February 7, 2023 • 15 mins
February 6, 2023 Hoover Institution | Stanford University
A Hoover History Working Group Seminar with Beatrice de Graaf.
Beatrice de Graaf illuminates how, long before economic considerations set in motion the creation of the European Union, collective European security provided the first impulse for the integration of European norms and institutions.
After Napoleon's defeat in 1815, Europe’s victorious powers sought to forestall the reemergence of war and revolutionary terror by establishing the Allied Council. The Council transformed interstate relations into the first, modern system of collective security in Europe. Drawing on the records of the Council and the correspondence of key figures such as Metternich, Castlereagh, Wellington, and Alexander I, Beatrice de Graaf tells the story of Europe's transition from concluding a war to consolidating a new order.
ABOUT THE SPEAKER Beatrice de Graaf is a historian and a security researcher. She studies the emergence of and threats to European security arrangements from the 19th century until the present. Her book Fighting Terror after Napoleon: How Europe Became Secure after 1815, won the 2022 Arenberg Prize for European History. She is currently working on a translation of her latest book, Radical Redemption: What Terrorists Believe In, which combines testimony, history, psychology, politics and theology to understand how the search for radical personal redemption can lead to violence. Beatrice is a member of The Netherlands Academy of Sciences and of the Academia Europaea. She is the editor of Terrorism and Political Violence, as well as of the Journal of Modern European History. She is also a fellow at the Program on Extremism and the ISIS Files Project at George Washington University.
ABOUT THE PROGRAM The Hoover History Working Group aims to conduct and disseminate historical research on issues of national and international concern, and provide concrete recommendations on the basis of research and discussion. The mission of the Hoover Institution Library & Archives is to collect, preserve, and make available the most important materials about global political, social, and economic change in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We serve as a platform for a vibrant community of scholars and a broad public interested in the meaning and role of history.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:08):
[MUSIC]>> Niall Ferguson: Hello, my name is
Niall Ferguson.
I'm the Milbanke family senior fellowhere at the Hoover Institution, and
I also chair the Hooverhistory working group.
And today we've been very fortunateindeed to have heard a brilliant
presentation by Beatrice de Graaf,distinguished professor at the University
of Utrecht in the Netherlands, andthe author of the most fascinating book,
(00:31):
Fighting terror after how Europebecame secure after 1815.
Beatrice, welcome tothe Hoover Institution.
You are, I think,the very model of an applied historian,
in my sense of the word.
You do extraordinarilyimpressive scholarly work,
in this case on the early 19th century,but
you're also interested in the recent past,indeed, the contemporary world.
(00:56):
And I want to begin with a verybig question about this book.
What can we learn from this bookabout the kind of problems we
face when it comes tomaking Europe secure today?
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (01:09):
Yes, thank you so much, Naill, for
the invitation andthe generous introduction, and also for
the fact that here that you alsocombine the two types of history.
The thing is,with the current plight we in Europe,
security wise, is that we have lost track.
We have lost sight of the factthat collective security in Europe
(01:32):
can only work if the big powers in Europe,the first rank powers,
as they call them themselves,work together.
And if those first rank powers of Europealso give each other the credits of being
first rank powers,they may not like each other.
They may even hate each other.
They need to give each other the credits.
And what we're now in is the situationwhere the powers in Europe and beyond,
(01:55):
with China and the United States as well,
do not want to consider eachother first rank powers anymore.
And one of those main tenets ofthe cemetery that was invented cemetery
in peacetime, not just coming togetheras coalitions to fight Napoleon, but
remaining there in conferences, talkingto each other in cemetery situations,
(02:15):
was invented at the Congress of Vienna,at the allied commission in Paris.
And that we've sort of lost track,lost out of sight,
that you need those first rankpowers to keep working together.
>> Niall Ferguson (02:28):
One of the points you make in fighting terror after Napoleon is
that there was a very explicit hierarchyof powers at the Congress of Vienna.
Talk a little bit about that,because clearly we don't have that
kind of hierarchy inthe international system today.
In fact, we completely pretendthere isn't a hierarchy,
whether it's in the UN General assembly orat the European Union levels.
