Phantom Terror

Phantom Terror investigates the fear of revolution that spread among European rulers and elites after 1789. Adam Zamoyski traces the belief that secret conspiracies, Freemasons, radicals and revolutionary networks were coordinating an assault on established society, and shows how governments responded by expanding censorship, surveillance, policing and political repression.

The book follows this climate through the Napoleonic period and the conservative order established after 1815, when Metternich and other statesmen sought to suppress renewed revolution across Europe. Zamoyski argues that official paranoia often exaggerated or even helped create the threats it claimed to combat. It is nonfiction political history.