Before the Fascists and Communists: Monarchists

A brief description of authoritarianism in early 19th Century Europe

Tsar Nicholas I, famed obscurantist

In the current age of liberal democracy any deviation from the ideal of a perfectly free and open society inevitably arouses fears of fascism and communism. That modern society stands on a thin precipice and that a single gust of obscurantism can send liberal civilization hurtling towards an abyss of concentration camps and gulags. The natural endstate of all authoritarianism is genocide and liquidation; without the Leviathan of liberalism, life is nasty, brutish, and short.

But fascism and communism where not the originators of modern obscurantism. Many of the techniques and tools used by totalitarian governments in the 20th century had their antecedents in milder but still authoritarian governments in the 19th century. The thrones of Europe may have won the Napoleonic Wars, but the Revolution which initiated the Terror and guillotined King Louis XVI was still alive in the hearts and minds of dissidents everywhere. The head of every monarch rested precariously upon their shoulders. To prevent another French Revolution, the thrones of Europe instituted regimes of repression.

One of the chief innovations used to tamp down dissent was the development of modern policing. Before the French Revolution, police were uncommon and where they did exist were primarily concerned with bureaucratic functions such as whore house inspections and adherence to building codes. Only the Habsburgs possessed a police force which could seriously be called repressive. By 1815, the French had transformed policing from a tool to enforce city ordinances into one of the pillars of government power. Napoleon and his Minster of Police Fouche would expand the authority of the police to include all of France and add to their remit rooting out political subversives: a true ‘secret’ police.

Fouche and his police established a vast network of spies. Every person or organ of authority in the French Empire was not above the Ministry of Police’s prying eyes.

[E]yes and ears [were found] in every rank in the army, in every salon and every household of note.

-Adam Zamoyski, excerpted from Phantom Terror

Hired spies and informants, however, were not enough. Fouche knew that these agents were often unreliable and needed other sources of information to root out dissent. The Ministry of Police turned to the mail and soon were pilfering through the correspondences of the whole of France. Every letter that passed through the French post was liable to be opened, its contents read and the information passed on to higher authorities.

All this, if Fouche is to be believed, was done for the good of not only the public, but even the enemies of state. Constant surveillance not only preserved order by helping prevent another bloody coup or revolution, but by keeping would be trouble makers in line, spared them imprisonment or other worse fates.

Despite decrying Napoleon as illegitimate and in some cases Satan incarnate, most of the monarchies of Europe would adopt Napoleon’s and Fouche’s methods and intensify them in decades following the Congress of Vienna. Humorously, in the early days of the restored Bourbon King Louis XVIII, Fouche, a regicide responsible for the death of King Louis XVI, the current King’s own brother, would be brought on as Minister of Police once more. He would soon be dismissed, but his vast apparatus would remain, and the restored ancien regime of King Louis XVIII would make much use of the Revolutionary police force to crack down on would be revolutionaries.

Even in liberal Great Britain, the efficacy of a centralized police force could not be ignored. Successive governments in Parliament continually worried about working class agitation and viewed civil disturbances of any kind, whether voting rights protests or bread riots, as vanguards of revolution and the possible work of Illuminati like conspirators. In 1829 Robert Peel as Home Secretary would introduce and see passed the Police Act which would establish the modern Metropolitan Police. The Act and the police force it established would be widely lampooned and viewed as a power grab by the government to suppress English civil liberties. While Robert Peel’s police did not introduce Continental style surveillance to the public, the ‘Bobbies’ (as their detractors called them) more than played their part for the government, breaking up London civil disturbances over voting rights with baton charges within a year of their inception.

Advancements in policing would take a far more intensive turn in Russia under Tsar Nicholas I. Having been forced to put down a liberal coup in the opening weeks of his reign, Tsar Nicholas I would expend considerable energies during his reign ensuring that the “gangrene” of liberalism would not taint the Russian the people. To that end he would establish the Third Section, a police force which answered directly to him and tasked with safeguarding the moral order of the Russian people. This largely meant mass surveillance of Russian high society and the army, but there was a public facing element as well: a paramilitary gendarmerie unit was granted to the Third Section as its enforcers. Named the New Corp of Imperial Gendarmes, their authority was second to none. Since they reported directly to the Tsar himself, they could overule provincial governors.

