Metternich had long seen Paris as a sewer, from which nothing but filth could be expected to flow. But he had expected better of Britain, which, viewed from Vienna, now appeared to be well on the way to anarchy. In May 1838 Francis Place and the Radical William Lovett drew up a charter for the London Working Men’s Association, listing their demands for further parliamentary reform, which were: universal male suffrage, secret ballots, annual elections, constituencies of equal size, the payment of Members of Parliament and the removal of the property qualification to stand for election. On 9 February 1839 a National Convention of the Industrious Classes opened in London, bringing together a motley assortment of traditional Radicals, anti-Poor Law agitators, Methodists, trades unionists, socialists and others. It reconvened in Birmingham in the summer in more bellicose mood. The city magistrates requested assistance from the Metropolitan Police, which sent ninety men, but this was seen as provocation, and there was a series of ugly confrontations in the Bull Ring, followed by riots which were only contained by the intervention of troops. A petition for reform bearing 1,280,000 signatures was presented to the House of Commons, which rejected it out of hand. This set off a rash of strikes and other disorders around the country.
The government appointed General Charles Napier to command the northern district, and he was in no doubt as to the danger of the situation. He realised that he must avoid a clash at all costs, and kept his troops concentrated in large bodies in order to discourage attacks. He invited Chartist leaders to watch demonstrations of artillery fire, and explained how much effort and organisation it would take them to keep together and feed a body of insurgents, and just how long his grapeshot would take to kill them. As he put it in a letter to one of his officers, if one small detachment were to be overwhelmed, it would lead to ‘the total defeat of the troops’, as the rioters smelled blood and success. But he had no doubt of the final outcome. ‘Poor people! They will suffer,’ he noted in his diary in August. ‘They have set all England against them and their physical force: – fools! We have the physical force, not they … Poor men! Poor men! How little they know of physical force.’1
Others took a different view, and The Annual Register 1838 was damning on the subject of the associations of workers: ‘Terror becomes the main foundation of their authority. Like all secret associations, they begin by the institution of certain mystic and superstitious rites, which not only impose upon the imagination of their neophytes, but give a dramatic interest to their proceedings, and a dignity to their lawless schemes. Thus it appears, that the apartments in which their nocturnal conclaves assemble, are often, on occasions of especial solemnity, decorated with battle-axes, drawn swords, skeletons, and other insignia of terror. The ceremony of inauguration itself, is said to partake of a religious character. The officials of the society are ranged on either side of the room, in white surplices; on the table is the open bible. The novice is introduced with his eyes bandaged – prayers and hymns are recited – and certain mystic rhymes pronounced …’ There follow bloodcurdling extracts of the alleged oath sworn by new members. ‘The ordinances of these societies are usually enforced by violence, and too frequently assassination has been resorted to by their emissaries. When a “strike” has been determined upon in any factory, the avenues to the building are invested, and regular picquets, of men who are strangers to the neighbourhood, are stationed by night and day, to intercept the arrival of fresh workmen …’ The reader is alerted to the ‘profound secrecy’ surrounding the associations’ operations and the ‘very considerable’ sums of money raised.2
Such disturbances as did take place were in fact sporadic and unrelated to any wider cause. Those that broke out in Wales in 1839 were a case in point. Known as the Rebecca riots, they were largely the result of the breakdown of rural structures and the progress of nonconformism, and hostility to English magistrates and stewards, though rents, tithes, rates and the Poor Laws also played a part. But the immediate motive was the imposition of new toll gates. These were destroyed at night by men with blackened faces dressed in women’s clothes, supposedly in emulation of a mythical Rebecca, whose origins are as nebulous as those of Ned Ludd and Captain Swing. The only overtly revolutionary explosions were an armed march on Newport and an abortive rising in Sheffield and the West Riding of Yorkshire. The disturbances died down in the spring of 1840.3
In July 1840 the National Charter Association was launched in Manchester, and it quickly sprouted four hundred local branches which concentrated on proselytising rather than agitation. It also began collecting signatures under a new petition to Parliament. When this was presented, in 1842, it had over 3.3 million signatures, more than all the registered voters in the United Kingdom. Like the first, it was dismissed. This coincided with worsening conditions, unemployment and rising food prices. By the summer of 1842, almost 10 per cent of the entire population was on poor relief. Food riots were accompanied by the so-called ‘Plug-Plot’ events, where industrial workers pulled the plugs out of boilers in order to immobilise steam engines. The Chartists sought to exploit the unrest, which spread through Lancashire, Yorkshire, Staffordshire, Cheshire, Warwickshire and South Wales. The government reacted vigorously, and some 15,000 arrests were made.4
The repeal in 1826 of the Aliens Act of 1793 was a landmark; it demonstrated that the authorities were no longer afraid of infiltration and contagion by subversives. But they were taking a risk. It greatly facilitated the immigration of foreigners, and not a single political refugee was refused entry or expelled until the introduction of the Aliens Bill of 1905. And while France and Belgium also accepted political refugees, Britain was the only country in which they were allowed to carry on their political activities openly.
