My project is intended to offer a deeper historical perspective on the relationship of surveillance to both government and the governed in the modern era. More concretely, I will study the operations of surveillance in Central Europe between 1790 and 1866 and the varied public responses to heightened forms of policing. The decades after the Napoleonic Era are a crucial period in the history of Western state building, as governments erected new security agencies to monitor its population and check political revolution. Count Clemens von Metternich, the Austrian statesmen, was famous for his European-wide intelligence apparatus which, historians conventionally argue, muzzled public participation in political affairs. I propose, then, to research the policy and practice of state surveillance as well as the response of Central Europeans to political policing.