Status
Call number
Publication
Description
The French Revolution and the blood-curdling violence it engendered terrified the ruling and propertied classes of Europe. Unable to grasp how such horrors could have come about, many concluded that it was the result of a devilish conspiracy hatched by Freemasons inspired by the ideas of the Enlightenment with the aim of overthrowing the entire social order, along with the legal and religious principles it stood on. Others traced it back to the Reformation or the Knights Templar and ascribed even more sinister aims to it. Faced by this apparently occult threat, they resorted to repression on an unprecedented scale, expanding police and spy networks in the process. This compelling history, occasionally chilling and often hilarious, tells how the modern state evolved through the expansion of its organs of control, and holds urgent lessons for today.… (more)
User reviews
historical treatment, and this isn't one.
The most interesting part of the story is that no real threat actually existed, yet the surveillance machinery which was built to monitor signs of new uprisings (and incentivized to discover them) mass-produced false accusations and reports when no real revolutionary grass-roots movement existed. This misinformation only heightened and perpetuated the concerns of the leadership which feared the empowerment of the people more than anything else. In the afterword of the book the author writes puts it nicely: "the unnecessary repression of moderate liberal tendencies arrested the natural development of European society and helped create a culture of control of the individual by the state".
So the story is certainly interesting, but the book is a bit too long at 500 pages. The narrative seems to pass around the same circles again and again. It recounts how this or that political leader was afraid of upheaval, how he collected information through a terribly incompetent and biased filter, and how he then made bad decisions which had catastrophic consequences for more or less randomly selected innocent citizens. I would have liked to see the author occasionally take a few steps back from the details of who-said-what and who-did-what and provide some kind of bird's-eye view of the underlying system of government.