Published on: 18 Dec 05:12

Tsar Alexander I: Mr. Anti-Gangrene

I've been reading https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22859447-phantom-terror. It's a study of Europe's heads of state reacting to various revolutionary elements, and their skill at counter-revolution, or rather, total and abysmal lack of skill. They're so, so shit at countering revolution.

Turns out that if you pay spies and infiltrators and saboteurs more if they inform you of greater levels of unrest, then the lazy spies just simply bullshit to your face of alleged vast throbbing revolutions poised to overthrow the State, and the industrious spies will actively go out and poke and prod and inflame the populace into revolting so they've got solid intel to then relay to you.

Turns out Russia's Tsar at the time, Alexander I, had a near-pathological obsession with using "gangrene" as a verb: "France has become gangrened with Jacobin scum," he'd write in a million letters to a million statesmen urging a million million Russian soldiers be deployed to squelch these alleged million million Jacobins (if you're unfamiliar with "Jacobin", they're the ladies and/or gents powering the French Revolution).

I do actually rather enjoy encountering these little languagey twists. The period 1789-1848 is close enough in history that you can quote its primary historical sources directly, zero translation necessary, but it's still distant enough from us modern-day fairies that a ton of subtle differences persist. A second difference is the Duke of Wellington referring to the average British citizen not as "peaceful", but "peaceable". That kind of thing. It's fab.