Two Centuries of "Phantom Terror"

There are books you read and quickly forget, ones you think about for a while and remember, and those you reread and mull over for a long time. For me, one of those is Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848, Adam Zamoyski's 2014 exploration of how European elites came to be obsessed with wild conspiracy theories during and after the French Revolutionary Wars, how those beliefs contributed to a series of repressive ideologies and policies, which themselves were important in the creation of the modern state, and how some responded to oppression by creating revolutionary organizations modeled on those conspiracy theories. Put bluntly and simplistically, the thesis of the book could be stated as: conspiracies created the modern political world. The book is considerably more nuanced than that, but putting it that way makes it clear why it is so relevant in our present situation.

We do not like to face or contemplate the irrational strain in government or leadership, but it is there, and influential all the same. The beliefs of the power elites inform and dominate their actions. If they pass through a phase of paranoia, or dwell there year after year, that becomes encoded in their actins and the structures they create to govern. In the case of Metternich's generation, the one that fought the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and rebuilt national and international political systems afterward, it manifested itself as the desire for absolute surveillance, absolute knowledge, and absolute control of thought, word, and deed. For Metternich, and many others, it was the only way to ensure that the conspiracies they saw behind every lamppost and around every corner, and which they believed continued the hated Jacobinism of the Revolution, at bay. 

Caught in an era of profound change in every aspect of life, much of w2hich they attributed to dangerous underground currents, they reacted by taking the idea of the police state, founded by Napoleon and his Minister of Police, Joseph Fouché, and creating the beginnings of western surveillance culture. Even those states, like America and Britain, that were lightly touched by it, and rejected most of the extreme trappings of Metternich's world, found it useful later when concerns about Socialists, Anarchists, and Communists grew after the Paris Commune. They likewise found it useful in governing their overseas empires, whether in Ireland, the Sub-Continent, Africa, or the Philippines. They developed tools there, just as the Continental powers honed the skills of their police and secret police at home, and then reimported them when business and financial elites felt threatened by real or imagined radicalism. In Britain, America, France, and Germany, surveillance culture grew in partnership  with, and driven by the rise and requirement of capitalism. 

It was also driven by fear of the Other; of the Black, or the Irish, or the immigrant, of those who supposedly lacked the Anglo-Saxon and German sense of self-control, or the French sang-droid, reflecting, one supposed, the fear of the elites of losing their own sense of self-control and bloody mindedness themselves. Over time, these beliefs became institutionalized and passed largely unquestioned. Those who were responsible for embodying them and enforcing them came to believe in them, in this country men like J. Edgar Hoover,  John J. McCloy, and Harry J. Anslinger. (One almost begins to wonder if using the initial "J" in one's name somehow makes one susceptible to belief in this kind of conspiracy and in the powers of surveillance - there is probably some wild conspiracy theory that would could hatch out of that.) Their subordinates came to believe the same things, and in following generations, it was more widely and deeply internalized. Now the mechanisms of surveillance, analysis, and control have become deeply integrated as a "necessary" aspect of government, and of an increasingly dominant business model and ethic, but their origins are in the wild ravings of certain authors written in the wake of the guillotining of the Bourbons in 1792, and of the willful gullibility of those who wished to uphold the old order, but who did so only by distorting it with new and irrational institutions of oppression.