by Will Durant
The monarchy ceased to be hereditary, became elective. At the death of Charles XII (November 30, 1718) the throne would have passed by heredity to Karl Friedrich, duke of Holstein-Gottorp, a son of Charles’s eldest sister; but the Riksdag, assembling in January, 1719, for the first time in twenty years, gave the crown to Ulrika Eleanora, another sister of Charles, on her agreement to renounce the royal absolutism that her brother had exercised. Even so, she proved hard to manage, and in 1720 she was persuaded to abdicate in favor of her husband, Landgrave Frederick I of Hesse-Cassel, who now became King Frederick I of Sweden. Under the prudent guidance of Count Arvid Bernhard Horn as chancellor, Sweden was allowed eighteen years of peace in which to recover from the wounds of war.
Proud Swedes ridiculed his pacifism, and called his partisans “Nightcaps”—“Caps” for short—implying that they were dotards sleeping while Sweden fell behind in the parade of the powers. Against these a party of “Hats” was formed by Count Carl Gyllenborg, Karl Tessin, and others; this captured the Riksdag in 1738, and Gyllenborg replaced Horn. Resolved to restore Sweden to her former place among the powers, he renewed the lapsed alliance with France, which sent her subsidies in return for opposition to the aims of Russia; and in 1741 the government declared war against Russia, hoping to regain those Baltic provinces which had been lost to Peter the Great. But neither the army nor the navy had been sufficiently prepared; the navy was incapacitated by disease, and the army yielded all Finland to the Russian advance. Czarina Elizabeth, anxious to win Sweden’s support, agreed to restore most of Finland if her cousin, Adolphus Frederick of Holstein-Gottorp, was named heir to the Swedish throne. On these terms the Peace of Abo ended the war (1743). When Frederick I died (1751) Adolphus Frederick became king.
The estates soon taught him that he was king in name only. They disputed his right to name new peers, or to choose the members of his household; they threatened to dispense with his signature if he objected to signing certain measures or documents. The King was docile, but he had a proud and commanding consort, Louisa Ulrika, sister of Frederick the Great. King and Queen attempted a revolt against the power of the estates. It failed; its agents were tortured and beheaded; the King was spared because the people loved him. Louisa Ulrika consoled and distinguished herself by becoming Queen of Letters: she befriended Linnaeus, and gathered about her a circle of poets and artists through whom she spread the ideas of the French Enlightenment. The Riksdag appointed a new tutor for her ten-year-old son, with instructions to inform the future Gustavus III that in free states kings exist only on sufferance; that they are invested with splendor and dignity “more for the honor of the realm than for the sake of the person who may happen to occupy the chief place in the pageant,” and that “as the glare and glitter of a court” might mislead them into delusions of grandeur, they would do well to visit the huts of the peasantry now and then, and see the poverty that pays for the royal pomp.39
On February 12, 1771, Adolphus Frederick died, and the Council summoned Gustavus III to come from Paris and accept the forms of royalty.
2. Gustavus III
He was the most attractive king since Henry IV of France. Handsome and gay, loving women, the arts, and power, he flashed through Swedish history like an electric charge, bringing to action all the vital elements in the nation’s life. He had been well educated by Karl Tessin, and had been spoiled by his fond mother. He was intellectually precocious and keen, well endowed with imagination and aesthetic sense, restless with ambition and pride; it is not easy to be a humble prince. His mother transmitted to him her love of French literature; he read Voltaire avidly, sent him homage, learned the Henriade by heart. The Swedish ambassador at Paris forwarded to him each volume of the Encyclopédie as it appeared. He studied history with attention and fascination; he was thrilled by the careers of Gustavus Vasa, Gustavus Adolphus, Charles XII; after reading of these men he could not bear to be a do-nothing king. In 1766, without consulting him, and without the consent of his parents, the Council married him to Princess Sophia Magdalena, daughter of Denmark’s Frederick V. She was shy, gentle, pious, and thought the theater a place of sin; he was skeptical, loved the drama, and never forgave the Council for projecting him into this uncongenial marriage. The Council appeased him for a time by a handsome grant for a trip to France (1770-71).
