Shocking Consequences of the Attempts of Bigotry to Re-Establish Itself

First published in The Examiner, XI, 6 September 1818, pp. 561–3. When Napoleon first abdicated in 1814 and the Congress of Vienna was established to settle the governance of Europe, Hunt issued multiple warnings against reactionary efforts to re-establish pre-revolutionary systems of oppressive government (see Vol. 1, pp. 329–36). He maintained this critical line throughout 1815–17, as the forces of reaction continued to consolidate power and resist movements of national liberation (see above, pp. 36–9, 87–90). The cumulative effect of the repressive measures listed in the first paragraph below provoked this latest in Hunt’s persistent diatribes against those rulers and ministers throughout Europe who had colluded with church authorities throughout the post-Napoleonic years to prop up the old order of things, especially through the formation of the Holy Alliance of Russia, Prussia and Austria in 1815. For details on the Holy Alliance, see headnotes above, pp. 1–2, 55–6. All the promises of freedom and justice in the original proclamation of the Holy Alliance now seemed blatantly false. At the end of 1818, Hunt reprints an equally specious document proclaiming the political reconstitution of the Holy Alliance in November, now to include England, and runs a series of Examiner articles disparaging the entire post-war history of broken promises and reactionary policies made by the rulers of Europe (see the Political Examiners for 6 December, pp. 769–71; 13 December, pp. 785–6; 27 December, pp. 817– 18). The role that religious superstition and notions of eternal damnation played in maintaining established power had also been a recurring theme in Hunt’s political criticism. For earlier versions of his attacks on the insidious social effects of religious superstition, see his series of Examiner articles on Methodism, the first of which (8 May 1808, pp. 301–3) is reprinted in Vol. 1, pp. 49–55. For the positioning of this essay within Hunt’s overall response to the European political scene of 1818, see headnote above, pp. 144–7.