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

There was little enthusiasm in Austria for this war, still less when it led to the loss of the Austrian Netherlands, present-day Belgium. Rather than provoking a desire for revenge, the French successes were accepted with resignation, and officers as well as soldiers discussed the Revolution in a way that suggested Francis’s prophylactic measures had been of little use in keeping the ‘poison’ out. There were instances of his troops fraternising with French prisoners, and when these were marched across Habsburg dominions they aroused the sympathy of the population. They would give away their brass buttons, stamped with the slogan ‘ Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité ’, which were accepted with reverence by the emperor’s subjects. The police carried out frantic searches for these unholy relics and confiscated them as though they were dangerous weapons.23

Baron Johann Amadeus Thugut, who took over the direction of Austria’s foreign policy in 1793, quickly realised that this was no conventional war. He had spent some time in Paris in 1791, and understood that the Revolution represented a powerful new force and a menace unlike any other. The French had, in the words of one of his advisers, ‘made a discovery more menacing to human existence than powder’. ‘If they had invented some new war machine, we could have made one just like it,’ but by galvanising citizen-soldiers fighting for their own cause, not that of some crusty ruler, they had done something that ‘no one dares copy’.24

The slogan of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity proclaimed by the French appealed to those living under oppressive regimes, and paved the road to victory for their armies, which seemed to be inspired by an entirely novel zeal. ‘[The French generals] Custine and Dumouriez, at the head of troops that know the value of victory, seem to be inflamed with a kind of zeal like that of Omar, and hitherto they have preached this new species of Mahometanism with a degree of success equal to that of the Arabian,’ wrote William Augustus Miles, the British minister in Frankfurt. ‘If the fury of these modern Caliphs is not successfully & speedily checked, every sceptre in Europe will be broken before the close of the present century, and the Jacobins be everywhere triumphant.’ The analogy was not misplaced. While conservatives shuddered at the implications of the various conspiracy theories, the paladins of revolution, far from being ordered about by occult sects, were fired by a message which some referred to as their ‘Khoran’.25

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