Klemens Wenzel Lothar von Metternich-Winneburg-Beilstein was born at Koblenz in 1773, the son of an imperial count from an ancient family of the Rhineland. In 1788, aged fifteen, he was sent to university at Strasbourg. While he applied himself assiduously to his studies, he also displayed a marked devotion to elegance, taste, pleasure and the art of living well. He cut a dashing figure, and was viewed by his fellow students as something of a fop. To one, the rather severe Freiherr vom Stein, he seemed ‘fin, faux, fanfaron’ (clever, sly and boastful). Unlike so many of his contemporaries, he did not greet the French Revolution as a new dawn. He was no bigot, and he was well versed in the political culture of the Enlightenment. That change and reform must come he did not doubt. But he believed in the orderly conduct of public affairs. He was shaken and disgusted by the spectacle of what he called ‘a drunken rabble’ storming Strasbourg’s Hôtel de Ville in emulation of the Paris mob’s assault on the Bastille. His conviction that the world was being turned upside down was confirmed when he watched the university’s director of religious studies publicly burn the symbols of office of the bishops of Strasbourg. By contrast, the coronation in Frankfurt on 6 October 1790 of Leopold II as Holy Roman Emperor, at which he assisted, a ceremony as empty of practical significance as it was brimming with symbolic meaning, struck him as the embodiment of everything he believed in. The emperor and the electors made their ceremonial entry into the city in a hundred carriages, surrounded by outriders on richly caparisoned horses, to a three-hundred-gun salute. Metternich imbibed the subliminal message of divinely ordained hierarchy implicit in the elaborate rituals that followed, and was captivated. The young duc de Richelieu, who was also present, was more struck by the ‘dazzling’ array of diamonds with which the ladies of the court were bedecked, and indeed by the sumptuous liveries of crimson velvet dripping with gold of the young Count Metternich’s servants.1
Less than two years later, in July 1792, Metternich witnessed the coronation of Leopold’s successor, Francis II, which was to be the last such ceremony ever to take place. After brief travels which took him to London, Brussels and finally Vienna, in 1795, aged twenty-two, he entered the emperor’s service. His first appointment was as diplomatic minister to Dresden, his second posting was to Berlin. There, in 1805, he negotiated the treaty which brought Prussia into the Third Coalition against Napoleon, and to disaster on the fields of Jena and Auerstadt. After the defeat of the allies, in 1806, Napoleon abolished the Holy Roman Empire, and Metternich’s master Francis II became Francis I of Austria. At the request of Napoleon, Metternich was posted to Paris as Austrian ambassador.
Handsome and distinguished, graceful in his bearing, delightful in conversation, effortlessly charming, he was a natural diplomat. Flush with Napoleon’s recognition of his talents, and eager to widen his acquaintance and his influence, he bedded nearly every lady of note in Paris, including the French emperor’s sister Caroline. It was largely thanks to Metternich that after its disastrous attack on France in 1809 Austria and its monarchy were saved from extinction, and Francis did not, as some wags had foretold, become Francis 0. Having negotiated the Treaty of Vienna, which turned Francis into Napoleon’s ally, Metternich was appointed Austria’s foreign minister, a post he was to keep for the next thirty-nine years.
Metternich despised Napoleon as the product of the French Revolution and for being the upstart and bully he was, but he also admired him. He acknowledged his intelligence and ability to achieve his ends, and recognised that he had suppressed the Revolution and turned France into an efficient state. In this respect, Metternich would have liked to emulate him with regard to the Habsburg realm. But since the Austrian state was founded on medieval principles, and was only held together by the glue of hierarchy and tradition, he came to the conclusion that only strict adhesion to existing forms could safeguard the continued existence of the monarchy. This conviction became his guiding principle as he navigated the perilous international situation over the next years. He kept Austria in Napoleon’s camp as long as this was necessary, while preparing for it a prime position in that of his enemies. After the Battle of Leipzig in 1813, which sealed the triumph of this policy, he was elevated to the dignity of prince (for his new arms he took the motto Kraft im Recht, Strength in Law). He went on to dominate the Congress of Vienna, providing Austria with what he believed were firm bases for its survival as an autocratic paternalist monarchy. The preservation of the settlement agreed there in 1815 was for him a matter of principle as well as a priority.2
The greatest threat to it would be the outbreak of war or revolution in Europe. But back at the beginning of 1814, when it had become certain that Napoleon would be defeated, Metternich and Castlereagh had set up a structure for avoiding the first and dealing with the second. In a treaty signed at Chaumont on 9 March 1814, Britain, Austria, Russia and Prussia had committed themselves to a long-term alliance aimed at containing France. It had stood the test of Napoleon’s return from Elba, and mobilised the forces which defeated him at Waterloo. On his arrival in Paris on the tail of Wellington’s army, Castlereagh suggested transforming the alliance into a permanent coalition. In consequence, on 20 November 1815 the plenipotentiaries of the four great powers, as they now styled themselves, signed the Quadruple Alliance. Though primarily directed against France, this engaged them jointly to defend all the arrangements they had made at the Congress of Vienna. They further agreed to hold regular congresses to review the situation and consider measures necessary for the preservation of peace. It was a pan-European security system intended to guarantee the existing territorial and constitutional arrangements. In the minds of Metternich and most of the rulers of the Continent, it was also there to preserve what they saw as the moral order those arrangements supposedly rested on.