The first wave of political refugees was made up of Italians who had to leave their homeland following the abortive revolutions of 1820–21. They were mostly educated, and found employment of one kind or another. They were joined by Germans and some Spaniards, and, after 1831, by a significant number of Poles. More Spaniards and numbers of Frenchmen came in the course of the 1830s, followed by a large number of Germans. They mostly lived in rookeries in the dirty, narrow streets east of the Charing Cross Road around Seven Dials, behind Leicester Square, in Soho and Islington. Most eked out a living, if only by giving language lessons. This was not a resource for the Poles, for obvious reasons.
The Polish insurrection had aroused high levels of emotion and sympathy in England, among both the aristocracy and the politically conscious working classes. The refugees who settled in the early 1830s, who numbered just over five hundred, were granted a pension by Parliament based on their military rank. Apart from a handful associated with the aristocratic and constitutionalist Polish Party, which was embraced by the Whigs, most of the Poles were republicans, and the Radicals and the Chartists warmed to them. The Poles eagerly joined in the working-class agitation, and brought to it a more vigorous and revolutionary edge. They encouraged insurrection and were involved in most of the more violent disturbances, such as the march on Newport.
The Working Men’s Association issued a proclamation declaring their solidarity with all the refugees and their cause:
Fellow producers of wealth! Seeing that our oppressors are thus united, why should not we too, have our bond of brotherhood and holy alliance? Seeing that they are powerful through your ignorance, why should we not unite to teach our brethren a knowledge of their rights and duties? Perceiving that their power is derived from our ranks, why should we not unite in holy zeal to show the injustice of war, the cruelty of despotism, and the misery it entails upon our species? … Let us, therefore, brethren, cultivate feelings of fraternity among nations, and brotherly union in our respective countries. Let us not be so ignorant as to allow ourselves to be converted into soldiers, police, or any other of the infamous tools by which despotism is upheld, and our brethren enslaved. Let us be prepared to make any sacrifice in the dissemination of truth, and to cultivate feelings of toleration, between Jew, Catholic, Protestant or Dissenter!
In 1846 a group of Chartists came together with Polish and German émigrés to found the Fraternal Democrats, which was supposed to unite the like-minded all over Europe, but remained little more than a talking shop. The émigrés would attend each other’s commemorations – Bastille Day on 14 July for the French, 29 November for the Poles – and deliver addresses ringing with grandiose visions of international solidarity, but that was where it stopped.5
Metternich believed otherwise. ‘The underground activity which the political émigrés and the sects never tire of carrying on against legitimate governments obliges these to extend their surveillance far beyond their own borders if they wish to avoid the risk of being taken unawares,’ he wrote to his new ambassador in Russia, Count Fiquelmont, in December 1837. ‘I do not in truth accord more than a very restricted degree of credence to the reports of our paid informers abroad, for one should not entirely trust agents whose primary interest is money. But when people who do not know each other and watch from very different points send in the same alarm signals, it is very difficult not to believe them.’ He was receiving reports of ‘noticeable agitation in the propaganda’, and above all among Polish émigrés, who had set up a ‘Cosmopolitan Society’ with its headquarters in London and branches in Paris and Brussels, which was actively planning revolutions in Poland, Germany and Italy. Research by historians has so far failed to find any trace of the existence of such a body, but its existence was real enough for Metternich.6
The Emperor Francis had died in March 1835, but his doctrine of maintaining ‘calm’ at all costs did not perish with him. He was succeeded by his son Ferdinand, who was mentally incapable of ruling the country, and Metternich continued in command of foreign policy and security, which in effect meant everything except finances. Whatever Gentz and Kolowrat may have said, he continued to place his trust in bayonets, and since he felt he could not count on the support of Prussia or any of the German states, let alone Britain, which was ‘making great strides towards a revolution’, his policy increasingly took on the characteristics of a siege mentality. As his erstwhile allies could not even be relied on to provide him with intelligence, he felt obliged to extend his tentacles and assume the role of policeman for the whole Continent.7