(02:49):
Talk about the hierarchyof powers in 1815.
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (02:52):
Let me state up front, and
I just was expressing the notionof first rank powers.
I sort of heard in my head, this is notwhat I think I would condone and I think,
and this is a strugglethat we have to face and
perhaps have to discuss at the high levelsessions, because we may think, and
we may consider the ranking of nationsall according to the same criteria,
(03:14):
according on a par,as being reasonable and modern, etc.
But it doesn't work that way.
I mean, the world still isbeing ruled by great powers.
And at least back in 1815, up until 1918,
up until the Congress of Versailles,the Treaty of Versailles,
the powers at least had a way ofreckoning with that hierarchy.
(03:35):
And hierarchy was invented byPitt the younger and Alexander I.
So the Russians and the Britons together,it was reinvigorated in 1815.
There's four ranks.
First rank is the great powers back then,Russia, Prussia,
Austria and>> Niall Ferguson: France.
Well, France was in the losing side.
And Britain,
>> Niall Ferguson (03:53):
yes,
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (03:53):
and only
in 1818, France was also invited backto the falls of five great powers.
The second rank powers is the powers that
are the satellites that have to kind ofpay attention to the first rank power,
Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands,Bavaria, countries like that.
And then the third rank powers,
the smaller Italian states,smaller German states, Scandinavian state.
(04:17):
In the words of the diplomats back then,
they should be glad that they wouldbe granted independence at all.
And then there were also countriesconsidered, which was, of course,
very detrimental to the situationoutside of the family of nations.
So United States was not invited intoChina, Japan, neither were they,
nor to speak of the Ottoman Empire.
>> Niall Ferguson (04:36):
So in this hierarchical world, where there are the great powers,
great mainly in terms of their militarycapability and their resources, and
the resources that financetheir military capability.
There's a sense that France has beenthe bad boy because of its revolution and
then Napoleon's tyranny.
And the point of the Congress and
(04:58):
the subsequent meetings of the greatpowers is to put a stop to that.
Tell me exactly what the design was.
How do you solve a problemlike revolutionary France?
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (05:08):
Yes.
Well, first of all,just a paper treaty doesn't work.
So Emmanuel Kant's Worldpeace situation federation,
even the Congress of Viennapaper treaty would not work,
would not suffice to bring backthe world and France to peaceful habits.
And we saw that because Napoleon returned.
So the fact that Napoleon returned puteverything on a different footing.
(05:31):
So when he returned, the 7 March of 1815,a week later, a treaty was concluded.
The treaty on mutual security could arguethat it was the first treaty on collective
security in peacetime.
And it argued that the worldneeded to be brought back to, say,
peaceful habits by means of a pledgeof those countries together,
not just in paper, butalso in stone fortresses.
(05:54):
Needed to be built and also in teeth,in bayonets, men on the ground,
boots on the ground.
So what happened was that the alliedpowers together invaded France,
didn't go home after the armisticewas concluded, but stayed there,
occupied France, andmade sure that France was de bonapartized,
demilitarized, stabilized, and thata kind of stable rule was implemented.
(06:19):
And the other point was thatthe revolution, the terror,
also brought to a stop.
And then when they managed to do so, intheir own eyes, they felt that they could
now spread this over the rest of Europe,and even beyond that.
And the principles were,perhaps we could bring it boil down to
one principle that was beingmentioned all the time.
(06:41):
So the allied commission was a commissionthat only had a thin ideology.
So the liberals, Britain, the second ranknations that were also quite liberal,
like the Netherlands, and later on,after 1830, France was also part of this.
Those countries worked together, but
they did not want to impose their ideologytoo strongly on the other nations.
(07:03):
It was a thin ideology.
It needed to be moderate, not extreme.
So no extremism,neither reactionary extremism, nor
to revolutionary extremisms.
And this meant that warneeded to be avoided and
terror needed to be avoided,>> Niall Ferguson: and
reparations were imposedon the defeated French.
Now, we tend to think of thatas an instrument that went
(07:24):
terribly wrong after the first world War,
when it was part of the Versaillestreaty that ended the war with Germany.