Metternich was a curious amalgam of child of the Enlightenment and product of the ancien régime. He was not religious, and did not believe in the Divine Right of rulers, yet he worshipped an order based on autocratic monarchy underpinned by established religion. He regarded any change with suspicion, as it must perforce disturb this order. He viewed the professional and middle classes with antagonism, as it was in their nature to advance their interests, which could only be achieved by displacing existing hierarchies and altering the political structure, both of which threatened the system he stood by. It had been lawyers who had dominated the French Revolution, he never ceased reminding people.
There was a fundamental flaw in the logic of Metternich’s position. He rejected liberalism and modern notions of progress in favour of an imagined pax Christiana resting on the twin pillars of throne and Church which had supposedly existed before the French Revolution, a time when the laws of God were observed and legitimacy reigned. A time when, in the words of the German philosopher Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘more outward religiosity dominated the people’ and ‘people lived in a more secluded and decorous manner’, ‘worked more cheaply and more untiringly’, ‘showed themselves more submissive’ and did not ‘allow themselves all kinds of opinions or even aspirations for a better life’.3
Such a state had never existed. Certainly not in the eighteenth century, which had been one of secularisation, of astonishing upward mobility as well as social degradation, when there had been an explosion of opinion on every conceivable subject, and when nakedly illegitimate wars raged, with the King of France abetting the rebellious American subjects of his Britannic brother-monarch, and the rulers of Russia, Prussia and Austria ganging up against the anointed King of Poland to dethrone and despoil him, to name but two. Every Catholic ruler in Europe, whose descendants now posed as defenders of the Church as a means of shoring up their authority, had abolished religious institutions, curtailed the prerogatives of the clergy, and closed down monasteries and convents, shamelessly helping themselves to their riches. Francis’s uncle Joseph II had not only been one of the first to dissolve religious orders and pillage Church property, but had encouraged anticlericalism and made irreligion fashionable.
When Napoleon had taken over Francis’s palace of Schönbrunn after his defeat of Austria in 1809, he had two immense obelisks surmounted by imperial eagles erected on either side of the gates, to emphasise his imperial status. Instead of demolishing what others might have seen as a reminder of his humiliation, Francis kept them. They were not the only Napoleonic legacy Francis and Metternich hung on to, and they accepted the abolition of ancient privileges and the structural changes brought about in Germany and Italy. They quietly relished the erosion of the prerogatives of the nobility and other bodies, and copied the French state in its intrusion into the private sphere. And while they professed ardent devotion to the Catholic faith, they subjected the Church to the state and used it as an instrument of social control.4
In 1815, the Austrian monarchy faced no threat: there was no social unrest or political opposition to speak of, as the system generally benefited those who craved nothing beyond the comforts of life and the rewards of honest work, which meant the overwhelming majority of the population. The only elements not happy with the state of affairs were certain conservative milieus in Austrian society fired by a Romantic vision of a return to the spirit of an imagined past; a faction of the Hungarian nobility aspiring to greater autonomy; a residue of patriotic nobles in Galicia dreaming of a resurrection of the Polish state; and a mixture of redundant aristocrats and disappointed Napoleonic administrators and officers in the Italian provinces. None of these elements was in any position to upset the tranquillity of the state, and all could safely be ignored. Some 75 per cent of the population still lived off the land, and since there was little industry and no populous cities, there was no industrial proletariat to contend with.
Metternich had accepted Pergen’s credo that only a state of absolute ‘calm’ guaranteed the preservation of ‘order’, which had become gospel to the Habsburg monarchy. At the heart of that credo was the conviction, expressed by Pergen, that the task of the Austrian police was to invigilate not only the provinces of the monarchy itself, but ‘the spirit reigning throughout Europe’. In consequence, the state chancellery over which Metternich presided outgrew the mere function of an office of foreign affairs, and became an extension of the police. It grew into a huge machine, with ten departments run by minutely graded civil servants, and auxiliary branches dealing with specific areas such as encryption and decryption, translation, printing of propaganda, the archives, the treasury, the postal service, and so on. While he was a devotee of strict censorship and regarded press freedom as ‘a heresy’, he used newspapers, most notably the Ősterreichische Beobachter, and a stable of writers, including Friedrich Schlegel and Adam Müller, to propound his own views and manipulate public opinion. He financed a number of papers and periodicals, and paid to have articles included in foreign papers such as the Parisian Journal des débats and the London Morning Chronicle.
