Metternich never used his transatlantic title, but modesty was not the reason. ‘My life has become a kind of apostolate,’ he confided to his wife in July 1824. ‘Wherever I go I find a flock of the faithful waiting for their shepherd, and I cannot in all conscience leave them without having bestowed upon them spiritual consolation … a real multitude follows me, surrounds me, looks to me, stretches out its hands to me.’ For years he had been ‘preaching to the deaf’, but now that people had seen how he had brought Germany back from ‘the very brink of revolution’, to which it had been driven by ‘the most contemptible weakness’ of its rulers and the influence of ‘innovators and ideologues of every kind’, they listened gratefully.1
Germany was certainly calm, but many cast doubt on whether there had ever been much of a storm in the first place. The King of Württemberg, for one, openly mocked Metternich and his crusade, accusing him of having mistaken ‘the dreams and exaltations of youth for conspiracy’. The report of the Mainz commission in 1822 did little more than confirm that there had been conspiratorial contacts between the various student organisations, and that subversive sentiments were rife. The only group which did appear to have been party to Karl Sand’s murder of Kotzebue were the Giessen ‘blacks’, but their leader, Karl Follen, had fled abroad in 1820, robbing the commission of the opportunity of interrogating him. He went to Paris, where he met French liberals such as Joseph Rey and Voyer d’Argenson, and then settled at Coire (Chur) in Switzerland, where he founded a Youth League, the Junglingsbund, which was to take over from the banned Burschenschaften and create a pan-German network. One of his associates, the Dane Johannes (sometimes Joachim) Witt von Dörring, had fled with him, but finding himself short of funds agreed to spy on Follen for the Austrian police. He was not, however, able to provide much in the way of information, as in 1824 Follen gave up on Europe and moved to America (where he obtained the post of Professor of German at Harvard, introduced gymnastics into the university and, it is claimed, the Christmas tree into American homes). In its report, the commission did make much of possible effects on the student bodies of what had been taking place in Spain and Italy, and particularly Greece, but it was obliged to admit that subversive political activity ‘expresses itself less in actual performance than in enticement, preparation and preliminaries’.2
In September 1822 the Prussian educational reformer and minister Freiherr von Altenstein had further embarrassed Metternich by writing an open letter defending the students. In his view they were guilty only of naïvety and perfectly praiseworthy longings to see Germany great, and he denounced the state’s treatment of them as dangerous delinquents. At the same time, the judicial authorities were beginning to complain at the disgraceful behaviour of the police and the random detention of people without charge, and to overturn convictions made in the heat of the first months after the assassination of Kotzebue.3
Pressed by Metternich to try harder, the commission redoubled its efforts. As so many German students had fled abroad, to Switzerland or Paris, the commission recruited spies; it would arrest a student and, by threatening him with a long sentence, blackmail him to go abroad and spy on his brethren. This sometimes led to his being unmasked and murdered by them, but yielded little in the way of evidence. The commission’s 1824 report confirmed that there were secret societies in existence, but could provide no evidence on their activities.4
None of this could shake Metternich’s conviction that there did exist in Germany a ‘vast anti-social conspiracy’; he explained its lack of activity by the fact that it was powerless without a strong impulse from the revolutionary ‘bases’ in France. In April 1824 Franchet d’Esperey furnished him with an extensive report that confirmed the existence of a comité directeur in Paris which had ‘no organisation, no statutes, no regular reunions’.
But France too was tranquil. The long-anticipated death of Louis XVIII on 16 September 1824 had not, as some had feared, been the signal for revolution, and the smooth succession of Monsieur to the throne as Charles X demonstrated that the restoration was secure. ‘This calm transition, which has turned the Revolution into a historical episode, proves beyond doubt that the moral regeneration of France is progressing apace,’ Metternich admitted.5
That did not mean the danger had passed, and Metternich harassed the Mainz commission to come up with more evidence. Mail was opened throughout Germany and every possible lead pursued, but the results were disappointing. In its final report, in 1828, the commission would come to the conclusion that revolutionary tendencies in Germany were almost entirely intellectual in nature, that there was no chance of them producing a revolution unless galvanised by foreign intervention, and that there was no evidence of anyone having given any serious thought to what kind of order might replace the existing one. It concluded by stating that what was happening in Germany was, as elsewhere in Europe, the inevitable consequence of the process of modernisation taking place throughout the Continent, and could not be tackled independently of it.6
Instead of reassuring him, lack of evidence of conspiracy tended to make Metternich more suspicious. His instinct was to pry further and delve deeper, regardless of past experience in this sphere. In order to be well-informed on every score, he had put in place for the peace congress at Vienna in 1814 a vast network of informers at every level; he knew what every single member of every delegation was doing, with whom, at every moment of the day and night. It had been a triumph of intelligence-gathering. The fact that it had helped him not one jot in the achievement of his diplomatic aims (and only provided generations of historians with amusement) did not dampen his lust for information. He had informers of every sort in all the capitals and courts of Europe, and devoted much time and effort to the police. Given the challenge as he perceived it, they would have to extend their search for potential subversion into new and ever-expanding areas, involving the most intimate invasion of everyday life, in a pursuit of the elusive that was both endlessly self-justificatory and self-defeating.