But reparations in this case seemto have worked out much better.
Why was that?
That was the fourth principle,
the DES do the reparations.
Indeed.
Well, that's also very interesting,because Ralph Blaufarp,
(07:47):
in his book the great demarcation,
has explained that after the FrenchRevolution, after the Napoleonic wars,
a new kind of system of property holders,a system of capitalism, emerged.
It was already, of course,in the Neschte version present, but
there was quite strict separationbetween what the government owned and
what the citizens owned.
(08:08):
And those hybrid versions of clerical,of governmental lands were now solved,
which also meant that there was a newelite of bankers, of investors,
of property holders, that also sort ofwanted to have a share in the peace and
at least wanted to preventanother revolution.
Upturning the landed interestswere very big after 1815.
They wanted to prevent anotherrevolution from happening.
(08:30):
So they wanted to make sure that Francewould pay dearly for its sins and that it
would not resort to another revolution inorder out of fear to pay more reparations.
So it was a new system restingon capitalist securities,
financial securities.
And when France had to payall these reputation and
defaulted it could not just pay the moneybecause the coffers were empty.
(08:53):
The bankers of Europe were invited tothe table, the road shields about them,
but also the Barings,the Lafittes, the German bankers,
everyone who wanted to play with them.
They were invited to the table in Paris,chaired by the Duke of Wellington,
and they were told that there would now beinvented a system of european bonds, and
(09:13):
everyone could buy a share in the peace ofFrance with the allied army as a kind of
safeguard.
So it was a very good wayto invest your money in.
And actually it wasa quite successful scheme.
So successful that within three, fouryears, all the payments were being made.
So one can only imagine if after 1918,all the bankers of Europe
would have come together andhelped Germany with these bonds.
>> Niall Ferguson (09:35):
This was, of course, discussed, but did not happen.
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (09:38):
Why not?
>> Niall Ferguson (09:39):
Well, this is one of the questions I remember working on very
early in my career.
It's a long story.
John Maynard Keynes playsan interesting part.
Let me try to sum this up.
In many ways, the world of 200 plusyears ago is not so different.
You have a european commission whichis trying to work out european order.
You have a bond market which isthere to finance the operations of
(10:02):
the various governments, andyou have the specter of terror.
And that's where I wantto end this conversation.
There's been a debate about whetheryou're using the term terror in
an anachronistic way.
Is that a fair criticism?
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (10:18):
No, not at all.
Because if you look closelyat the references and
the way I go to the sources,terror was the buzzword.
So I just mentioned moderation.
Before.
It was actually a pair.
It was the opposite pair,the juxtaposed pair,
the vectors that put thiswhole system in motion.
So on the one hand,you had the moderation.
It was the thing that the peoples ofEurope craved for after all those years of
(10:42):
trauma, devastation, destruction,5 million people dead.
And the origins of thatmayhem were a terror.
And terror was a kind ofa two headed monster.
Bicephalus monster.
On the one hand, it was the terror ofthe revolutionaries against the non state
agents, but on the other hand, it wasthe terror when those revolutionaries took
over, the terror in the hands ofthe state itself, it was Napoleon,
(11:05):
it was the armed jacobinism.
So the terror was both something thatcould happen through revolution and
then in the hands of state armies,for example,
would be unleashed againstthe rest of the world.
Terror.And in a similar way,
we still use that phrase now.
And it was born not just out ofthe revolutionary terry of Robespierre,
(11:26):
but also of the terror ofNapoleon's armies in Europe.
>> Niall Ferguson (11:30):
And does that mean that in that period,
immediately after the battle of Waterloo,the statesmen and
the property elites of Europeare worried about terrorists?
Or is that something different?
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (11:43):
No, that's true, because terrorists formerly
were the ones that voted in the conventionfor the beheading of King Louis.
But after 1850, it was also used forpeople who tried to shoot.
Wellington, for example, tried tocommit attacks on Friedrich Wilhelm.
And the heads of states also correspondedwith each other on terrorism.
So it was an early way of dealing withterrorism, similar to we do it today.
