The Conspiratorial World of European Politics in the 1820s

Tue 22 November 2016

SG1

Abstract

After Napoleon's final defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, the conservative regimes of the Restoration quickly developed a paranoid suspicion of conspiracies which, they feared, were being hatched to overthrow them. For their part, democrats across Europe formed secret societies like the carbonari, while groups of junior army officers from Spain to Russia plotted to remove Restoration governments and drive the programme of the French Revolution forward. This lecture asks why the politics of the 1820s were so dominated by conspiracy, and attempts to fit the dynamics of plot and counter-plot into the larger framework of the history of conspiracies and conspiracy theories in the modern age.

Biography

Sir Richard Evans FBA is Regius Professor Emeritus of History and President of Wolfson College at the University of Cambridge. He is Principal Investigator in the Leverhulme Programme Grant 'Conspiracy and Democrary' at CRASSH. His latest book, 'The Politics of Power: Europe 1815-1914', will be published by Penguin Books on 1 September 2016.

This is part of a series of public talks from the Leverhulme-funded project Conspiracy and Democracy. More information at http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/

Cost: free