In Austria itself, the police were ubiquitous and prided themselves on knowing everything. They watched and pried without any sense of shame, and, as Martha Wilmot, the wife of the chaplain at the British embassy, wrote to her sister shortly after her arrival in the city, ‘there is a sort of Web cast round you the very day you arrive’. This is echoed in the accounts of other travellers, who were struck by the brazen lack of discretion. It was well known that in every household there were servants on the police’s payroll, but an American merchant travelling in Austria, Charles Sealsfield, was astonished by the lack of secrecy involved. One evening at a dinner given him by a Viennese merchant, his host mentioned a proposed new public loan, only to be summoned by the police the following morning and upbraided for discussing matters of state which were not his business. On coming home he dismissed his servants, and was summoned again, to give the reasons for which he had done so.7
‘Every footman in a public house is a salaried spy,’ Sealsfield wrote; ‘there are spies paid to visit the taverns and hotels, who take their dinners at the table d’hôte. Others will be seen in the Imperial library for the same purpose, or in the bookseller’s shop, to inquire into the purchases made by the different persons. Of course, letters sent and received by the post, if the least suspicious, are opened; and so little pains are taken to conceal this violation of public faith, that the seal of the post-office is not seldom added to that of the writer. These odious measures are not executed with the finesse which characterises the French, nor with the military rudeness of the Prussian, but in that silly and despicable way of the Austrian, who, as he is the most awkward personage for this most infamous of all commissions, takes, notwithstanding, a sort of pride in being an Imperial instrument and a person of importance.’8
Foreigners were prime objects of suspicion, and popular spas such as Töplitz and Karlsbad were stocked with Austrian noblemen with a command of foreign languages, who lived in the hotels, dined at the table d’hôte, took the waters, frequented the concerts and promenaded along with the visitors, reporting on them to the police. Homes in which travellers took rooms were under the constant surveillance of the master of the house.9
In 1817 a group of Swiss students at the University of Vienna formed ‘the Swiss Society in Vienna’, which met at a public eating house and discussed the situation in their homeland. They soon grew so alarmed at the obvious attentions of the police that they decided to dissolve it. They were nevertheless arrested and interrogated, and it was only after repeated diplomatic intervention by the Swiss authorities that they were released, on condition they leave Austria and never return. In 1819 a Prussian student who was sketching the Krimml waterfalls was surrounded by police who demanded to see his papers. He duly produced them and they went away, but that night he was snatched from his bed in a nearby country inn, clapped in irons like a dangerous criminal and taken to Innsbruck. He was released after a few days without charge or explanation, but given to understand that it would be best if he left the country as soon as possible.10
The Polizeihofstelle archives on the surveillance of foreigners which have survived to this day are not impressive. The files contain little more than skeins of bureaucratic verbiage, lists of names, often misspelled, of foreigners visiting spa towns and of those who have aroused suspicion, with little information to back this up. One man is said to be sympathetic to the Neapolitan rebels, another to have Carbonarist connections, a third has been seen reading the London Morning Chronicle. Meetings between two people are deemed suspicious because one of them is Italian, or Polish, or had served in the Napoleonic army. Fantastic conspiracies are hinted at, supported by gossip and even snippets copied from newspapers.11
Students continued to be the object of intense observation. They were subjected to repeated interrogations and searches. Every contact with a person from another town was grounds for suspicion, as was any mention of the events in Spain, Naples or Piedmont. The singing of songs such as ‘Das Deutsche Vaterland’ could land a student in the guardhouse for forty-eight hours. The Polizeihofstelle compiled reports of secret ‘machinations’ by student societies, which were allegedly communicating with Jahn in gaol, with students in Switzerland, Paris and Warsaw, planning a revolution in France in league with Bonapartists which would lead to the unification of Germany, all of this being orchestrated by a body calling itself the Classe Dirigeante des Hommes. The societies that had sprung up in support of the Greek struggle for independence were represented as branches of the comité directeur. But suspicion fell on all sorts of other groups as well – Protestant communities in predominantly Catholic areas were identified as ‘revolutionary’, and even travelling salesmen’s movements were tracked with infinite precision.12
This blanket surveillance was largely self-defeating. Back in 1804 the Viennese police had noted that the ubiquity of snoopers had made people avoid speaking to each other in public places, with the result that friends would meet in a coffee house and sit for a couple of hours in silence, breaking it only to say goodbye. The police inspector Anton Krametz-Lilienthal complained that the students at Grätz had been so terrified by blatant instances of informing that they would barely exchange a word with each other.13