(12:07):
Of course, you need to followthe trajectory genealogy.
It wasn't considered a specific tactic,as we consider it today.
But, for example,hellish machines were already mentioned.
Not the dynamite,that came only later, but still.
And what's also, I think, very important,and we tend to forget about it.
(12:27):
Terror was already en vogueas a noma around 1800, but
it had always been something.
It was considered a kind of a benigninstrument in the hands of a righteous
ruler.
So you, as an obedient citizen,could be grateful if you
had a ruler who would instill fearin the hearts of his enemies.
So terror was the Timor Dei,the terror day.
(12:49):
The king, as the divine agent, the kindof translation of the godly power,
was able to wield terror againsthis enemies, quite biblical.
>> Niall Ferguson (12:57):
Ivan the terrible wasn't really a critical monarch
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (13:01):
against
his enemies.
>> Niall Ferguson (13:03):
Exactly >> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf
And then came the French Revolution,and terror became secularized.
And now it was not just the instrument inthe hands of a legitimate divine king,
it was an instrument inthe hands of the masses.
And now it was something to be terrified.
For.
Metternich himself,
his family had lost all their property inthe rhenish lands because of the terror.
(13:23):
So for them, terror was notjust people killing each other.
It was perhaps they were even moreafraid of the upending of all values.
To speak with Nietzsche.
And revolutionizing meant takingaway all the property of the people.
That was the real terror.
Well, nothing illustrates better the relevance of early
19th century history to ourown times than your book and
(13:46):
the presentation that you just gave us.
I know that you're working on a separateproject on contemporary terrorism.
That's a very different kind of project.
Maybe say a few words about howyou're approaching that and
what you hope to find out.
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (14:00):
Yeah, I have these two tracks.
A more hermeneutical history andthe history for today, and
a project that I've been working on.
During the times of the pandemic,when the archives were closed,
the prisons were not.
So I was able, strangely enough,to visit prisons in the Netherlands and
go to Indonesia andinterview the terrorists themselves and
try to engage them in a conversation.
(14:20):
What they believed,what were their extreme beliefs and
how did they formulate and opin them?
And that's a book withan historical perspective,
because they tellhistorical stories as well.
The Indonesian terrorists did, the dutchterrorists did, the Syrian ones, and
that will come out,
hopefully somewhere next year to OxfordUniversity press as radical redemption.
>> Niall Ferguson (14:39):
Well, radical redemption sounds like
an equally exciting book, albeit acompletely different one methodologically.
And we hope that you come backto the Hoover institution and
talk about that book whenit's published by Oxford.
It's been a huge pleasure tohave Beatrice Graf here with us.
I hope, as I said, that she'll come backat some point and present her new book.
That's all we have time for now.
(15:00):
As I said, the Hoover history workinggroup has been very fortunate to hear her
talk about fighting terror after Napoleon,how Europe became secure after 1815.
Beatrice, thanks very much.
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (15:10):
Thank you, Neil.
[MUSIC]>> Niall Ferguson: Hello, my name is
Niall Ferguson.
I'm the Milbanke family senior fellowhere at the Hoover Institution, and
I also chair the Hooverhistory working group.
And today we've been very fortunateindeed to have heard a brilliant
presentation by Beatrice de Graaf,distinguished professor at the University
of Utrecht in the Netherlands, andthe author of the most fascinating book,
(00:31):
Fighting terror after how Europebecame secure after 1815.
Beatrice, welcome tothe Hoover Institution.
You are, I think,the very model of an applied historian,
in my sense of the word.
You do extraordinarilyimpressive scholarly work,
in this case on the early 19th century,but
you're also interested in the recent past,indeed, the contemporary world.
(00:56):
And I want to begin with a verybig question about this book.
What can we learn from this bookabout the kind of problems we
face when it comes tomaking Europe secure today?
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (01:09):
Yes, thank you so much, Naill, for
the invitation andthe generous introduction, and also for
the fact that here that you alsocombine the two types of history.
The thing is,with the current plight we in Europe,
security wise, is that we have lost track.
