“Thought Is in Itself a Dangerous Operation”: The Campaign Against “Revolutionary Machinations” in Germany, 1819–1828

Abstract

This paper examines the formation of a counterrevolutionary surveillance regime in the German Confederation in the wake of Karl Sand’s assassination of August von Kotzebue in March 1819. Its focus is less the institutions and mechanisms of surveillance than the ideological lens through which police and state officials construed the threat of “revolutionary machinations.” Relying on the Mainz Central Investigative Commission’s Hauptbericht and other sources, this paper argues that investigators were determined to expose the “dangerous” thoughts of German radicals, to whom they attributed the notorious maxim “the end justifies the means,” and that such assumptions shaped the self-conceptions of the radicals themselves.