He stopped at Copenhagen, Hamburg, and Brunswick, but Paris was his goal. He braved the anger of Louis XV by calling upon the banished Choiseul, and he violated the conventions by visiting Mme. du Barry in her château at Louveciennes. He met Rousseau, d’Alembert, Marmontel, and Grimm, but was disillusioned; “I have made the acquaintance of all the philosophers,’ he wrote to his mother, “and find their books much more agreeable than their persons.”40 He shone as a northern star at the salons of Mmes. Geoffrin, du Deffand, de Lespinasse, d’Épinay, and Necker. Amid his triumphs he received word that he had become king of Sweden. He did not hurry back; he stayed in Paris long enough to secure large subsidies for Sweden from the almost bankrupt government of France, and 300,000 livres for his own use in managing the Riksdag. On his way home he stopped to see Frederick the Great, who warned him that Prussia would defend—if necessary by arms—that Swedish constitution which so strictly limited the powers of the king.
Gustavus reached Stockholm on June 6. On the fourteenth he opened his first Riksdag with amiable words strangely like those with which another hampered king, George III, had opened his first Parliament in 1760. “Born and bred among you, I have learned from my tenderest youth to love my country, and I hold it the highest privilege to have been born a Swede, and the greatest honor to be the first citizen of a free people.”41 His eloquence and patriotism won a warm response from the nation, but it left the politicians unmoved. The Caps, friends of the constitution and Russia, and financed by forty thousand pounds from Catherine II, won a majority in three of the four estates. Gustavus countered by borrowing 200,000 pounds from Dutch bankers to buy the election of his nominee as marshal of the Riksdag. But he had still to be crowned, and the Cap-controlled estates revised the coronation oath to pledge the king to abide by the decision of “a majority of the estates,” and to base all preferments on merit alone. Gustavus resisted for half a year this move toward democracy; then (March, 1772) he signed it. Secretly he resolved to overthrow this ungracious constitution as soon as opportunity came.
He prepared his ground by establishing popularity. He made himself accessible to all; he “bestowed favors as if receiving them”; he sent no one away discontent. Several army leaders agreed with him that only a strong central government, untrammeled by a venal Riksdag, could save Sweden from domination by Russia and Prussia—which at this very time (August 5, 1772) were partitioning Poland. Vergennes, the French ambassador, contributed 500,000 ducats to the expenses of the coup. On August 18 Gustavus arranged that army officers should meet him at the arsenal the next morning. Two hundred came; he asked them to join him in overthrowing a regime of corruption and instability fostered by Sweden’s enemies; all but one agreed to follow him. The exception, Governor-General Rudbeck, rode through the streets of Stockholm calling upon the people to protect their freedom; they remained apathetic, for they admired Gustavus, and had no love for a Riksdag that, in their view, covered an oligarchy of nobles and businessmen with democratic forms. The young King (now twenty-six) led the officers to the barracks of the Stockholm Guards; to these he spoke so persuasively that they pledged him their support. He seemed to be repeating, step by step, the procedure by which Catherine II had reached power in Russia ten years before.
When the Riksdag met on August 21 it found its Rikssaal surrounded by grenadiers, and the hall itself held by troops. Gustavus, in a speech that made history, reproved the estates for having debased themselves with party quarrels and foreign bribery, and he ordered read to them the new constitution that his aides had prepared. It retained a limited monarchy, but widened the powers of the king; it gave him control of the army, navy, and foreign relations; he alone
could appoint and depose ministers; the Riksdag was to assemble only at his call, and he could dismiss it at will; it could discuss only such measures as he laid before it, but no measure could become law without the Riksdag’s consent, and it would retain control of the purse through the Bank of Sweden and the right to tax. The king was not to engage in a war of offense without the Riksdag’s concurrence. Judges were to be named by the king and be then irremovable; and the right of habeas corpus would protect all arrested persons from the delays of the law. Gustavus asked the delegates to accept this constitution; the bayonets convinced them; they accepted, and swore loyalty. The King thanked the Riksdag and dismissed it, promising to recall it within six years. The Hats and Caps parties disappeared. The coup d’état was effected with bloodless expedition, and apparently to the satisfaction of the people; they “hailed Gustavus as their liberator, and loaded him with blessings; … men embraced one another with tears of joy.”42 France rejoiced, Russia and Prussia threatened war to restore the old constitution. Gustavus stood his ground; Catherine and Frederick retreated, lest war should endanger their Polish spoils.