We have lost sight of the factthat collective security in Europe
(01:32):
can only work if the big powers in Europe,the first rank powers,
as they call them themselves,work together.
And if those first rank powers of Europealso give each other the credits of being
first rank powers,they may not like each other.
They may even hate each other.
They need to give each other the credits.
And what we're now in is the situationwhere the powers in Europe and beyond,
(01:55):
with China and the United States as well,
do not want to consider eachother first rank powers anymore.
And one of those main tenets ofthe cemetery that was invented cemetery
in peacetime, not just coming togetheras coalitions to fight Napoleon, but
remaining there in conferences, talkingto each other in cemetery situations,
(02:15):
was invented at the Congress of Vienna,at the allied commission in Paris.
And that we've sort of lost track,lost out of sight,
that you need those first rankpowers to keep working together.
>> Niall Ferguson (02:28):
One of the points you make in fighting terror after Napoleon is
that there was a very explicit hierarchyof powers at the Congress of Vienna.
Talk a little bit about that,because clearly we don't have that
kind of hierarchy inthe international system today.
In fact, we completely pretendthere isn't a hierarchy,
whether it's in the UN General assembly orat the European Union levels.
(02:49):
Talk about the hierarchyof powers in 1815.
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (02:52):
Let me state up front, and
I just was expressing the notionof first rank powers.
I sort of heard in my head, this is notwhat I think I would condone and I think,
and this is a strugglethat we have to face and
perhaps have to discuss at the high levelsessions, because we may think, and
we may consider the ranking of nationsall according to the same criteria,
(03:14):
according on a par,as being reasonable and modern, etc.
But it doesn't work that way.
I mean, the world still isbeing ruled by great powers.
And at least back in 1815, up until 1918,
up until the Congress of Versailles,the Treaty of Versailles,
the powers at least had a way ofreckoning with that hierarchy.
(03:35):
And hierarchy was invented byPitt the younger and Alexander I.
So the Russians and the Britons together,it was reinvigorated in 1815.
There's four ranks.
First rank is the great powers back then,Russia, Prussia,
Austria and>> Niall Ferguson: France.
Well, France was in the losing side.
And Britain,
>> Niall Ferguson (03:53):
yes,
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (03:53):
and only
in 1818, France was also invited backto the falls of five great powers.
The second rank powers is the powers that
are the satellites that have to kind ofpay attention to the first rank power,
Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands,Bavaria, countries like that.
And then the third rank powers,
the smaller Italian states,smaller German states, Scandinavian state.
(04:17):
In the words of the diplomats back then,
they should be glad that they wouldbe granted independence at all.
And then there were also countriesconsidered, which was, of course,
very detrimental to the situationoutside of the family of nations.
So United States was not invited intoChina, Japan, neither were they,
nor to speak of the Ottoman Empire.
>> Niall Ferguson (04:36):
So in this hierarchical world, where there are the great powers,
great mainly in terms of their militarycapability and their resources, and
the resources that financetheir military capability.
There's a sense that France has beenthe bad boy because of its revolution and
then Napoleon's tyranny.
And the point of the Congress and
(04:58):
the subsequent meetings of the greatpowers is to put a stop to that.
Tell me exactly what the design was.
How do you solve a problemlike revolutionary France?
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (05:08):
Yes.
Well, first of all,just a paper treaty doesn't work.
So Emmanuel Kant's Worldpeace situation federation,
even the Congress of Viennapaper treaty would not work,
would not suffice to bring backthe world and France to peaceful habits.
And we saw that because Napoleon returned.
So the fact that Napoleon returned puteverything on a different footing.
(05:31):
So when he returned, the 7 March of 1815,a week later, a treaty was concluded.
The treaty on mutual security could arguethat it was the first treaty on collective
security in peacetime.
And it argued that the worldneeded to be brought back to, say,
peaceful habits by means of a pledgeof those countries together,
not just in paper, butalso in stone fortresses.
(05:54):
Needed to be built and also in teeth,in bayonets, men on the ground,
boots on the ground.
