance of foreigners was taken over by the Fremdenpolizei or foreigners police. Embassies were infiltrated by agents in the guise of servants, who were to report the most banal goings-on, scour the wastepaper baskets and fireplaces for ‘chiffons’, scraps of paper that might prove of interest, and purloin letters and other documents, which were passed to what was popularly known as the Schwarze Kabinette, the Black Cabinet. Here, letters would be expertly opened, copied and resealed in a matter of minutes so they could be replaced before anyone noticed their disappearance. The Fremdenpolizei was also to make use of informers belonging to every social sphere, who could be rewarded with money, but were preferably motivated by the conviction that they were working for the good of the empire.22

This was now under serious threat, and not only from the ‘errors’ of the Enlightenment and the ‘poison’ being manufactured in France. During a meeting in the magnificent baroque palace of Pillnitz in Saxony in August 1791, Francis’s father Leopold and Frederick William II 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