The effects verged on the surreal. The exchange of information between Metternich and Benckendorff, both through diplomatic channels and in direct correspondence, most of it concerning alleged plots by Poles, paints a picture which no historian of the movements in question would recognise. In 1838 Metternich supplied Benckendorff with information on a vast conspiracy prepared by ‘anarchist parties’ in France and Belgium, involving republicans in Paris, ‘the Clubs of Belgian malcontents’, English Chartists and ‘partisans of the revolution in the Rhineland’. The following year he warned him that one of his best agents, operating in Belgium, had uncovered ‘a vast conspiracy in Russia’. The information was corroborated by intelligence he had received from Naples. It was linked with a Polish conspiracy whose tentacles reached as far as Kiev, Odessa, Vilna, even Moscow and St Petersburg. The societies Alexander had banned and the Decembrists had revived, and the conspiracy was in contact with like-minded groups in Poland, Germany, France and Belgium. The agent in question, a Baron Forsting, was sent to St Petersburg to divulge the detail to Benckendorff, but failed to convince him. In the politest terms, Benckendorff reassured Metternich that a preliminary examination suggested that the whole thing was ‘very minimal’, and that a minute and far-reaching investigation would probably not turn up much more than ‘some dreams, or, at the very most, some unconsidered conversations of young men’. Russia, he declared, was perfectly calm, no Russian would ever dream of collaborating with any Pole, and everyone mentioned by Forsting had been investigated and cleared.8
In the spring of 1841 Metternich warned Benckendorff that a Pole serving in the Austrian army who had attempted to overthrow the monarchy was in contact with a movement among Russian officers planning to found a Slav republic. Benckendorff replied that the allegations had ‘not the slightest foundation’, and that ‘unless the Corps Commanders of our Army, the Governors of our provinces and myself are struck by some strange blindness, nothing of the sort exists in Russia’. But he did warn Metternich that his own spies in Paris had informed him that Polish émigrés had infiltrated the Lazarist Order and were sending agents into Habsburg dominions disguised as missionaries.9
The low quality of the intelligence supplied by police informants in general is staggering, but it is not altogether surprising. Judging by the information in their files, the French police never managed to recruit agents among the émigrés in their midst, or even to find spies with a command of the relevant languages, which seriously limited the amount of intelligence they could gather, while their agents’ inability to spell foreign names rendered all their lists of suspects worthless. Even more astonishing, given that the Habsburg monarchy reigned over speakers of every language of its supposed revolutionary enemies, is that the Austrian police files are full of ludicrously misspelled Italian and Polish names.10
Spies reporting from the various spa towns regularly got the wrong end of the stick by piecing together whatever scraps of conversation they could understand, and sometimes misunderstand. They struggle to give weight to pointless reports, such as that a Pole, Count Czapski, on a cure in Karlsbad, is ‘exalted and nourishes a prejudice against the Russian government’; or that a Dr Kalitowsky working in a hospital in Pest is part of a plot to assassinate Metternich, as he is ‘lugubrious’ and ‘extremely suspicious’, and seems to be in contact with Poles in Paris. The wild allegations and the bureaucratic verbiage lend these reports a numbing quality that must presumably have had the opposite effect on Metternich, who lapped them up, and on one occasion asked rhetorically, ‘Where would society be without surveillance?’11
When he first came to power, Metternich expanded the interception of mail, which yielded such a rich crop of interesting material that the Emperor Francis developed something akin to an addiction, awaiting with impatience each morning after hearing Mass his 7 a.m. delivery of intercepts. The mail was checked at all major post offices throughout the monarchy’s dominions, at seaports and at fashionable spas frequented by foreigners, such as Karlsbad, Marienbad and Töplitz. Private mail was opened indiscriminately at the whim of local operatives, and neither high officials, members of the imperial family, the emperor, nor Metternich himself were immune.
