A magnificent and timely examination of an age of fear, subversion and espionage. Adam Zamoyski explores the struggle by governments to police a world seemingly threatened by obscure forces and revolutionary conspiracy dedicated to the overthrow of civilisation - and their exploitation of the threat for their own ends. The French Revolution and the blood-curdling violence it engendered terrified the ruling and propertied classes of Europe. Unable to grasp how such horrors could have come about, many concluded that it was the result of a devilish conspiracy hatched by Freemasons inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment with the aim of overthrowing the entire social order, along with the legal and religious principles it stood on. Others traced it back to the Reformation or the Knights Templar and ascribed even more sinister aims to it. Faced by this apparently occult threat, they resorted to repression on an unprecedented scale, expanding police and spy networks in the process. Napoleon managed to contain the revolutionary elements in France and those parts of Europe he controlled, but while many welcomed this, others saw in him no more than the spawn of the Revolution, propagating its doctrines by other means. After his defeat at Waterloo in 1815, his victors united to maintain the old order, suppress of all opposition, and ferret out of the conspirators whom they believed to be plotting mayhem and murder in the shadows.
In this ground-breaking study best-selling historian Adam Zamoyski exposes their pusillanimous yet cynical recourse to the police spy and the bayonet, which only intensified their own fears and pushed ordinary people towards subversion, building up the pressure of opposition to their rule. When it came, with the revolutions of 1848, the dreaded cataclysm revealed their fears to have been groundless; the masses stirred into revolt by hunger and oppressive living conditions were leaderless and easily pacified. There never had been any conspiracy. But the police were there to stay, and the paradigm of an order threatened by dark forces is also still with us today. This compelling history, occasionally chilling and often hilarious, tells how the modern state evolved through the expansion of its organs of control, and holds urgent lessons for today. *Epic book from master of European history. A great successor to his best-selling and prize-winning '1812: Napoleon's Fatal March on Moscow' and 'Rites of Peace: The Fall of Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna'. * Book tells story of how fear of revolution led European governments to crack down on individual freedoms.
Parallel to post-9/11 world are striking. * Key figures in the book are Napoleon, Wellington and Metternich - this is epic history but with vivid pen-portraits so the characters leap from the page. * Based on many years of original research in archives. The police archives of most of the countries involved have never been properly studied, so this is a book full of revelations about the fears, corruptions and manipulations of popular opinion committed by governments up and down the continent. *Adam Zamoyski is one of our finest contemporary historians. He is a multi- best-selling author in Germany where his previous book has sold over 90,000 copies. He is a best-seller in Holland, in France and in Spain. His profile in Russia and Poland is huge - as a historian and general commentator on cultural and political issues.