Metternich and Count Josef Sedlnitzky, who became chief of police in 1816, identified control of the postal service as a key element in the invigilation of Europe. In the course of the eighteenth century Vienna had, by providing the most efficient postal service throughout the Holy Roman Empire, gained access to the correspondence passing through central Europe. Although the Empire had been abolished, much of the post carried around its former territory still passed through Austrian sorting offices. Metternich managed to extend this to cover Switzerland, a natural crossroads as well as a meeting place for subversives of every sort. All Swiss post passed through Berne, whose postal service was in the hands of the conservative patrician de Fischer family, with the result that all mail between France, Germany and Italy was accessible to the Austrian authorities. Most of the mail going in and out of Italy passed through Lombardy, where it came under Austrian police scrutiny. The rest went through the kingdom of Sardinia or port cities such as Naples and Ostia. In July 1815 Metternich sent his postal expert, Baron von Lilien, to Rome to negotiate a convention with the Papal States whereby all mail leaving them would pass through Lombardy. The papacy was in conflict with Austria over religious issues deriving from the anti-clerical reforms of Joseph II, and the secretary of state, Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, was in no mood to cooperate. Metternich then tried to create a barrier across northern Italy by signing conventions with Parma, Modena and Tuscany, through which mail from Rome had to pass – ‘we cut Italy in two and become its masters’, he anticipated. But Tuscany, despite being ruled by an Austrian archduke, demurred, under discreet diplomatic pressure from Rome, Sardinia and France. This was a setback for Metternich, as it was the monarchy’s Italian provinces that were the most vulnerable.5
For centuries, Italy had been the arena in which an extended struggle for supremacy had been played out between the rulers of Austria and France. That struggle had continued after the Revolution, and it was in Italy that Napoleon had forged his reputation. After assuming the title of Emperor of the French he had taken that of King of Italy, bestowed on his son the title of King of Rome, and given the Bourbon kingdom of Naples to his brother-in-law Joachim Murat. The Congress of Vienna reversed this. The territory of the defunct republic of Venice was added to Austria’s recovered Italian province of Lombardy. This was protected from France in the west by the kingdom of Sardinia, which regained its mainland provinces of Piedmont and Savoy, and was strengthened with the heritage of the abolished republic of Genoa. The Austrian emperor’s brother was reinstated in Florence as Grand Duke of Tuscany, one of his grandsons became Duke of Modena, while Napoleon’s consort (and Francis’s daughter) Marie-Louise was given the former Bourbon duchy of Parma to reign over. The pope was restored to Rome and recovered his fiefdoms of the Legations and Le Marche. The Bourbons of Naples returned from Sicily and repossessed their former mainland kingdom.
Lombardy-Venetia was ruled directly from Vienna; Tuscany, Parma and Modena were under Austrian protection; and the pope was entirely dependent on Austrian support. The King of Naples, or of the Two Sicilies as his title now rang, was pressured by Metternich into signing a secret treaty which forbade any constitutional change to take place in his kingdom without the permission of Austria. Metternich would have liked to impose similar arrangements on the other Italian states, thereby binding them into a kind of federation dominated by Austria, but neither Sardinia nor the papacy would oblige. Metternich had nevertheless managed to exclude France entirely, and turned Austria into the policeman of Italy. In so doing, he had unwittingly set the scene for the unification of the peninsula – by giving all Italian patriots of whatever stamp a common enemy. And he had set himself an almost impossible task, for Italy was not liable to the kind of order he envisaged.
Before 1789, much of Italy had been a lawless place barely policed by its various rulers, most of whom knew better than to try to impose their will on intricate, centuries-old patterns of social interdependence and parochial loyalties. Remote areas were governed by a form of outlawry which has been termed ‘social banditry’ by some historians. Its practitioners were impossible to apprehend, as they were shielded by the poorer sections of the population, which they protected from oppression by landlords and taxation by the state, and subsidised in times of hardship from the proceeds of their robberies. Rulers, landowners and the Church had learned to accommodate themselves to such realities.
French incursions into Italy in the 1790s had a dramatic effect on this state of affairs. Rulers were toppled, feudalism was abolished, existing political and administrative structures were dismantled and replaced with French models, the Church was restricted and property confiscated. The whole peninsula was first subjected to republican forms of government, then incorporated into the French empire or turned into kingdoms. The imposition of French order on hitherto lawless areas had unintended consequences: resistance to the execution of the law, collection of taxes and conscription of young men grew in proportion to the energy with which these were carried out, and the latent banditry became more organised.