To ensure that as much European mail as possible continued to pass through Austrian domains, Metternich saw to it that the Habsburg postal service was cheaper and faster than the alternatives. In 1822 the police minister Sedlnitzky complained that this placed a huge strain on his operatives, since it reduced the amount of time they had to turn the intercepted mail around. Letters arriving at Vienna were brought at 7 a.m. from the post office to the secret cipher chancellery, where one of the sub-directors would pick out those which might be of interest. These had to be opened, copied, resealed and returned to the post office by 10 a.m. An hour later, letters were brought in from provincial post offices, and the same procedure had to be gone through in quick time, so they could be back in the post by 2 p.m. Two hours after that, the first letters posted in Vienna that day would be brought in, and they had to be processed in time to catch the outgoing post at 7 p.m. (A letter posted in Vienna took ten or eleven days to reach Paris, one sent by special courier took seven, but Metternich often relied on the banking house of Rothschild, whose communications were mysteriously swifter.) The canny soon learned to post their letters at the last minute in order to leave as little time as possible before they left the city, which put further strain on the censors.12
These numbered no more than twenty-two, all of them housed rent-free, and well paid. But they were in effect prisoners, as they could never get away from the hectic activity. Metternich was extremely proud of their achievements, and once boasted that one of them, Eichenfeld, had single-handedly deciphered eighty-three codes. Another, Josef Schneid, spoke nineteen languages. One French ambassador admitted to a colleague that he had never been provided with a cipher that the Austrians were not able to decrypt within a month.
But Metternich’s satisfaction was misplaced; he should have realised that if his personnel could be so proficient, so could those of other powers. If, as he prided himself, his men could ‘borrow’ the French cipher from the bedroom of France’s ambassador, the same could be, and was, done by the other side. And if his experts were brilliant, those of the French cabinet noir were a match for them. As Austrian ambassador in Paris in 1806–09 Metternich became aware that his letters were being read, so he commissioned an engraver to make a barely perceptible modification to his seal. When he noticed that the letters he sent were being resealed with a copy that had been made of the original one, he wrote a note to the head of the French postal service, saying: ‘I have the honour to inform you that my seal has, by misfortune, been slightly chipped. Please amend yours accordingly, so that I may continue to notice nothing.’13
If Metternich could be so clever, so could the French. In 1818 he had set up what he thought was a foolproof secret channel of communication for conducting his affair with Countess Lieven. He arranged for her letters to leave London in the British diplomatic bag, addressed to Baron Binder, the secretary at the Austrian embassy in Paris. On arrival at the British embassy the sealed package would be passed by hand to Binder. Inside he would find another, also addressed to himself. Inside that that was a further sealed envelope, with no address, which he knew to send through the Austrian diplomatic bag to one of Metternich’s secretaries in Vienna. The secretary in question would open the envelope and find another unmarked, sealed envelope, which he would hand to Metternich, who would bask in the loving words it contained, ignorant of the fact that a copy of each of the letters was lying in the archives of the French police in Paris.14
If any letter could be intercepted, any code could be broken. As Joseph de Maistre pointed out to his superior when he was Sardinian minister in St Petersburg, diplomats had a tendency to over-encode, which made the code easier to crack. Encoding text also lent it an importance that could be harmful: if an ambassador reported the amorous goings-on at the court to which he was accredited, the other side would treat it as mere gossip, but when the information was encrypted it drew attention to itself, and even if, once decrypted, it appeared to be harmless, the snoopers of the other side would try to read hidden significance into it. In 1833 the head of the Russian cipher office came to the conclusion that ‘the role of the decrypter is over’, as everyone had become so good at breaking each other’s codes.15