In the ensuing decade Gustavus behaved as a constitutional monarch—i.e., subject to constituted law. He carried out beneficent reforms, and earned a place among the “enlightened despots” of the century. Voltaire hailed him as “the worthy heir of the great name of Gustavus.”43 Turgot, frustrated in France, had the satisfaction of seeing his economic policies succeed in Sweden, where free trade was legalized in grains, and industry was released from the cramping regulations of the guilds. Commerce was stimulated by the organization of free ports on the Baltic and free market towns in the interior. Mirabeau père was asked for advice on improving agriculture; Lemercier de la Rivière was commissioned to draw up a plan for public education.44 Gustavus sent to Voltaire a copy of the ordinance guaranteeing freedom of the press (1774), and wrote: “It is you that humanity has to thank for the destruction of those obstacles which ignorance and fanaticism have opposed to its progress.”45 He reformed the law and the judiciary, abolished torture, reduced penalties, and stabilized the currency. He lowered the taxes of the peasantry. He reorganized the army and the fleet. Ending the Lutheran monopoly on Swedish piety, he granted toleration to all Christian sects and, in three major cities, to Jews. When he summoned the Riksdag in 1778, his first six years of rule were approved by it without a single dissenting voice. Gustavus wrote to a friend: “I have reached the happiest stage of my career. My people are convinced that I desire nothing but to promote their welfare and establish their freedom.”46
3. The Swedish Enlightenment
Amid this activity of legislation and administration, the King contributed with all his heart to the magnificent outburst of literature and science that put Sweden fully abreast of European intellectual developments in the eighteenth century. This was the age of Linnaeus in botany of Scheele and Bergman in chemistry; we have elsewhere paid them honor. But perhaps we should have included under science one of the most remarkable Swedes of the age, Emanuel Swedenborg, for it was as a scientist that he first earned fame. He did original work in physics, astronomy, geology, paleontology, mineralogy, physiology, and psychology. He improved the air pump by using mercury; he gave good accounts of magnetism and phosphorescence; he proposed a nebular hypothesis long before Kant and Laplace; he anticipated modern research on the ductless glands. He showed, 150 years before any other scientist, that the motion of the brain is synchronous with the respiration rather than with the pulse. He localized in the cortex of the brain the higher operations of the mind, and assigned to specific parts of the brain the control of specific parts of the body.47 He addressed the House of Nobles on the decimal system, the reform of the currency, the balance of trade. All his genius seemed directed to science. But when he concluded that his studies were leading him to a mechanistic theory of mind and life, and that this theory led to atheism, he reacted strongly away from science toward religion. In 1745 he began to have visions of heaven and hell; he came to trust these visions literally, and he described them in his treatise Heaven and Its Wonders and Hell. He informed his thousands of readers that in heaven they would not be disembodied spirits but real flesh-and-blood men and women, enjoying the physical as well as the spiritual delights of love. He did not preach, nor did he found a sect; but his influence spread throughout Europe, affecting Wesley, William Blake, Coleridge, Carlyle, Emerson, and Browning; and finally (1788) his followers formed the “New Jerusalem Church.”
Despite his opposition Sweden gave its mind more and more to the Enlightenment. The import or translation of French and English works rapidly produced a secularization of culture and a refinement of literary taste and forms. Under Gustavus III and his mother the new liberalism found wide acceptance in the middle and upper classes, even among the higher clergy, who began to preach toleration and a simple deistic creed.48 Everywhere the watchwords were reason, progress, science, liberty, and the good life here on earth. Linnaeus and others organized the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences in 1739; Karl Tessin founded the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in 1733. A Royal Academy of Belles-Lettres had had a brief existence under Queen Louisa Ulrika; Gustavus revived it (1784) with a rich endowment, and directed it to award yearly a medal worth twenty ducats for the best Swedish work in history, poetry, or philosophy; he himself won the first award with his panegyric of Lennart Torstenson, the most brilliant of Gustavus Adolphus’ generals. In 1786 the King established (to use his own words) “a new academy for the cultivation of our own language, on the model of the Académie Françahise. It is to be called the Swedish Academy, and will consist of eighteen members.” This and the Academy of Belles-Lettres were provided with funds for pensions to Swedish scholars and authors.49 Gustavus personally helped men of letters, of science, or of music; he made them feel that his bounty was their due; he gave them new social status by inviting them to his court; and he stimulated them by his competition.
