In episode 150, Beatrice de Graaf joins me to discuss how Napoleon's police state operated, how unique it really was, and why terror lay at the heart of state control during this period.
Twitter: @zwhitehistory | @beatricedegraaf
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So Zack produced 150 episodes already, a quite staggering number and huge effort. Do I see Boney's regime as a state of terror? I see his state more like a police state where he perfected how to controll the press and public life and syping onto his own people even closest subordinates - percecting surveillance - and I cannot see any other state in europe where the control of their own people was devoted such huge enery and massive personal interest as in the case of Boney. His system served well as a blue print for police and terror states to come and yes all other powers were ready to copy and introduce such a system of heinous surveillance and eager to introduce for their own countries.
I certainly don't dispute the existence of a tightly-controlled and monitored state under Napoleon's rule; the press had been reduced to a handful of "officially sanctioned" outlets; publishers were also required to operate under some "guidelines" that many would consider restrictive; and the comings and goings of officials and other important people. Of course, many if not most of these restrictions had been firmly in place during the Enlightenment in France, where it was a felony to write or speak anything remotely critical of the king and his family--or the monarchical institution--the Church, or the accepted order of things, especially the aristocracy. Such restrictions were a gift to the publishing houses in Switzerland, for instance, who published manuscripts smuggled out of France and helped smuggle the printed editions back into France. And newspapers and broadsides rose up like toadstools after a rainstorm flaunting the laws. The difference, I think, is that Napoleon perfected and modernized the mechanisms already in place. Every other European monarchy utilized these same processes during this period, some more than others. But again, Napoleon simply did it better. I do not think much of applying 20th- and 21st-century terminology, ideology, and political mechanisms to early 19th-century states. Using terms like "police state," "terror state," and similar pejorative expressions is unfortunate, and an example of historical gaslighting. To continue to use these terms and their associated "reasoning" seems to me to be either a lazy approach to proper research, a desire to attract attention, or simple ignorance of the political, economic, and social universe of the various European states between 1800 and 1820, for example. In this case, I think de Graaf is a one-trick pony, using her research and publications on modern terrorism and modern terrorist states to overlay them onto early 19th-century Europe. I am neither impressed or persuaded, especially after having plowed through the book to which she contributed a single chapter on ministers conferring in Paris 1815-1818.