The surveillance of correspondence was of dubious value anyway. Those reading the letters were under subliminal pressure to discover something of importance, and as a result read significance into innocent text or distorted the sense of a passage, which nullified the whole point of the exercise. Once people realised that their letters were being read, they took various precautions, such as using their own codes and nicknames. Others resorted to various kinds of ‘invisible ink’, usually based on lemon juice – a pointless exercise, as the method of reading this (by warming it next to a candle flame) was widely known even among amateurs. Some actually inserted messages into their letters which they intended to be picked up by the police for a number of reasons, none of which was helpful to the forces of order. Many just stopped writing letters or using the postal service – in France, the resulting drop in postal revenues was so marked that it precipitated a debate in the Chamber.16
Metternich’s desire to know everything that was going on was matched by the determination of the rulers of the Habsburg realm to protect their flock from the evils of the Schwindelgeist. The first step was to limit access to education, which was self-evidently a bad and dangerous thing. They could not prevent the aristocracy or wealthy people from acquiring it, but they were opposed to spreading it to the lower orders: in Mantua, a Lancaster school was closed down precisely because it provided free education, and Caroline Augusta, the Emperor Francis’s fourth wife, was opposed even to kindergartens.17
‘I want not scholars, but good citizens,’ Francis told a group of teachers to whom he gave an audience at Laibach in 1821. ‘It is your duty to educate youth in this direction. Whoever serves me must teach according to my orders. Whoever is not able to do so, or starts new ideas going, must go or I will eliminate him.’ Teachers were not supposed to have any original thoughts, and an edict of 1820 stipulated that all lectures must be monitored by the police for signs of deviance. Applicants for teaching posts had their origins, their past, their ideas and their friends checked by the police. The information was passed to the emperor, who personally vetted each one. Those he approved were employed for a three-year probationary period, during which they had to demonstrate that they were not encouraging in their charges ‘behaviour hostile to or threatening to public order’. In Lombardy-Venetia, where the need to engage the loyalty of the local population was recognised, the Austrian authorities did provide compulsory primary education, with higher rates of attendance than elsewhere in Europe. Based on the inculcation of civic duty, loyalty to the sovereign and obedience to the laws, it ensured that generations of Italians grew up into faithful subjects of the Austrian emperor.18
Francis viewed science, literature and history as inherently dangerous: the first because it was by definition in conflict with Holy Scripture, the second because it involved reading frivolous and corrupt books, and the third because it raised all sorts of political issues. In 1810 a set of regulations on the conduct of censors ruled that only serious scientific books were to be passed, while most novels should be banned out of hand, particularly if they contained anything that could be seen as disparaging to the throne, religion or the law.
Having no interest in education himself, Francis was suspicious of anyone who did wish to broaden their horizons, and those running his empire had been brought up to think like him. As a result, any activity dedicated to the acquisition or extension of knowledge was regarded by the authorities as suspect. The Austrian police in Italy viewed institutions of learning and literary academies with the utmost suspicion, and when these began corresponding with each other across the provincial and state boundaries criss-crossing the peninsula, they jumped to the conclusion that they were in fact a thinly disguised Carbonarist network. Metternich raged at ‘the spirit of association which is in evidence everywhere’, and did everything he could to prevent the formation of any kind of institution or society, even small-town reading clubs, for, as Sedlnitzky put it, ‘people would read and read until they became murderers’.19
One of Metternich’s most trusted weapons was censorship. He regarded the very concept of the freedom of the press as heresy, and strove throughout his life to limit it, not only in Austrian dominions but in every other country too. Where he could not muzzle it, he used the press to put forward his own arguments, making use of a stable of talented writers as well as his own pen. As with all attempts to manipulate news, this produced some curious effects, as people tried to deduce the truth from what was or was not reported and printed, second-guessing what they read. The inhabitant of Vienna could read about events in Paris or London in the local press, but rarely about what was going on in Vienna, for which he would have to read the London or Paris papers, if he could get hold of them – and, despite the multiple restrictions, this was not all that difficult. Censorship was a double-edged weapon, as in denying society a voice, it deprived the authorities of the knowledge of what society was thinking, and obliged them to pry into people’s lives in order to find out – which made people suspicious and secretive.
