Quotes from Adam Zamoyski

As Mazzini put it, writing in 1849: 'The masters of the world had united against the future.' But they had also left a poisoned chalice no less toxic than the acqua tofana whose menace exerted such a spell. When the future caught up with them, in 1917-18, it detonated a series of events which would cost the lives of untold millions and lead to the near-destruction of European civilization.

It would be idle to propose that the arrangements made in 1815 caused the terrible cataclysms of the twentieth century. But anyone who attempted to argue that what happened in Russia after 1917, in Italy and Germany in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, and in many other parts of central and southern Europe at various other moments of the last century had no connection with them would be exposing themselves to ridicule.

By effectively proscribing all change from below without placing any constraints on the powers of rulers, such a system arrested normal development and created a situation in which, since absolutist rulers were unlikely agents of social, economic or political development, change could only be brought about by violent revolution.

Just as starry-eyed Western intellectuals in the twentieth century would transfer to the Soviet Union all their own fantasies of the ideal state, so the idealists of late eighteenth-century Europe doted on the American Eden.

A drama will be enacted in Germany compared with which the French Revolution will seem like a harmless idyll,' wrote Heine in a moment of foreboding. 'Christianity may have restrained the martial ardour of the Teutons for a time, but it did not destroy it; now that the restraining talisman, the cross, has rotted away, the old frenzied madness will break out again.'[459]

While Jefferson and the Republicans made light of the excesses of the Revolution in France, the Federalists were horrified to see America's sister-republic and erstwhile ally descend into lawlessness.

The Westminster government continued to aggravate the situation by haughty mismanagement, and on 4 July 1776 the Congress passed a Declaration of Independence from Britain. This was a constitutionally dubious act with no real democratic basis. Only one in five of the inhabitants of the colonies was in any sense active in the cause of independence, and there were at least 500,000 declared loyalists (out of a total population of 2,500,000) at the beginning of the war.

You must flee from them as you flee from roses that cannot be touched without exposure to the thorns. You must fear an agreeable contagion, the more dangerous because it is hidden. The serpent glides among the flowers.

Man seeks ecstasy and transcendence, and if he cannot find them in church, he will look for them elsewhere.

All were agreed that there could be no liberty while a body independent of the parliamentary system was able to judge people, and the ecclesiastical tribunals' jurisdiction was duly annulled by act of the Sejm in 1562.

The Grand Conspiracy, a Devil-substitute for an age that was too grown-up to believe in the horned version, had been born. 'There is something satanic about the French Revolution that distinguishes it from everything we have known, and perhaps from everything we will ever witness

How wrong they are, these Potentates, to go out like this without dignity, without anything to distinguish them,' wrote Anna Eynard in her diary, 'for it is then that one sees them as men just like any others, and even as less, for they have been placed in the position of being able to achieve more.

My overriding feeling in writing this book has been one of frustration at not being able to dwell at requisite length on the many threads that make up this exceptional story.

In his Hymn to the Love of the Motherland, written after the first partition of Poland, Bishop Ignacy Krasicki, a Voltairian and no friend of the confederates, extolled the 'delights' of suffering and dying in the cause. Paoli

The democratic and civic instinct in that part of Europe today is largely the product of the two decades of freedom secured by Pi?sudski and his armies on the Vistula in 1920.

They seem a selfish, churlish, unsocial race, totally absorbed in making money; a mongrel breed, half-English, half-Dutch, with the worst qualities of both countries

By effectively proscribing all change from below without placing any restraints on the powers of rulers, such a system arrested normal development and created a situation in which, since absolutist rulers were unlikely agents of social, economic or political development, change could only be brought about by violent revolution.

Young men rushed to enlist, not just to have a go at the British, but also to assert the intellectual supremacy of Enlightenment France.

It was a simpler explanation, and, implausible as it might appear, it was comfortably understandable.