Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty 1789-1848

The French Revolution and the violence it unleashed terrified the ruling classes of Europe. After Napoleon's defeat in 1815, the victors united to restore the old order by any means necessary. This ground-breaking history shows how, from London to Moscow, they resorted to the use of secret police and the bayonet to ferret out real or imagined conspirators and crush subversion. Chilling and often darkly comic, it charts the development of the modern state and its covert organs of control.