Censorship was extended to cover every conceivable manner of expression that could be seen, heard or read by the public, including music, pictorial representations, even advertisements and epitaphs on tombstones. The dedication to Chopin on a piece of sheet music was banned on account of his association with the Poles’ struggle for independence. The publication or exhibition of the likeness of any member of the Bonaparte family was strictly prohibited, including those of Napoleon’s wife, even though she was the daughter of the Emperor of Austria. Images of Kościuszko, Poniatowski, Riego, Ypsilanti and other heroes of various wars of independence were banned, not only in engravings, but on buttons, rings and pipe bowls. Portraits of living figures had to be shown to the police before they could be exhibited, and the depiction of the emperor or any court official in civil attire was forbidden.20
Manuscripts destined for publication and books imported from abroad had to be submitted to the fourth department of the Polizeihofstelle. Authors would bring their manuscript to the Central Book Revision Office, which would pass it on to two readers, often eminent scholars, each of whom would make a report which would be handed in to the Court Police Office. Medical books were submitted to specialist censors at the university. If two censors arrived at differing conclusions, the manuscript would be sent to a third for assessment. The process could take anything between eight and twenty months, since various offices of state needed to be consulted on passages which might concern their purview. In theological matters, the emperor was the final arbiter.21
No criticism was allowed of the monarch, the imperial family or the administration. Unfavourable comment on monarchs and authority in general, even foreign or historical, was also prohibited. Religion was protected territory, and any reference to it was likely to cause trouble for the author. Anything that infringed morality, and all erotic literature, was scrutinised for lapses of ‘taste’. The effects were often ludicrous. History books were banned because they described thrones being toppled, kings being killed and alternative forms of government. In 1816 Metternich forbade the production of a play by Caroline Pichler, Ferdinand II, which was set in the days of the seventeenth-century religious wars, on the grounds that the image of princes fighting amongst themselves undermined legitimacy and might give hope to revolutionaries. A history of ancient Greece was banned on the grounds that the models of Athens and Sparta might incite enthusiasm for democracy. For similar reasons, the press was not allowed to use the word ‘constitution’. The censor’s mind is naturally paranoid, and sees potential criticism everywhere. When one of his plays had been rejected, Grillparzer confronted the censor to ask which were the offending passages; the censor replied that there was nothing wrong with the play at all, but ‘One never can tell!’ When an essay was put forward for publication in the Wiener Zeitung advocating the establishment of houses for the improvement of criminals released from gaol, it was turned down on the grounds that ‘the aforementioned suggestion could be used to blame the government for the fact that no such institutions exist’. In a rare moment of clarity, Francis himself reportedly admitted that ‘our censorship is really stupid’.22
By the mid-1840s the number of censors employed by the police had doubled; they were dealing with 10,000 titles a year, most of them foreign publications, and they had to draw up lists of banned foreign books once a month, and from 1822 once a fortnight. But these lists were not published, and booksellers had to go to ingenious lengths to find out which titles were on them. This was no easy task, as the numbers of books banned went into the thousands, and every so often rulings on previously allowed books were reversed, which entailed the booksellers having to pulp their stock. In 1845, less than a quarter of the 10,000 titles published in Germany were approved for circulation in Austria, while one in five manuscripts submitted in the country itself were turned down. And although censorship was formally in the ambit of the ministry of police, the foreign ministry also took a keen interest, and operated its own office reviewing new books.23
A similar system obtained in Lombardy-Venetia, where manuscripts had to be submitted to a special office which passed them to the police ministry, which classified them under one of four categories. Those marked Admittitur could be published and sold freely. The classification Transeat meant they could be published, but only sold under certain conditions and not translated. Erga Schedam signified that while the book was dangerous in tendency, it could be printed and made available to certain persons of proven character. Damnatur meant it could not see the light of day. Here too, the system produced idiotic results. An essay on the art of tying cravats was banned because one fashionable knot was known as à la Riego. Lessing’s play Emilia Galotti was banned because the villain was a duke, and the regulations stated that nobody above the rank of baron should be depicted unfavourably. Italian classics such as the works of Tasso and Ariosto were expurgated. Among all the foreign authors banned in Austria, the seafaring tales of Captain Marryat were prohibited, probably because he had once stood for Parliament as a Whig.24
In Italy, history was the object of particularly careful censorship, as the country’s past offered a vast field for reflection and speculation as to where its tempestuous trajectory, from the greatness of Rome, through subjugation and division, might ultimately end. ‘Those who devoted themselves to such a study,’ noted Johann von Mailath, ‘were seen as dangerous or mad, and in either case useless to society. The government, more especially the police, mistrusted history, from a fear that its teaching must encourage ideas of liberty and the spirit of rebellion … It was believed that in obliterating the past it would be easier to manipulate the present.’25
Expensive collected editions of banned works published abroad were sometimes allowed in, in the conviction that only the aristocracy could afford them, and they could be trusted to read them without being inspired to start a revolution. The purpose of censorship was, first and foremost, to keep the masses in docile ignorance of everything that was not necessary for their day-to-day work and existence. In this context the theatre was an area of deep concern for the authorities, since it attracted people from every class and could deliver a powerful message to the uneducated. This was particularly true of Italy.
