Civil society and state security in Central Europe, 1770-1830
Date
2022
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Based upon police reports and other state documents from six regional and state archives in Germany and Austria, this study traces evolving state responses to new, radical ideas and forms of political participation over three historical epochs. As such, the dissertation captures the early development and expansion of conservative state practice in Central Europe, tying absolutist era concerns over public opinion and an increasingly engaged civil society to trends in post-Napoleonic political repression. State surveillance looms large in modern history, and scholarship has rightly focused on twentieth-century abuses in Nazi Germany and the German Democratic Republic. Yet state surveillance has a much deeper history. This study argues that prior to the French Revolution, Central European states developed state security measures to control public opinion, surveil society, and manage threats to the monarchy. The Revolutionary and Napoleonic eras highlighted the importance of those agencies and promoted their continued development and institutionalization, thus inaugurating qualitative changes in surveillance and information gathering in Central Europe. New concepts such as popular participation, constitutionalism, and popular sovereignty, birthed after 1789, laid the groundwork for political alternatives to absolutist rule throughout Europe. Countering these new political threats, Central European statesmen relied upon several techniques developed prior to the French Revolution to monitor and police their changing societies. ☐ The decades between 1790 and 1815 proved critical for the development of conservative state practice in Central Europe as they witnessed the increased elaboration and professionalization of agencies designed to monitor political participation. These repressive practices, honed during a period of war and revolutionary upheaval, later found full institutionalization in the Mainz Central Investigative Commission (1819-1827) and in the Frankfurt Central Investigative Authority (1833-1847).
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Keywords
Austrian empire, Carlsbad decrees, Habsburg, Metternich, Napoleon, Police