The Austrian police were not on the whole brutal, but they did detain people, sometimes for a very long time. Karl Freiherr von Glave-Kobielski was incarcerated without charge from 26 March 1810 until his death in 1831. János Bacszany had been arrested in connection with the Jacobin conspiracy of 1794 but released two years later. He settled in Vienna, where, after his victory at Wagram in 1809, Napoleon employed him to compose an appeal to the Hungarians urging them to rise up against Habsburg domination. He left Vienna with the French army and set up home in Paris, but in 1814 the Austrian police ferreted him out, took him back to Austria and put him in gaol, where he died in 1845.14
The Austrian police regime in Lombardy-Venetia had, by the mid-1820s, imposed what Stendhal described as ‘a kind of reign of terror’, with the province treated ‘like a colony on the brink of revolt’. Conversation had become ‘the most dangerous of pleasures’. An American traveller, George Bancroft, was unpleasantly surprised as he watched the sunset from a hill overlooking Brescia in October 1821. ‘Just as I was giving way to feelings of rapture, two Austrian soldiers presented themselves not far from me, one armed with a gun and bayonet, and in the grossest and most absolute terms ordered me to descend, adding harshness to insolence and threats to contumely.’15
In 1826 the secret police of Lombardy-Venetia were reorganised and a new set of eighteen regulations issued to the supreme commissioner of police, setting out his duties in order of precedence. The first was ‘to investigate and uncover all the schemes, conspiracies, plots, projects, attempts, machinations and enterprises against the safety of the most august ruling house and particularly of the sacred person of H.M. the Emperor himself, as well as the state; to investigate anything and everything that could compromise the public safety, internal or external, of the monarchy’. The second was ‘to track down secret societies, corporations, fraternities, gangs and sects, whatever their nature’, both inside and outside Austrian dominions. The third was ‘to penetrate public opinion’, ‘to watch those who have a major influence on public opinion, those who invent or propagate false, inaccurate or alarming news’, and ‘to gather up all the observations, comments, remarks, propositions, desires and complaints of the population’. The fourth, to observe the effect produced by newspapers, periodicals and other publications, to use every possible means to detect those responsible for smuggling forbidden items, and to keep watch on bookshops and print sellers. The fifth, to invigilate the public and private conduct of state functionaries, and the religious practice and doctrinal beliefs of the clergy and people working in the field of education. Further duties were ‘to watch all consuls, foreign diplomats, or other accredited agents, or secret emissaries, adventurers, libertines, explorers, etc.’, to keep an eye on all travellers, their contacts and correspondence, to set up a network of espionage, and so on. The instructions recommend avoidance of ‘any sort of provocation, seduction’ or criminal means to obtain results, and warn that as ‘the spirit of political faction, the fanaticism for secret sects, the vehemence of temperament and private considerations, no less than the almost universal habit of calumnying the reputation of others all too easily incite the passions into a spirit of vengeance and persecution’, the police should be careful in their choice of informers, whose reports should be treated accordingly.16
The police of the Habsburg grand duchy of Tuscany were neither efficient nor discriminating in their choice of informers. They wasted huge resources on following Byron and his household when the poet moved to Pisa in 1822. His courtesy visits to the small English colony there were interpreted as briefings from a higher body. One spy, Luigi Torelli, was so imaginative in his interpretation of Byron’s activities that an affray with an off-duty dragoon sergeant was described as a ‘pitched battle’, and the poet was reported as having artillery concealed in the palazzo he had rented. The police of the duchies of Parma and Modena, nominally ruled by Napoleon’s widow Marie-Louise, exhibited similar levels of excessive zeal and incompetence. But Metternich had his own people on the spot. In 1822, the French minister in Florence complained that his Austrian counterpart was ‘established here like a power within a power, with his spies and his police’.17
The Vatican was the most reluctant to cooperate, preferring to rely on its own organs. These were pervasive, invasive and largely ineffectual. Like their colleagues elsewhere, they were obsessed with the danger presented by travellers, who had to show their documents at every border, both state and provincial, in spot checks along the road, at city gates, at inns and even at livery stables. Anyone wishing to stay more than one night had to register with the local police, justifying their visit, and their words might carry less weight than the secret messages contained in their documents: the higher police authorities issuing these would use their own signals to warn any official examining them, and a double-crossed ‘t’ or an undotted ‘i’ could condemn the traveller to constant surveillance or being moved on. At the same time, the constant movement to and from markets of peasants who failed to carry or had lost their documents, vagabonds and pilgrims on their way to Rome overwhelmed the police, and people were regularly waved through city gates without a check.18