Nominally, their purpose was to act as symbols of public order and virtue, to bolster faith and trust in the people towards the Tsar. But even this requirement for unimpeachable virtue served the far greater need for mass surveillance. Subjects would be far more willing to bring forward conspiracies and denunciations if they viewed the government police as agents of virtue and order.

The Third Section’s need to appear fair and just, while also cracking down on liberal dissent would lead to some strange and comic situations. One Russian notable was arraigned and brought forward to a gendarmerie general on the count of liberal sympathizing. His crime? Having scribbled some personal musings on the moral duty of a land owner to help feed his serfs in a poor harvest year. He would be interrogated (politely) and whenever a wrong or insufficiently correct answer was given, Third Section agents would tell him what the answer should have been. Once the landowner was cleared of any real revolutionary sentiment, he was sentenced to ‘only’ six months exile in Siberia.

Censorship too was the responsibility of the Third Section. All Russian publications had to seek pre-approval from the Third Section for publication. Any potentially revolutionary writing, whether intentional or not, had to be scrubbed from publications. Tsar Nicholas II took a special interest in censorship, as certain troublesome but well known authors garnered the Tsar’s personal attention, and he would take the time to personally read through manuscripts to mark out any potentially subversive passages.

In his penchant for micromanagement, Tsar Nicholas I had a friend in Emperor Francis II. The Habsburg Emperor took a particularly keen interest in education, understanding how critical it was to the formation of youth in general and revolutionaries in specific. Generally speaking, he was an obscurantist and believed numerous fields of study as fundamentally dangerous such as science, literature and history. To ensure that his subjects would not be corrupted by liberal thought, Emperor Francis II held the final say over any applicant for a teaching post, personally reviewing the background and credentials of any would be educator.

To Emperor Francis II, the key result of a good education was not the development of scholarly inquiry in a young mind, but rather the inculcation of loyalty towards to the Habsburg dynasty. In his own words:

I want not scholars, but good citizens

-Emperor Francis II, before an audience of teachers

The Habsburgs implemented this policy most strongly in Lombardy-Venetia, were the state heavily sponsored primary education in an attempt to transform future generations of restless Italians into loyal subjects of the dynasty.

Despite being so enmeshed in the education of his subjects, Emperor Francis II still found time to involve himself in the general surveillance of his domains. Mail was heavily tampered with in the Empire and every day at 7 am Emperor Francis II would receive a dispatch of the choicest letters for his personal perusal.

Interception of the mail in Habsburg lands was one of the chief tools the government kept an eye on not only its citizenry but foreign agents and conspirators. To that end, the Habsburgs took great pains to ensure than their mail system was the cheapest and fastest in the whole of Europe to incentivize as much mail as possible to pass through it’s territory. At every seaport, major postal branch and famous resort town where European notable congregated, mail was checked and private correspondences likely to be pulled and copied for further analysis. No letter was sacrosanct and local operatives routinely opened up mail of some of the highest ranking members in the Habsburg Empire including imperial family itself and the Empire’s chief ministers.

No individual was above potential suspicion. In a post French Revolutionary world, which saw even members of the highest nobility side with the Revolutionaries at some point during the tumult, it was clear the seeds of radicalism could exist in any stratum of society, sprouting in any mind. The forces of order recognized all too well that only constant vigilance could hope to keep the fragile peace of Europe established by the Congress of Vienna. Repression was a necessity to maintain a safer and better Europe. But unlike later authoritarians, the iron fist of 19th Century despots was somewhat velveted. For they fought not necessarily against an institution or a class or a race, but rather an idea. And ideas, being naturally inchoate, are difficult to persecute. In this way perhaps, the people of 19th Century Europe, while repressed largely avoided facing atrocities that those in the 20th Century endured.

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