Adam Zamoyski's new book, Phantom Terror: Political Paranoia and the Creation of the Modern State, 1789–1848, is an epic, magisterial examination of the conservative elite in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Europe and their obsession with the threat of radical conspiracies during and after the French Revolution. In response to these plots—some real, most imagined, several out-and-out invented—European leaders disseminated propaganda, issued decrees, and established the security apparati that laid the foundation of the modern national security state. Even as European subjects continued to transition into citizens, they remained fundamentally objects of suspicion, with states invoking a circular logic that justified surveillance and repression, which called forth resistance, which demanded more surveillance and repression. In the end, Zamoyski suggests, the paranoiac behavior of European regimes produced real revolutionary movements where there had been minimal organized opposition.
If this sounds dry, the book is anything but. Zamoyski, an unaffiliated historian, is a stylish, approachable writer who leans on anecdotes and biographical sketches to spin out his story. Moreover, he injects the text with plenty of humor and appreciates the absurdity of much of what he describes.
Zamoyski's narrative is panoramic in its scope, a success made possible by his broad vision and his ability to read sources and commentaries in English, French, Italian, Polish, and Russian. His narrative ranges across the region and reveals that virtually no European country was immune to conspiratorial paranoia nor failed to respond with some sort of repressive behavior. This is hardly a surprise in the case of Russia, which developed a new police force, the Third Section, and quickly built up a network of 5,000 informers in response to the so-called Decembrist Revolt. French authorities saw conspiracies everywhere. Some, like the Carbonari, established real cells but rarely did more than cook up bloodthirsty plots; others, like the comité directeur, never existed. Even the English got into the act, harassing the London Corresponding Society, a harmless group that praised the French Revolution.
Phantom Terror speaks quite clearly to two audiences beyond those simply interested in modern European history. The first is today's educated public. After all, it has become a standard trope of today's Left to fret that the PATRIOT Act, one of President George W. Bush's responses to September 11th, can easily be turned against domestic dissidents—or that, more broadly, the fear of terrorism is used to distract the public from more pressing domestic concerns. But Zamoyski does not pursue these comparisons because, as he cheekily puts it in the introduction, “I felt readers would derive more fun from drawing their own” (xiv).
The other audience that will lap up Phantom Terror is the small community of historians who study terrorism. The irony here is that Zamoyski speaks authoritatively to their concerns while acknowledging none of their secondary literature (as can be gleaned from a close examination of the ample endnotes and bibliography). One of the great questions pondered by historians of terrorism—one that is quite apart from other concerns about the real how and why of the phenomenon—is the exact provenance of modern terrorism. Where and when might we pinpoint its birth? Zamoyski's answer is that terrorism primarily emerges as a figment of the imaginations of the early-nineteenth-century reactionary elite of Europe. And if there is a midwife, his name is Prince von Metternich, foreign minister and chancellor of the Habsburg Empire.
Today's historians of terrorism largely accept much of the process that Zamoyski describes in his book, that is, that governments radically inflated the threat of revolutionary terrorism—sometimes out of paranoia, sometimes quite deliberately—and used that threat to create extensive new means of surveillance, harassment, and state control that were far more likely to be used against nonterrorists or newly emergent threats like nationalists, liberals, socialists, and trade unionists. The rub, though, is that historians of terrorism have documented and analyzed this phenomenon not for the period 1789–1848, but rather for the last third of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Historians have drawn attention, for instance, to German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck's use of two unsuccessful assassination attempts by anarchists in 1878 on the life of Emperor Wilhelm I to force through legislation that was used to crack down on the Social Democratic Party of Germany (the SPD). The SPD espoused an ideology and a political program that had little to do with anarchism—except, and this was what made the assassination attempts so useful, in the minds of the middle and upper classes who understood that both anarchism and socialism were left of center, antiestablishment, and dangerous.
In conclusion, Phantom Terror is a highly original contribution to the literature of modern European history, a long book (nearly 500 pages of text) but one that is worth the investment.