French rule had nevertheless achieved a great deal, much of it what former rulers would have liked to bring about themselves but did not dare or know how to, such as curbing the power of the nobility and the Church, enforcing the law and providing for the efficient collection of taxes. The rulers reinstated in 1815 were not about to reverse this, which put them at odds with those, such as the nobility and the clergy, who should have been the natural pillars of their thrones. Much of what the French had done had also upset the rural masses, by trampling on local interests and sensibilities, and the failure to reverse it alienated them.
French revolutionary influences had radicalised the educated nobility and middle class, making them more hostile to authority of any stamp, and awakening an aspiration to unite the whole peninsula in one Italian state. French rule had created a new administrative class, while Napoleon’s exploitation of Italian manpower had created parallel military cadres. Not only did these two categories feel threatened by the return of former monarchs or the imposition of Austrian rule, they constituted a natural leadership and the skeleton of an alternative.
The vacuum created by the end of Napoleonic rule in northern Italy in 1813 and 1814 had quickly filled with aspirations for an independent Italian state. Some hoped to preserve the existing kingdom of Italy with Napoleon’s viceroy, Prince Eugène de Beauharnais, as king. Others, encouraged by the British minister at Palermo, Lord William Bentinck, a dashing general and former governor of Madras who was enamoured of Italy, wanted the whole peninsula united under Napoleon’s brother-in-law Joachim Murat, who was then still King of Naples. In 1815, when Austria was distracted by Napoleon’s return from Elba, Murat sallied forth at the head of his army and called on all Italians to support him in creating a united independent Italy. His call was answered by no more than a few hundred, and his enterprise foundered.
When the Austrians reoccupied Venetia and Lombardy following the withdrawal of the French, the military commander, Field Marshal Heinrich von Bellegarde, provisionally confirmed existing French law and kept on the administration and the police. He and the new police chief in Venice reported that there was no resistance to the Austrians and no cause for alarm. But in 1815 the new civil authorities began the wholesale dismissal of Napoleonic civil servants and officers. Not only did this produce a marked decline in efficiency, a body of ambitious and articulate Italians had been deprived of their livings and their prospects. But the Austrian administration was not out to make friends. Heraldic commissions were established to tidy up the hierarchy after the various changes of regime, and these succeeded in alienating further sections of Italian society. Titles of nobility granted under Napoleon were abolished. Ancient Venetian titles were downgraded, on the grounds that they had been granted by a republic. A Venetian duke was reduced to the level of a German count, a Venetian count became the equivalent of a German baron, and the process of having to produce documents and plead with Austrian civil servants was as humiliating as the degradation itself. Metternich was entitled to his opinion of the Venetian and Lombard nobility as a ‘bastard race of fallen aristocracy’, but it was questionable policy to insult the class whose natural interest was to support the existing order.6
The Emperor Francis was no more tactful. Ignoring the advice of his men on the spot, he set about imposing his own standards of propriety on the administration of his Italian provinces. Interpreted by local police officials, these translated into a bizarre set of precepts, whereby people were denied appointments on grounds ranging from ‘suspect relationship with a chambermaid’ to being interested in financial speculation or simply too talkative. This involved the police intimately in the lives of people to the extent that according to one Austrian commentator, ‘It may be said that in Italy no social relationship exists that is not subject to its direct interference.’7
Francis, whose obsession with the Masonic/Illuminist conspiracy had not abated, banned all secret societies. Government officials, teachers and even candidates for doctoral degrees had to swear an oath that they did not belong to one. He ordered lists to be drawn up of everyone who had ever belonged to a Masonic lodge, and the results terrified him. Freemasonry had been fashionable in Italy since the last decades of the eighteenth century (it had only been banned by Napoleon, who feared its potential as a force of opposition, in 1812). The lists included most of the aristocracy and almost all government officials and army officers, prompting Francis to conclude that his Italian provinces were a hotbed of subversion.8
Metternich established the Beobachtungs Anstalt in Milan to gather information on Masonic and other secret societies operating on the peninsula, and tried to persuade the other rulers to do likewise. As they failed to cooperate, he set up his own agencies to gather information on the west and south of Italy, run by his diplomatic envoys in Florence and Rome. Their usefulness was open to question. Many of those coming forward to give information and those arrested had something to hide, and the best way of doing this was to point the finger elsewhere. Most informers had worked for many masters and turned their coats inside out several times over the past two decades, and were practised at telling the new authorities what they wished to hear. They would conceal the existence and activities of a sect they might have belonged to, and invent spurious ones to throw the authorities off their own trail. They would regale their masters with the fearsome-sounding names of non-existent secret societies, their rituals and occult aims. As a result, all the Austrians were able to gather were lists of names and unfounded allegations.9
Their search for trouble was rewarded when they were alerted to a conspiracy being hatched in Milan. The information came from one Saint-Agnan, who had it from a Count Comelli, who had informed him of a plan being prepared there for a rising to establish an Italian state based on Rome, with the support of thousands of Italian exiles who were to land at strategic points from British ships. While this information on its own did not sound convincing, it did coincide with other intelligence Metternich had received, from the governor of Tyrol. He took the precaution of transferring Austrian army units composed of Italians to other Habsburg provinces and replacing them with Austrian and Hungarian troops, and despatched Saint-Agnan to Milan to find out more. There, Saint-Agnan met a man named Marshal, who told him that the plan was backed by Louis XVIII of France, who meant to establish a kingdom of Italy with his nephew the duc de Berry as king. Saint-Agnan was introduced to some of the conspirators, from whom he managed to obtain a batch of papers, which he sold to the Austrian authorities for 2,800 francs. He then disappeared.
