Beginning in the early 1790s, the British cabinet, the Habsburg monarchy and the rulers and ministers of Russia, Prussia and virtually every other state in Europe consistently misled and repressed those they governed, invoking a threat which they failed to substantiate. In some instances they appear to have believed in it, in others they patently did not. Mostly, one suspects, they fell into that grey area of self-delusion in which politicians come to believe anything they have invented out of expediency. But whether they believed in the threat or not is ultimately immaterial: the damage was done.
Perhaps the most damaging legacy is a wholly imaginary vision of the political and therefore the social sphere as a permanent conflict between the privileged and the underprivileged; a paradigm of the rich and influential ensconced in their citadels besieged by a violent, anarchic mass of the poor and deprived, led by mad-dog terrorists bent on storming those citadels and overturning the social order. This notion has bedevilled European and worldwide political discourse ever since.
More immediately, the unnecessary repression of moderate liberal tendencies arrested the natural development of European society, more in some countries than in others, and helped to create a culture of control of the individual by the state. In the more repressive states, it led to the alienation of generations of young people, resulting in the growth of real terrorist movements in the second half of the nineteenth century.
In Austria, the threat of the grand conspiracy was used to justify the preservation of an order which acted as a brake on economic development, as did the ruinous expenditure on the army needed to maintain it. The long-term consequence was that the Habsburg dominions were left far behind other parts of Europe, and while the provinces of Venetia and Lombardy flourished economically after they broke away from Austrian domination in 1860, the rest of the monarchy remained economically backward as well as politically supine.
In Russia, Alexander’s and Nicholas’s attempts to mould society into an obedient instrument of the state had the effect of driving thinking young people into opposition – moral, intellectual and artistic at first, murderous from the 1860s onwards. They introduced much that would later form the basis of the Soviet model of control: the benevolent menace of Benckendorff’s Gendarmerie would shape the invasive and sinister power of the Cheka and the NKVD. In 2010, Nikolai Patrushev, director of their descendant, the FSB, described his force in terms Benckendorff would have recognised, referring to it as ‘our new nobility’.1
In Germany, the repression of national aspirations, following as it did on Napoleon’s humiliation of German national pride, turned legitimate patriotism and national feeling into a defensive, embittered subculture which, denied legitimate expression, grew increasingly angry and aggressive, with disastrous consequences for the whole world in the twentieth century.
As Mazzini put it, writing in 1849: ‘The masters of the world had united against the future.’ But they had also left a poisoned chalice no less toxic than the acqua tofana whose menace exerted such a spell. When the future caught up with them, in 1917–18, it detonated a series of events which would cost the lives of untold millions and lead to the near-destruction of European civilisation.2