After the French Revolution, conservative governments from Britain to Russia created bulwarks to protect their power against the threat of further rebellions. They repressed and spied on their citizens, policing both speech and actions. In nations across Europe, politicians and cultural leaders from Edmund Burke to Mary Shelley chose sides, either propelling or resisting the counter-revolutionary spirit embodied in these omnipotent central states. These years of paranoia not only witnessed the first stirrings of modern totalitarian regimes, but gave birth to the political contest between the privileged and the underprivilegeda legacy that haunts us to this day.In Phantom Terror, award-winning historian Adam Zamoyski reveals that the years after the French Revolution were the crux upon which the rest of European history would turna moment when desperate monarchs took the world down the path of revolution, terror, and world war.