Similar levels of ambition, activity, incompetence and laziness characterised the papal police’s enforcement of political conformity, the so-called alta polizia. They snooped, eavesdropped, followed people and opened letters, but as they were so blatant about it people would keep their mouths shut in public, employ tricks to lose those following them, and consign nothing to the post except trivia. Rumour, hearsay and denunciation were often all the police had to go on, and their only guides to what people were thinking were the slogans scrawled in charcoal on the city walls and public buildings, which they would efface every morning. Every matter was treated with the same gravity. When a group of Bologna’s wealthiest citizens established a club for their entertainment and applied for the necessary licence, an investigation was ordered which culminated a two-hundred-page report to Cardinal Consalvi.19
In the wake of the events of 1820, the Austrian police and their allies in various parts of Italy made a number of arrests, and the prisoners provided a mixed bag of information. The Illuminati were allegedly active in Tuscany, the Templars in Rome, and a dizzying array of other societies with absurd names in various other parts of the peninsula. One of those arrested, in 1821, shortly after the suppression of the Piedmontese coup, was Karl Follen’s follower Johannes Witt von Dörring, who was believed by some to be one of Metternich’s own secret agents. He had aroused the suspicion of the French police when he came to Paris in 1818 by staying in expensive hotels under different names and meeting a confusing variety of people. He had supplied the police with information on the secret societies in Germany, which were, according to him, preparing a massacre of ruling princes. Their password was ‘INRI’, standing not for Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudaeorum, but Iustum Necare Reges Iniustos (It is right to kill unjust kings). Döring had moved on to Switzerland to join Follen, and subsequently to England, where he posed as a refugee from Prussian persecution, before travelling to Italy. He told the Austrian police that there was an international conspiracy, indicating links between Germany, Italy and Switzerland, from where the whole thing was being directed. He claimed that although he had been a Freemason, he was not himself a member of any secret society, yet he discoursed authoritatively on the subject of the Carbonari. According to him, they and the Illuminati were one and the same, and were dedicated to the destruction of the existing social order, to murder and mayhem.20
Towards the end of 1822, the police in Milan arrested a young Frenchman by the name of Alexandre Andryane. As a student in Geneva in the previous two years he had come across Buonarroti and fallen under his spell. Buonarroti had been working for years to bring all secret societies and conspirators together under the aegis of his Sublimi Maestri Perfetti with its Grand Firmament, a kind of areopagus whose membership remains a mystery. His ambition was not the overthrow of one monarchy or another, but universal social revolution. In 1818 he changed the name of the Sublimi Maestri Perfetti to Il Mondo, and according to some informants operated in Italy under the name of the Adelfi. Andryane (codename Plato) claimed to be on a mission to make contact with whatever revolutionary movements he could identify, to try to bring them together and give them renewed hope after the failures of the past two years. He contacted a number of conspirators and attended meetings of secret societies, and he was not impressed. The men he met regurgitated the bloodthirsty slogans and oaths of the Carbonari, but were actually passive liberals who merely longed for a slightly less oppressive system such as a constitutional monarchy. They grossly exaggerated their own numbers, influence and potential, and some of the more honest admitted to him that their societies were a sham. He decided to hand on the papers Buonarroti had entrusted to him and leave. Before he could do so he was arrested and the documents he was carrying seized. Among them was evidence of international conspiracy and the structures and rituals of the Sublimi Maestri Perfetti.21
Andryane was condemned to death, later commuted to life imprisonment, but after eight years in the Moravian fortress of Spielberg he was pardoned and returned to Paris. There he published memoirs which would give new life to the conspiracy theories. Dörring would also publish sensationalist memoirs on his release from gaol in 1830, in which he rolled out the usual nonsense, enriched by his time in captivity, about the grand conspiracy. On entering a cell he would scour the walls and, so he claimed, discover coded messages from previous incumbents, with instructions to be passed on. This kind of thing only fed the fears of the gullible.22