So what happened was that the alliedpowers together invaded France,
didn't go home after the armisticewas concluded, but stayed there,
occupied France, andmade sure that France was de bonapartized,
demilitarized, stabilized, and thata kind of stable rule was implemented.
(06:19):
And the other point was thatthe revolution, the terror,
also brought to a stop.
And then when they managed to do so, intheir own eyes, they felt that they could
now spread this over the rest of Europe,and even beyond that.
And the principles were,perhaps we could bring it boil down to
one principle that was beingmentioned all the time.
(06:41):
So the allied commission was a commissionthat only had a thin ideology.
So the liberals, Britain, the second ranknations that were also quite liberal,
like the Netherlands, and later on,after 1830, France was also part of this.
Those countries worked together, but
they did not want to impose their ideologytoo strongly on the other nations.
(07:03):
It was a thin ideology.
It needed to be moderate, not extreme.
So no extremism,neither reactionary extremism, nor
to revolutionary extremisms.
And this meant that warneeded to be avoided and
terror needed to be avoided,>> Niall Ferguson: and
reparations were imposedon the defeated French.
Now, we tend to think of thatas an instrument that went
(07:24):
terribly wrong after the first world War,
when it was part of the Versaillestreaty that ended the war with Germany.
But reparations in this case seemto have worked out much better.
Why was that?
That was the fourth principle,
the DES do the reparations.
Indeed.
Well, that's also very interesting,because Ralph Blaufarp,
(07:47):
in his book the great demarcation,
has explained that after the FrenchRevolution, after the Napoleonic wars,
a new kind of system of property holders,a system of capitalism, emerged.
It was already, of course,in the Neschte version present, but
there was quite strict separationbetween what the government owned and
what the citizens owned.
(08:08):
And those hybrid versions of clerical,of governmental lands were now solved,
which also meant that there was a newelite of bankers, of investors,
of property holders, that also sort ofwanted to have a share in the peace and
at least wanted to preventanother revolution.
Upturning the landed interestswere very big after 1815.
They wanted to prevent anotherrevolution from happening.
(08:30):
So they wanted to make sure that Francewould pay dearly for its sins and that it
would not resort to another revolution inorder out of fear to pay more reparations.
So it was a new system restingon capitalist securities,
financial securities.
And when France had to payall these reputation and
defaulted it could not just pay the moneybecause the coffers were empty.
(08:53):
The bankers of Europe were invited tothe table, the road shields about them,
but also the Barings,the Lafittes, the German bankers,
everyone who wanted to play with them.
They were invited to the table in Paris,chaired by the Duke of Wellington,
and they were told that there would now beinvented a system of european bonds, and
(09:13):
everyone could buy a share in the peace ofFrance with the allied army as a kind of
safeguard.
So it was a very good wayto invest your money in.
And actually it wasa quite successful scheme.
So successful that within three, fouryears, all the payments were being made.
So one can only imagine if after 1918,all the bankers of Europe
would have come together andhelped Germany with these bonds.
>> Niall Ferguson (09:35):
This was, of course, discussed, but did not happen.
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (09:38):
Why not?
>> Niall Ferguson (09:39):
Well, this is one of the questions I remember working on very
early in my career.
It's a long story.
John Maynard Keynes playsan interesting part.
Let me try to sum this up.
In many ways, the world of 200 plusyears ago is not so different.
You have a european commission whichis trying to work out european order.
You have a bond market which isthere to finance the operations of
(10:02):
the various governments, andyou have the specter of terror.
And that's where I wantto end this conversation.
There's been a debate about whetheryou're using the term terror in
an anachronistic way.
Is that a fair criticism?
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (10:18):
No, not at all.
Because if you look closelyat the references and
the way I go to the sources,terror was the buzzword.
So I just mentioned moderation.
Before.
It was actually a pair.
It was the opposite pair,the juxtaposed pair,
the vectors that put thiswhole system in motion.
So on the one hand,you had the moderation.
It was the thing that the peoples ofEurope craved for after all those years of
(10:42):
trauma, devastation, destruction,5 million people dead.
And the origins of thatmayhem were a terror.
And terror was a kind ofa two headed monster.
Bicephalus monster.
