Revolutionizing of the Revolution 413
thought under the first point, suggesting that the non- French revolutionaries were
insignificant or ephemeral groups, mere immediate by- products of French inva-
sion. It was the purpose of the preceding volume, by describing conditions in Eu-
rope for a generation before 1792, to prepare the reader of the present volume for
a rejection of this idea.
Thirdly, the reader must put out of mind a good deal that will be suggested to
him by twentieth- century international communism. There was never any con-
certed international organization directed from Paris or anywhere else. There was
not even a French propaganda office trying to reach sympathizers in other coun-
tries. We find, indeed, as early as June 1790, counter- revolutionary allegations that
such a “propaganda” existed. The word itself was then new, and usually found in the
French form, propagande; it was used almost exclusively by conservatives, and what
it meant was not the publicity or the open promotion of ideas that the word now
suggests, but secret conspiracy and subversion. A letter written on July 31, 1790,
from Turin, where the Count of Artois and other émigrés were assembled, men-
tioned a society called the De propaganda Libertate, a term obviously modeled on
the De propaganda Fide of the Catholic Church.^12 About the same time, both from
Turin and from Coblenz, another émigré center, the Emperor Leopold II heard
that “a democratic party” in Paris had set up a clandestine club de propagande to
bring about revolution in other countries.^13 The conservative Hamburg Politisches
Journal and Girtanner’s Historische Nachrichten gave further currency to the story
and to the word.^14 Count Axel de Fersen, in March 1791, told the King of Sweden
of “the Propaganda, that infernal abyss of secret agents everywhere.”^15 Where the
Turin report had attributed the “propaganda” in part to French Protestants, Fersen
now also included the “Jew Ephraim.” Later, on July 15, he recorded in his diary a
report that the Propaganda had burned the Arsenal at Amsterdam. “If this should
not be true,” he added, “it would at least be useful to spread the story.”^16 Mean-
while the British envoy at the Hague, Lord Auckland, sent Lord Grenville a paper
obtained “on good authority” describing the “Society of the Propagande,” whose
aim was to produce revolution not only in France and Holland but in the “whole
world.” The society was now said, in May 1791, to consist of 5,000 members who
paid dues of four louis a year, and 50,000 who paid nothing but were organized “in
every country to spread this so- called philosophical enlightenment.”^17 The idea
found favor among opponents of the French Revolution: at Philadelphia, in 1796,
William Cobbett talked of “the Propagande at Paris,” and the Scottish Robison, in
a book of 1797 of which more will be said, believed that the “propaganda” had
12 Pia Onnis Rosa, “Filippo Buonarroti nel Risorgimento italiano,” in Rassegna storica del Risorgi-
mento, XLIX (1962), 31, notes 1 and 2.
13 E. Wangermann, From Joseph II to the Jacobin Trials: Government Policy and Public Opinion in the
Habsburg Dominions in the Period of the French Revolution (Oxford, 1959), 62.
14 Politisches Journal, Hamburg, Aug. 1790, 833–40; Sept., 963–65; Oct., 1,087–91; Historische
Nachrichten, Hanover, III, 3.
15 R. Klinckowstrom, Le comte de Fersen et la cour de France, 2 vols. (Paris, 1877), I, 87.
16 Fersen’s Dagbok, 4 vols. (Stockholm, 1925), under date of July 15, 1791. I am indebted for this
item to the dissertation by H. A. Barton mentioned above in note 1.
17 Great Britain: Historical Manuscripts Commission, The Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue Preserved
at Dropmore, 10 vols. (London, 1892–1927), II, 69–70, 117, 342, 358.