He reappeared in Turin, where he offered his services to the King of Sardinia, volunteering to infiltrate the Sardinian émigrés in Paris who were supposedly plotting against him. Having failed to extract any money from Victor Emmanuel, he went to Switzerland, from where he wrote to Bellegarde saying he had evidence of a plot by Lord William Bentinck and the Duke of Buckingham to start a revolution in Italy, and to Metternich himself claiming that he was in possession of important documents which he would only show him in person (on receipt of 12,000 francs, and possibly some land and a title). Metternich paid him 4,000 francs on condition he never set foot in Italy again. The conspirators identified by Saint-Agnan were arrested and their interrogation was conducted under the supervision of the emperor himself. The case against them was of the flimsiest, which was reflected in its outcome: a few were imprisoned on short sentences, others were exiled, some were set free – having spent twenty months in gaol during the investigation and trial.10
It is impossible to assess the extent of the threat posed by the conspiratorial networks which troubled Metternich and others so much, as very little is known about them. They had mostly originated in France. What was probably the first was founded by an Italian, Filippo Antonio Buonarroti of Pisa, believed to be a descendant of the artist Michelangelo. Early reading of Rousseau’s works had inspired in him dreams of an egalitarian society, and with the outbreak of the French Revolution he was drawn to Paris, where he collaborated with Saint Just and Robespierre. He followed the French army when it invaded Italy, and began building up a network of like-minded people covering the entire peninsula. On his return to Paris after the fall of Robespierre he was arrested, and in prison he encountered the socialist revolutionary François (alias Gracchus) Babeuf, with whom he wrote the Plebeian Manifesto, published on their release in 1795, which among other things called for the abolition of private property. Babeuf and Buonarroti then began plotting a coup d’état, to be carried out by small cells taking over the controls of power – they despised the idea of popular revolution, and meant to impose their order from above. The conspiracy unravelled, so, following Napoleon’s invasion of Italy, Buonarroti returned there and recreated his network as a secret society which he called the Adelphi, all of whose members assumed the name of Emilio, in honour of Rousseau’s Émile.
He may have taken the name Adelphi from a group of disgruntled officers in the French army calling themselves the Philadelphes, founded around 1803 in opposition to the rising power of Napoleon. In the wake of French incursions, secret societies sprang up all over Italy, some of them revolutionary, some pro-French, some anti-French, some in defence of the Catholic faith, others with no identifiable agendas. Some took over or overlapped with existing Masonic lodges. They sported a bizarre litany of names, based on astrology, religious symbolism drawn from Egyptian, Greek and Roman mythology, from Judaism and the Catholic canon, and their structures and rites were strongly marked by Masonry and Illuminism. To be precise about their numbers, or even to be certain of their existence, is impossible, as they would occasionally merge or change their names; because of the need for secrecy, members were often unaware of these changes, and so defunct societies lived on in the imaginations of members and their existence was reported by informers, and recorded by the police. Among these were not only the Centri, the Raggi, the dei Cinque, the Silencio dei Greci, the Cattolica and the Apostolica Romana, but also some whose names suggest that someone was having a joke at the expense of the Austrian police – the Pancie Nere (Black Bellies), the Vampiri and the Scamiciati (Shirtless Ones). They were joined in 1809 by a new society created by Buonarroti whose members were titled Sublimi Maestri Perfetti, and whose ruling body, the Grand Firmament, based in Switzerland, supposedly controlled a ramified organisation, of whose actual activities nothing specific is known.11
Less nebulous were the Carbonari. There are many theories as to the origins of the movement, placing them alternatively in Switzerland, France, Germany, Scotland, England and ancient Egypt, where they were allegedly founded by the goddess Isis, but others name the founder variously as Philomel of Thebes, the Roman god Mithras, the eleventh-century St Theobald, the Knights Templar, King Francis I of France, or just the German guild of charcoal-burners. The most likely explanation is that it was originally an offshoot of Freemasonry which drew inspiration from this guild and from its French equivalent, the Compagnonnage de la Charbonnerie, both of them loose but resilient networks based on the nature of their trade and their peripatetic way of life. Just as the basic unit of Masonry was the lodge, for the Carbonari it was the vèndita, and where Masons were ‘brothers’, the Carbonari were ‘good cousins’. The first evidence of their existence in Italy dates from 1808, and by the end of Napoleonic rule the movement was supposedly huge: estimates of its membership (all of which need to be taken with a large pinch of salt) vary from 4,000 to 80,000, and one would place it as high as 642,000.12