The authorities throughout the peninsula patronised the most popular forms of entertainment, the theatre and the opera. Given the high rates of illiteracy, this was the only point of contact with culture for the majority of the population – and for some of the lazy and uncultured monarchs themselves. The theatre had the advantage of being a respectable and controllable space, a social agora in which the various classes could assemble, and the ruler could commune with his subjects in a pleasurable common pursuit, safely segregated in his royal box, with the aristocracy, middle and professional classes, artisans and others, each in their respective enclosures. More than six hundred new playhouses were built in Italy during the decades following 1815.26
But the theatre, and particularly the opera house, also became a pulpit for the expression of discontent and the spread not so much of ideas as of a mood, which posed problems for the censors, and as a result there was little logic to what was allowed and what was forbidden. Verdi’s Nabucco got past the censors because of its biblical setting (and because nobody thought that anyone would wish to associate themselves with Jews). Ernani was potentially subversive, but the emperor was portrayed in a sympathetic way. In some parts of Italy his Giovanna d’Arco could only be performed in a version set in ancient Greece. Rossini’s Guillaume Tell could only be performed in Italy after it had been reworked and set in Scotland, under the title Rudolph of Stirling.
But it was impossible for the censors to predict audience reaction at every given moment. The crowd responded with enthusiasm to any aria which called for war, and naturally identified with the embattled Druids in Bellini’s Norma and the crusaders in Verdi’s I Lombardi. In some cases, medleys of popular arias or choruses from various operas would be played in preference to the performance of a whole work, and this would excite the audience to a frenzy that could lead to rioting, and eventually to insurrection. Auber’s La Muette de Portici had an extraordinary track record for starting revolutions.
The safest course was to ban as much as possible. The list of foreign books forbidden in Austria between 1815 and 1848 includes three historical novels by William Harrison Ainsworth, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, four novels by James Fenimore Cooper, Disraeli’s Contarini Fleming, Washington Irving’s History of New York, nineteen works by Walter Scott, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Smollett’s Roderick Random, Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, several hundred French romantic novels, most of them set in medieval times or sixteenth-to-eighteenth-century France, over three dozen works by Balzac, The Three Musketeers and all the other novels of Alexandre Dumas, several works by Théophile Gauthier, Victor Hugo’s complete works, three by Mérimée and most of those of Alfred de Musset, Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, Rousseau’s Émile and La Nouvelle Héloïse, everything by George Sand, Stendhal and Eugène Sue, much of Alfred de Vigny – but not, oddly enough, Laclos’ Les Liaisons Dangereuses.27
There were only twenty booksellers in Vienna in 1800, and although this would rise to thirty by 1848, the number of printers declined in the same period. Some booksellers took considerable risks to stock and sell prohibited literature, but the police conducted snap inspections of their premises and penalties were stiff, with the result that most conformed. Publishers reprinted books without paying royalties, as it was considered immoral for an author to profit from the success of his book; the consequence was that most of them had to have other jobs, mostly in the civil service (two-thirds of them in 1822), which imposed a degree of self-censorship.28
Although it was always possible for the determined to obtain the books and press they craved, the majority of the educated classes were browbeaten by the pervasive surveillance and accepted the censorship with surprising passivity. As far back as 1809 the then police chief Baron Hager had warned the emperor that such a system endangered the future of the state itself, as those preparing for a career in public service made a point of avoiding broadening their minds through education and reading, fearing it might lay them open to suspicion and spoil their prospects. The consequence was that the administration was in the hands of uneducated men, and very little of the political thought of Western Europe penetrated Austrian society, which became atrophied and inward-looking. Hermetically sealed off behind a great wall of repression and censorship, by the 1840s the country had, as the saying went, become ‘the China of Europe’.29