How a clumsy drummer started the 1848 revolutions

There are hundreds of resounding ideas and shrewd precepts in Adam Zamoyski’s temperate yet splendidly provocative Phantom Terror. This is the history of European ultra-reactionary repression and police espionage in the half-century after the overthrow of the French monarchy in 1789-93. The instability of popular opinion, the destructiveness of angry, ignorant populism and the wretchedness of timid, suppliant leadership are laid bare by him. Yet his deadliest strictures are against the rigid, fear-driven, authoritarian reaction of the propertied classes, which he demonstrates was lethally counter-productive as well as often absurd. Phantom Terror is full of suggestive instances that will set readers thinking about contemporary constitutional quandaries, threatened liberties, hysterics about border security and inflated evaluations of national sovereignty. Although Zamoyski does not hector his readers with explicit modern parallels, his book is a study in timeless statecraft. He upholds individual liberty without making the egalitarian’s error that people of unequal abilities should have similar powers and influence.

The French Revolution spread the shibboleth of the sovereignty of the people with almost religious zealotry. The revolutionaries’ mass executions, land seizures and continental warfare made their blood-drenched notions detestable to the old guard. Accordingly, from the 1790s, European rulers and ministers enforced counter-measures against insurrectionaries. Some of them believed in the imminent threat of subversion with fanatical sincerity, but others concocted or exaggerated dangers for their cynical administrative convenience. Most of these national insecurities, Zamoyski argues, ‘fell into that grey area of self-delusion in which politicians come to believe anything they have invented out of expediency’.

The unnecessary repression of moderate liberalism arrested the development of European societies, more in some countries than others, and entrenched systems of state surveillance and controls over individuals. The estrangement of young people living under the more repressive regimes produced, after 1848, the growth of real terrorist organisations of the sort that the state espionage had been intended to forestall.