The members of the Congress of Vienna honestly and sincerely believed that "the Revolutionary Principle had led to the criminal usurpation of the throne by the former emperor Napoleon." They felt that they were called upon to eradicate the adherents of the so-called "French ideas" just as Philip II had only followed the voice of his conscience when he burned Protestants or hanged Moors. In the beginning of the sixteenth century a man who did not believe in the divine right of the Pope to rule his subjects as he saw fit was a "heretic" and it was the duty of all loyal citizens to kill him. In the beginning of the nineteenth century, on the continent of Europe, a man who did not believe in the divine right of his king to rule him as he or his Prime Minister saw fit, was a "heretic," and it was the duty of all loyal citizens to denounce him to the nearest policeman and see that he got punished.
But the rulers of the year 1815 had learned efficiency in the school of Napoleon and they performed their task much better than it had been done in the year 1517. The period between the year 1815 and the year 1860 was the great era of the political spy. Spies were everywhere. They lived in palaces and they were to be found in the lowest gin-shops. They peeped through the key-holes of the ministerial cabinet and they listened to the conversations of the people who were taking the air on the benches of the Municipal Park. They guarded the frontier so that no one might leave without a duly viseed passport and they inspected all packages, that no books with dangerous "French ideas" should enter the realm of their Royal masters. They sat among the students in the lecture hall and woe to the Professor who uttered a word against the existing order of things. They followed the little boys and girls on their way to church lest they play hookey.
In many of these tasks they were assisted by the clergy.
The church had suffered greatly during the days of the revolution. The church property had been confiscated. Several priests had been killed and the generation that had learned its cathechism from Voltaire and Rousseau and the other French philosophers had danced around the Altar of Reason when the Committee of Public Safety had abolished the worship of God in October of the year 1793. The priests had followed the "emigres" into their long exile. Now they returned in the wake of the allied armies and they set to work with a vengeance.
Even the Jesuits came back in 1814 and resumed their former labours of educating the young. Their order had been a little too successful in its fight against the enemies of the church. It had established "provinces" in every part of the world, to teach the natives the blessings of Christianity, but soon it had developed into a regular trading company which was for ever interfering with the civil authorities. During the reign of the Marquis de Pombal, the great reforming minister of Portugal, they had been driven out of the Portuguese lands and in the year 1773 at the request of most of the Catholic powers of Europe, the order had been suppressed by Pope Clement XIV. Now they were back on the job, and preached the principles of "obedience" and "love for the legitimate dynasty" to children whose parents had hired shopwindows that they might laugh at Marie Antoinette driving to the scaffold which was to end her misery.
But in the Protestant countries like Prussia, things were not a whit better. The great patriotic leaders of the year 1812, the poets and the writers who had preached a holy war upon the usurper, were now branded as dangerous "demagogues." Their houses were searched. Their letters were read. They were obliged to report to the police at regular intervals and give an account of themselves. The Prussian drill master was let loose in all his fury upon the younger generation. When a party of students celebrated the tercentenary of the Reformation with noisy but harmless festivities on the old Wartburg, the Prussian bureaucrats had visions of an imminent revolution. When a theological student, more honest than intelligent, killed a Russian government spy who was operating in Germany, the universities were placed under police-supervision and professors were jailed or dismissed without any form of trial.
Russia, of course, was even more absurd in these anti- revolutionary activities. Alexander had recovered from his attack of piety. He was gradually drifting toward melancholia. He well knew his own limited abilities and understood how at Vienna he had been the victim both of Metternich and the Krudener woman. More and more he turned his back upon the west and became a truly Russian ruler whose interests lay in Constantinople, the old holy city that had been the first teacher of the Slavs. The older he grew, the harder he worked and the less he was able to accomplish. And while he sat in his study, his ministers turned the whole of Russia into a land of military barracks.
It is not a pretty picture. Perhaps I might have shortened this description of the Great Reaction. But it is just as well that you should have a thorough knowledge of this era. It was not the first time that an attempt had been made to set the clock of history back. The result was the usual one.