The nature of this movement can best be deduced from its rites and ceremonies. Initiation took place in a baracca, a hut in the middle of a wood or, failing that, of an urban garden. It began with a moment of reflection, after which the postulant would declare that he had come to the good cousins in search of truth and in order to learn to conquer his passions. He was then blindfolded and led around an obstacle course of tree trunks, confronted with blazing flames which symbolised the spirit of charity that must always burn in his breast, and made to kneel, axe in hand, while he swore to keep the secret and never deny assistance to any cousin. The axe was there to remind him that were he to fail in this he would be killed, and his body would be chopped up and burned, and his ashes scattered to the winds. The entire process took some time, and was accompanied by inordinate quantities of bloodcurdling verbiage, dramatic promises and oaths. Surviving Carbonarist ‘catechisms’ contain violent language, asserting for instance that property is ‘an outrage against the rights of the human race’, but they are essentially series of banal precepts based on the Catholic catechism, proclaiming the principal virtues to be faith, hope and charity, with some vaguely Rousseauist notions of ‘natural virtue’ thrown in. Initiation into higher grades could take the form of a simulacrum of the passion and crucifixion of Christ, with the postulant playing the role of Jesus, and his oppressors and killers dressed as Austrians. After his supposed death on the Cross, he would be taken down and resurrected into a new life.
The paraphernalia involved included daggers, cloaks, axes, fire, wine, chalices and blood, while the printed matter bristled with crosses, crowns of thorns, suns, moons, cocks, fasces, ladders, representations of St Theobald, skulls, crossed bones, geometrical dividers, triangles, pentangles and the odd papal tiara being struck by lightning. More than any desperate urge to rise up and overthrow the existing order, all this nonsense suggests a desire to escape an unfriendly world, to come together in a confraternity of like-minded equals, and to assuage a religious urge that the established Church could no longer satisfy. Many travellers, such as Byron and Heine, noted a profound sense of disappointment and alienation among young Italians, which is nowhere better captured than by Stendhal in the hero of his novel La Chartreuse de Parme.
Metternich did not concern himself with such reflections as he travelled around northern Italy, where he spent the first months of 1816. The following year he set off on a longer tour. He was delighted not only by the weather, the sights and the monuments; everywhere he went he encountered people who appeared to think like him and who expressed their loyalty to the Austrian emperor. ‘The Jacobins are hiding from me, as they see me as a whip hanging over them,’ he wrote home cheerfully. ‘The kind of European police which we have organised, on a scale far greater than any that has ever existed, has not failed us,’ he bragged to his ambassador in St Petersburg. ‘I am confident that no project against the existing order could ever be prepared without us being informed of the first moves on the part of the subversives.’ He was even more sure of himself in a letter to the French minister at Turin. ‘You see in me the great minister of police of Europe, I am overseeing everything,’ he wrote. ‘My contacts are such that nothing escapes me.’ Others were not convinced.13
The British ambassador in Vienna, Lord Charles Stewart, had complained in a letter to his half-brother Lord Castlereagh of Metternich’s ‘Inordinate Taste for Spies and Police’, which in his view ‘put the Employer more oftener [sic] on the wrong, rather than the right scent’. The British diplomat Sir Robert Gordon, who accompanied Metternich and Francis to Italy two years later, took much the same view. ‘Nothing can surpass Prince Metternich’s activities in collecting facts and information upon the inward feelings of the people: with a habit of making these researches he has acquired a taste for them, which gives no repose, until he finds himself ignorant of nothing that was intended to be concealed,’ he wrote. ‘But it may be feared that the secrecy with which this taste is necessarily indulged leads him to attach too great importance to his discoveries. Phantoms are conjured up and magnified in the dark, which probably, if exposed to light, would sink into insignificance; and his informers naturally exaggerate their reports, aware that their profit is to be commensurate with the display of their phantasmagoria.’14
Metternich was confident that while the many ‘sects’ were indeed giving rise to ‘a spirit of fermentation, discontent and resistance’, they did not represent a threat. ‘An active surveillance, which has not let up over the period of the past two years, has demonstrated to me that while the very real existence of these sects cannot be denied, and while they are nefarious and opposed in spirit to the Government, it is no less certain that they lack leaders of distinction capable of inspiring confidence, and that they have neither an overall directorship nor any of the other means required to effectively provoke revolutionary movements,’ he wrote in a memorandum to the Emperor Francis on 3 November 1817 at the end of his travels in Italy. In his view, nationalist aspirations could be countered by the delivery of order and sound administration, which would convince Italians of the benefits of Austrian rule.15