On the one hand, it was the terror ofthe revolutionaries against the non state
agents, but on the other hand, it wasthe terror when those revolutionaries took
over, the terror in the hands ofthe state itself, it was Napoleon,
(11:05):
it was the armed jacobinism.
So the terror was both something thatcould happen through revolution and
then in the hands of state armies,for example,
would be unleashed againstthe rest of the world.
Terror.And in a similar way,
we still use that phrase now.
And it was born not just out ofthe revolutionary terry of Robespierre,
(11:26):
but also of the terror ofNapoleon's armies in Europe.
>> Niall Ferguson (11:30):
And does that mean that in that period,
immediately after the battle of Waterloo,the statesmen and
the property elites of Europeare worried about terrorists?
Or is that something different?
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (11:43):
No, that's true, because terrorists formerly
were the ones that voted in the conventionfor the beheading of King Louis.
But after 1850, it was also used forpeople who tried to shoot.
Wellington, for example, tried tocommit attacks on Friedrich Wilhelm.
And the heads of states also correspondedwith each other on terrorism.
So it was an early way of dealing withterrorism, similar to we do it today.
(12:07):
Of course, you need to followthe trajectory genealogy.
It wasn't considered a specific tactic,as we consider it today.
But, for example,hellish machines were already mentioned.
Not the dynamite,that came only later, but still.
And what's also, I think, very important,and we tend to forget about it.
(12:27):
Terror was already en vogueas a noma around 1800, but
it had always been something.
It was considered a kind of a benigninstrument in the hands of a righteous
ruler.
So you, as an obedient citizen,could be grateful if you
had a ruler who would instill fearin the hearts of his enemies.
So terror was the Timor Dei,the terror day.
(12:49):
The king, as the divine agent, the kindof translation of the godly power,
was able to wield terror againsthis enemies, quite biblical.
>> Niall Ferguson (12:57):
Ivan the terrible wasn't really a critical monarch
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (13:01):
against
his enemies.
>> Niall Ferguson (13:03):
Exactly >> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf
And then came the French Revolution,and terror became secularized.
And now it was not just the instrument inthe hands of a legitimate divine king,
it was an instrument inthe hands of the masses.
And now it was something to be terrified.
For.
Metternich himself,
his family had lost all their property inthe rhenish lands because of the terror.
(13:23):
So for them, terror was notjust people killing each other.
It was perhaps they were even moreafraid of the upending of all values.
To speak with Nietzsche.
And revolutionizing meant takingaway all the property of the people.
That was the real terror.
Well, nothing illustrates better the relevance of early
19th century history to ourown times than your book and
(13:46):
the presentation that you just gave us.
I know that you're working on a separateproject on contemporary terrorism.
That's a very different kind of project.
Maybe say a few words about howyou're approaching that and
what you hope to find out.
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (14:00):
Yeah, I have these two tracks.
A more hermeneutical history andthe history for today, and
a project that I've been working on.
During the times of the pandemic,when the archives were closed,
the prisons were not.
So I was able, strangely enough,to visit prisons in the Netherlands and
go to Indonesia andinterview the terrorists themselves and
try to engage them in a conversation.
(14:20):
What they believed,what were their extreme beliefs and
how did they formulate and opin them?
And that's a book withan historical perspective,
because they tellhistorical stories as well.
The Indonesian terrorists did, the dutchterrorists did, the Syrian ones, and
that will come out,
hopefully somewhere next year to OxfordUniversity press as radical redemption.
>> Niall Ferguson (14:39):
Well, radical redemption sounds like
an equally exciting book, albeit acompletely different one methodologically.
And we hope that you come backto the Hoover institution and
talk about that book whenit's published by Oxford.
It's been a huge pleasure tohave Beatrice Graf here with us.
I hope, as I said, that she'll come backat some point and present her new book.
That's all we have time for now.
(15:00):
As I said, the Hoover history workinggroup has been very fortunate to hear her
talk about fighting terror after Napoleon,how Europe became secure after 1815.
Beatrice, thanks very much.
>> Beatrice da Graff / de Graaf (15:10):
Thank you, Neil.
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