There had been drama in Sweden before him, especially under encouragement by his mother, but it had been provided by French actors presenting French plays. Gustavus dismissed the alien troupe, and called upon native talent to produce plays for a really Swedish theater. He himself collaborated with Johan Willander in writing an opera, Thetis och Pelée; this had its première on January 18, 1773, and ran for twenty-eight nights. Then for eight years the King gave himself to politics. In 1781 he took up the pen again, and composed a series of plays which still rank high in Swedish literature. The first of them, Gustaf Adolfs Adelmod (Gustavus Adolphus’ Magnanimity, 1782) marked the beginning of the Swedish drama. The King took his subjects from historical records, and taught his people the history of their country as Shakespeare had taught the English. In 1782, at state expense, a superb theater was built for both drama and music. Gustavus wrote his plays in prose, had them versified by Johan Kellgren, and had native or foreign composers put them to music; so his plays became operas. The best results of this collaboration were Gustaf Adolf och Ebha Brake, celebrating the great commander’s love story, and Gustaf Vasa, which told how the first Gustavus had freed Sweden from Danish domination.
With such royal leadership, and three universities (Uppsala, Abo, and Lund), Sweden moved into its own Enlightenment. Olof von Dalin provided an Addisonian prelude by writing anonymously, and periodically publishing (1733-34), Den svenska Argus, discussing everything except politics, in the genial style of the Spectator. Nearly every reader was pleased. The Riksdag voted a reward to the author, who forthwith came out of hiding. Queen Louisa Ulrika made him court poet and tutor to the future Gustavus III. This fettered and dulled his Muse, but it allowed him time and money to write his chef-d’oeuvre, Svea Rikes Historia, the first critical history of the Swedish realm.
The most interesting figure in the new Pléïade was a woman, Hedvig Nordenflycht, the Sappho, Aspasia, and Charlotte Brontë of Sweden. She alarmed her puritan parents by reading plays and poetry; they punished her, she persisted, and wrote verses so charming that the
y resigned themselves to the scandal. But they compelled her to marry the overseer of their estate, who was wise and ugly; “I loved to listen to him as a philosopher, but the sight of him as a lover was unendurable.”50 She learned to love him, only to have him die in her arms after three years of marriage. A handsome young clergyman ended her mourning by courting her; she became his wife, and enjoyed “the most blissful life that any mortal can have in this imperfect world”; but he died within a year, and Hedvig went almost insane with grief. She isolated herself in a cottage on a small island, and voiced her sorrow in poems that were so well received that she moved to Stockholm and issued annually (1744-50) Aphorisms for Women, by a Shepherdess of the North. Her home became a salon for the social and intellectual elite. Young poets like Fredrik Gyllenborg and Gustaf Creutz followed her in adopting the classic French style and in espousing the Enlightenment. In 1758, aged forty, she fell in love with Johan Fischerström, twenty-three; he confessed that he loved another, but when he saw Hedvig desolate he proposed marriage to her. She refused the sacrifice, and to simplify matters she tried to drown herself. She was rescued, but she died three days later. Shepherdess of the North is still a classic in the literature of Sweden.
Creutz followed her romantic flight with an exquisite cycle of songs, Atis och Camilla (1762), which remained for many years the most admired poem in the language. Camilla, as a priestess of Diana, is vowed to chastity; Atis, a hunter, sees her, longs for her, wanders through the woods in despair. Camilla too is stirred, and asks Diana, “Is not nature’s law as holy as your decree?” She comes upon a wounded hart; she tends and comforts it; it licks her hand; Atis begs similar privileges; she rebukes him; he jumps from a high cliff, seeking death; Cupid breaks his fall; Camilla tends him and accepts his embrace; a serpent buries its fang in her alabaster breast; she dies in Atis’ arms. Atis sucks the poison from her wound, and nears death. Diana relents, revives them both, and releases Camilla from her virgin vows; all is well. This idyl was acclaimed by literate Sweden and by Voltaire, but Creutz turned to politics and became chancellor of Sweden.