What is astonishing is that it was given any credence by the police. Andryane and Dörring told tales and produced documents which were, to put it mildly, incredible. That they tallied with supposed facts gleaned elsewhere made the police treat them seriously. What the police do not appear to have considered is that from their own files it would seem that where it is not made up this evidence echoes the grand conspiracy of Barruel and the occult secrets of Lombard de Langres. There had been so many books and pamphlets on the theme of the grand conspiracy of the Templars, Masons, Illuminati and the rest, scraps of which found their way into common parlance, that it had become a familiar theme. It inspired poseurs and fantasists, and frauds who would try to sell the police vitally important evidence on some plot or other. It also provided a means of diverting a charge, as in the case of one André Achard, arrested by the French police for highway robbery in July 1824, who attempted to get off by confessing to being part of a conspiracy by Piedmontese revolutionaries directed from Paris operating under the name of l’Union Croisée which meant to place Napoleon’s son on the throne. He gave the names of officers involved which, when checked, turned out to be false, and the only elements in his ‘confession’ that were true were publicly known.23
Neither the French nor the Austrian police appear to have paused to consider the plausibility of the stories they were fed by the likes of Andryane. If those he identified had been serious conspirators, in touch with colleagues in France, Germany and Switzerland, it seems unlikely that a man like him could have turned up in Milan unannounced and been entrusted with important documents. The members of the secret societies would surely have been given notice that an emissary was due, and have insisted on passwords or other validation. Some of the documents in the French police archives are of an amateurish silliness that beggars belief. The induction rituals described all derive from one of the many books on the grand conspiracy, while the recipes for invisible ink are infantile (e.g. ‘Take an oak gall, grate finely and dissolve in fresh water until the mixture is white but not too thick, write with a new pen on white paper’).24
The other thing the police and their masters failed to do was to confront the claims made about the extent and power of the alleged secret societies with their failure to achieve results. This led them to exaggerate the threat and to impose grossly disproportionate punishments, which had the effect of creating martyrs. In October 1820 the journalist and poet Silvio Pellico was arrested in Venice, although it seems the ‘vèndita’ he belonged to was actually a literary society. At the beginning of 1822, after a lengthy trial, Pellico was sentenced to death. This was commuted to fifteen years of carcere duro, and he was sent in chains to the Spielberg. He would be released in 1830, and two years later published the account of his sufferings in a small book entitled Le mie Prigioni, which became an international best-seller, turning a mediocre poet incapable of doing any harm to anyone into a martyr whose treatment blackened the reputation of the Habsburg monarchy around the world and inspired countless young men to take up arms against it.
Another who achieved the status of martyr was Count Federico Confalonieri, who had conspired with the Piedmontese constitutionalists, encouraging them to help their comrades in the liberation of Lombardy-Venetia in 1820. He was tracked down and arrested in 1822. Early in 1824, after a trial which also took an inordinately long time, he was sentenced to death, commuted to life of carcere duro, also in the Spielberg. But on his way there he was to have a curious, almost surreal experience. He was conveyed from Milan in a windowless carriage resembling a large black box, his hands and feet chained, sitting between two armed policemen. At the beginning of March 1824 his convoy stopped at Vienna. He was so emaciated after two years of incarceration and interrogation that he could barely walk, so he was carried upstairs to a tastefully furnished apartment. The following evening he was driven in an ordinary carriage across the city, whose palaces were illuminated and whose streets swirled with gaily attired people laughing and singing, as the carnival was in full swing. It drew up outside the Ballhausplatz chancellery and he was carried upstairs and into a small study, where he found himself face to face with Metternich.
During their interview, which lasted a full two hours, the Austrian chancellor questioned him with exquisite courtesy about his activities in Italy, repeatedly asking the baffled Confalonieri about the comité directeur in Paris. Metternich lectured him as he might a naughty child, reproaching him for having embraced ‘false’ ideas and ending up on the wrong, and the losing, side. ‘Our cause is therefore not only the better one,’ he blandly affirmed, ‘it is the more successful.’ Confalonieri was struck by the Austrian chancellor’s certainties as he exposed for his benefit the Metternichian world-view, in which everything that did not entirely accord with his own opinions was de facto Jacobinical, a term with which he embraced philanthropists, liberals, constitutionalists, deists, agnostics and a multitude of others. Metternich for his part also learned something which astonished him, even though he had suspected it for some time. In a letter to Lebzeltern after his interview with Confalonieri on 7 March he wrote that he had heard ‘some curious things concerning the dealings of the Russian embassy in Turin before the outbreak of the Piedmontese revolt’.25