They were willing to kill when men stormed the Konstablerwache in Frankfurt. A fight broke out, and a sergeant of the Free City guards lost his life.
Reinforcements arrived. A shootout followed. At one point, the attackers realized they were going to lose. They retreated. Calm returned to the Zeil, which had briefly turned into a scene resembling war.
When news of the fighting in Frankfurt reached Klemens von Metternich in Vienna, he reacted immediately by founding the “Mainzer Informationsbüro” (Mainz Information Office).
Its mission: repression through intelligence.
You shouldn’t expect a classic espionage story. This article is a short summary of how powerful heads of state used spycraft to undermine the still-young ideals of the Enlightenment.
This ghost — the same one that broke the British iron fist in the American colonies and sent Marie Antoinette to the guillotine — terrified Europe’s absolutists and monarchists. They feared losing their power, their wealth, and the destiny they believed was theirs by right.
Surely, some of them felt relieved when Metternich declared war on this ghost and united the free cities and principalities of Central Europe. The German Confederation was born.
It was 1815, shortly after Napoleon Bonaparte’s final defeat near Waterloo.
Metternich demanded a hard line against liberalism and Enlightenment thought. The repression began.
It started with laws restricting free thought at universities and in the press.
Academics and students with liberal opinions were expelled from their institutions. Getting hold of foreign magazines or newspapers became harder and harder. Authors — including major names like Heinrich Heine — were forced to censor their own work.
Not by the German Confederation directly, but by publishing houses that needed their writers to avoid critical prose, because otherwise an entire edition could be banned.
Like a cancer, repression clung to every piece of flesh it could reach until the body itself began to decay.
But the liberal “revolutionaries” kept going stubbornly. The ideas of free will and the responsible citizen had already become too popular.
Perhaps this realization, mixed with the assault on the Konstablerwache, convinced Metternich that legislative repression alone was no longer enough.
The result: the MIB. An intelligence service whose agents proactively spied on the “enemies” of Europe’s monarchs.
Crucial information, summarized in reports, reached the headquarters in Mainz, which then forwarded it to Metternich. The claim that the state chancellor was “the best-informed man in Europe” appears frequently in historical accounts.
Metternich had no choice. He had to move faster than the liberal agitators.
MIB spies were spread across Europe, from major players like France and United Kingdom to southern regions like Italy and even Malta.
Dr. Franz Strohmeyer kept an eye on communists in Switzerland and their plans to realize Karl Marx’s vision.
Bernhard Lizius was tasked with gathering intelligence in Belgium, France, and United Kingdom on liberal secret societies and the foreign press.
Hermann Friedrich Georg Ebner was a well-known name in the German publishing industry. That‘s exactly why the MIB recruited him. He reported on the plans and activities of liberal publishers and writers.
But Metternich was fighting a battle he had already lost. More and more people embraced the ideas of political participation, freedom, and equality.
In March 1848, after the overthrow of French King Louis Philippe I and the founding of republics in southern Italy, 4.000 revolutionaries faced 14.000 Prussian soldiers in Berlin.
Three hundred people died.
So did the German Confederation.
And with it the era of its architect, Klemens von Metternich.
While researching this article, I was reminded of similar examples from history.
The “Staatssicherheit” (Stasi) of the German Democratic Republic. The Soviet KGB. Or the “Geheime Staatspolizei” (Gestapo) of Nazi Germany.
Secret services built to repress their own populations. Massive apparatuses created to work against their own families and neighbors.
That’s sick. I’ve always thought so.
The methods Metternich used almost 200 years ago were disturbingly similar to those employed by the regimes I mentioned above. That realization astonished and frightened me..
As I said at the beginning of this article, this wasn’t a classic historical espionage story. But it is a powerful example of how espionage can be used for perverse causes — like suppressing people who want to be free.
We should always keep that in mind.
Two more informations:
The next newsletters topic will be a classical epsionage story again. In a famous, mystical era: The Cold War.
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Benni