This did not mean that vigilance should be relaxed. Count Saurau, the governor of Lombardy-Venetia who directed the Habsburg police’s fight against subversion in Italy, developed an extensive network of agents, to cover not only the Austrian provinces but also places such as Rome, where he recruited a papal chamberlain in financial straits. Vast quantities of paper poured into Saurau’s office, most of it utterly without significance. Typical is a report from Venice dated 11 January 1816. It goes on at some length about how everything was calm and people were concerned only with the economy, living standards and fashions. ‘Nevertheless,’ it continues, ‘it being always prudent, in those who oversee public security, not to lose from sight the smallest political thing, even the most distant, I will not here omit to mention that in Italy there still exists an insidious faction which tends to promote the endlessly repeated and indulged mirage of national independence, in order to try to propel certain elements of this divided nation into the chaos of political confusion, from which to draw those advantages which the anarchists seem to always have as a project in their criminal machinations.’ Such a report tells the recipient nothing, and can only serve to alarm, particularly as the author throws in, for good measure, that he has heard that in Naples a group of Jacobins is trying to manipulate the king’s younger son against his father with the aim of starting a civil war.16
Another agent reported that he had been told ‘in the greatest confidence’ by a friend, ‘a man of great probity and trustworthiness’, that in Trieste, whither she had retired, Napoleon’s sister and former Grand Duchess of Tuscany, Countess Bacciochi, had been joined by her brother Jérôme and the former police chief Fouché, and that they were scheming with Joseph Bonaparte in the United States. She had been placed under the strictest possible surveillance by the Austrian police, but, the informant asserted, this was not sufficient. The consequence was reams of pointless tittle-tattle concerning the living arrangements and daily habits of every member of the households of the various Bonapartes, none of whom was remotely interested in political action, but all of whom were pathetically grateful to be allowed to live out their days in relative comfort.17
A nice example of the futility of this kind of intelligence-gathering is the disclosure to the Austrian authorities by a certain ‘Duke of Brindisi’ (who also traded under the names of Filipetti and Ancirotta) of the existence of a secret society, the Guelfi, allegedly set up in 1813 by British agents with the backing of Bentinck and Lord Holland to promote a rising which would bring into being an independent Italian state. He produced the society’s constitution, cipher codes and other papers, all of them forgeries. It was only after intercepting his correspondence with accomplices that the Austrian police recognised the hoax, which led them to dismiss the Guelfi as an invention, although the society did actually exist, and was active in various parts of Italy.18
Not only was this method of combating the perceived terrorist threat inefficient, it was also counter-productive. Lord Burghersh, the British minister at Florence, assured Castlereagh that ‘I am neither a Radical, nor that I have so far forgotten the principles which I have been brought up in, not to view with disgust the spirit of subversion and Jacobinism which is abroad; but I must at the same time declare that the system pursued by the Austrians in Italy, the ungenerous treatment of the Italians subjected to their government, will, as long as it is persisted in … not add one jot to their security.’19
Not that the other rulers were much more sensitive. The pope, Pius VII, had suffered at the hands of revolutionary and Napoleonic France, and lived in constant fear of upheaval. One moment he was convinced of the existence of a conspiracy in Paris to involve Spain and Italy in ‘a general revolution’, the next that Turkey was planning to land a force in Italy while Hungarian patriots attacked Austria and revolutionaries in France toppled the Bourbon regime. He was even suspicious of his secretary of state Cardinal Consalvi, whom the arch-reactionary cardinals known as zelanti undermined at every opportunity, at one point even reporting that he had been seen to give a British diplomat a ‘baccio di fra-massoni’, a ‘Masonic embrace’.20
Consalvi was no liberal. Yet he had managed to maintain some of the administrative structures introduced by the French, and founded a force of Carabinieri Pontifici, modelled on the Gendarmerie. On 23 October 1816 he issued an edict on the organisation of the police, giving the governor of Rome a free hand, making it clear that ‘he need not suffer any judiciary inhibition’ in the execution of his duties. He was to be given a large sum of money with which to pay ‘secret explorers’, who were to build up a bank of information on each family, district by district, giving the name, date of birth, origins, profession, financial circumstances, mode of life, moral profile and other details of every member. The file on the household of ex-King Charles IV of Spain, who had retired to Rome, is illuminating, classing his entire household, from old courtiers to lackeys and kitchen maids, as ottimo soggetto, equivoco soggetto, galantuomo (a damaging epithet in this context) or outright sospetto.21
Local police chiefs were instructed to produce a Rapporto Politico every week, on everything from the adequacy of the food supply, the regulation of markets and the efficiency of the administration to suspect persons, foreigners, standards of public decency, offensive books and pamphlets, and the attitude of the people to religion and the government. In the Papal States, opposition to the government was deemed not just criminal, but heretical as well. Those assessed by the local police as being deviant in this respect were placed under a kind of injunction, the precetto morale: they were forbidden to leave the city without police permission, or to be away from home between dusk and dawn; and they had to attend the Easter services and a three-day religious retreat in a monastery, and present themselves to the police once a month with an attestation from a priest that they had been to confession and received absolution. Usually applied to educated young men of the nobility or middle class, this was deeply humiliating.22
Such measures were also ineffectual when it came to social control. The police were entirely taken aback when, in June 1817, a revolt broke out in the small city of Macerata in the papal province of Le Marche. It was a pitiful business, involving a couple of dozen conspirators who attempted to seize control of the place. After a certain amount of shooting in the dark they were rounded up. Eleven were condemned to death, eleven to life imprisonment, seven to ten years on the galleys and two to shorter terms. The severity of the sentences reflects the degree to which the authorities had been rattled.23
One thing that particularly worried all the rulers was travellers, particularly if they were foreign. In order to inhibit them, an onerous system of visas and rigorous frontier checks was put in place. ‘Those who place purgatory in the other world would find it far more surely in the police offices and customs posts which have been set up in this one since the deliverance of Europe,’ the tsar’s erstwhile tutor La Harpe wrote to Alexander from Italy in August 1817. ‘In order to go to Naples, one is searched and interrogated fourteen times …!’ Stendhal echoes his exasperation. ‘The author’s trunk has been searched twenty-one or twenty-two times,’ he wrote at the beginning of January 1817. ‘The sight of a book irritates the customs official, who is supposed to know how to read.’ Mary Shelley records how, crossing from France into the kingdom of Sardinia in March 1818, one Milanese was sent back to Paris to have his passport countersigned by yet another official, and she nearly had to do the same, but was ‘suffered to pass’ (her books were not). Tiresome as they could be, these border controls were also highly inefficient, as the bored and poorly educated, and often illiterate, police or customs employees often let things through out of laziness or ignorance. One traveller was asked his name and other details by a police brigadiere to whom he had just handed his passport, and replied that all the information was contained in the document. The brigadiere then asked him to read them out, to which the traveller replied that the regulations required him to show his passport, not to read it out. The illiterate functionary had no option but to hand back the document and wave the traveller through.24
English tourists, who flooded Italy after two decades of privation, were treated with particular suspicion, being regarded as liberals by nature. None aroused more suspicion than Byron, who spent several years in Italy, leading a peripatetic existence, drawn hither and thither by the exigencies of his complicated love life. There was good reason for the authorities to be suspicious, as he naturally came into contact with the most disaffected elements in the country, such as aristocrats and writers. He understood their frustrations and sense of alienation, and joined their secret societies. Wherever he went, he was closely watched both by the local police and by Austrian agents. As a result, the archives of Venice, Lucca, Ravenna, Florence, Bologna, Pisa and the Vatican are full of reports on his daily doings – mostly dull, semiliterate, inaccurate and slapdash – detailing when he rose, when he went to bed, who visited him, at what time, how long they stayed, and so on.25
‘The constant watch kept by the police upon Lord Byron has led to two discoveries,’ reported the Austrian agent provocateur Giuseppe Valtancoli on 4 October 1819. ‘The first is that his Lordship wears on his watch-chain a triangular (or rather pyramidal) seal, on the face of which are engraved three small stars; on the seal are cut the letters F.S.Y. This is the new signal adopted some months ago by the Guelph Society.’ The second discovery was that a letter in the hand of Byron’s secretary addressed to someone in Milan contained an extract from an English publication on ‘Jesuitical Masonry’. Valtancoli’s research also elicited the revelation from an apparently impeccable source that Byron was ‘libidinous and immoral to excess’, but in politics he was ‘an Englishman in the fullest meaning of the term’, bent on ‘ruin and bloodshed’. Another spy reported that his secretary spent much time writing despatches in cipher, which were never seen by anyone or posted, suggesting to him that they were carried by the many English people passing through. One of the amusing aspects of the surveillance of Byron is that there are plenty of sightings of him, often accompanied by copious detail of his activities, in two places at once.26
The foreigners in Italy who particularly worried Metternich were not the English, or even the French. His diplomats and informers had identified Russian agents in Genoa, Turin, Bologna, Rome, Naples and elsewhere who were actively stoking up resentment of Austria and encouraging nationalist dreamers to believe that Tsar Alexander would support them in their endeavours for the liberation of Italy. To what purpose, Metternich could not be sure, as it was not easy to divine that monarch’s thoughts.