Rousseau and Revolution

by Will Durant

  If Hedvig Nordenflycht was the Sappho of Sweden, Karl Bellmann was its Robert Burns. Brought up in comfort and piety, he learned to prefer the jolly songs of the taverns to the somber hymns of his home. In the taverns the realities of life and feeling were revealed with little concern for convention and propriety; there each soul was bared by liquor, and let truth come out between fancy and wrath. The most tragic figure in this human wreckage was Jan Fredman, once clockmaker to the court, now trying to forget in drink the failure of his marriage; and the gayest was Maria Kiellström, queen of the lower depths. Bellmann sang their songs with them, composed songs about them, sang these before them to music composed by himself. Some of his songs were a bit loose, and Kellgren, the uncrowned poet laureate of the age, reproved him; but when Bellmann prepared Fredmans Epistlar for the press (1790), Kellgren chaperoned these verse letters with an enthusiastic preface, and the volume received an award from the Swedish Royal Academy. Gustavus III heard Bellmann gladly, called him “the Anacreon of the North,” and gave him a sinecure in the government. The assassination of the king(1792) left the poet without income;he sank into poverty, was imprisoned for debt, was released by friends. Dying of consumption at the age of fifty-five, he insisted on a last visit to his favorite tavern; there he sang till his voice failed him. He died soon afterward, February II, 1795. Some rank him as “the most original of all Swedish poets,” and “by all odds the greatest in the circle of poets” that honored this reign.51

  But the man whom his contemporaries recognized as second only to the King in the intellectual life of the time was Johan Henrik Kellgren. Son of a clergyman, he discarded the Christian creed, marched with the French Enlightenment, and welcomed all the pleasures of life with a minimum of remorse. His earliest book, Mina Löjen (My Laughter) was an extended ode to joy, erotic joys included; Kellgren hailed laughter as “the one divine, distinguishing mark of humanity,” and invited it to accompany him to the end of his days.52 In 1778, aged twenty-seven, he joined with Karl Peter Lenngren in founding the Stockholmsposten; for seventeen years his lively pen made this journal the dominant voice in Swedish intellectual life; in its pages the French Enlightenment held full sway, the classic style was honored as the supreme norm of excellence, German romanticism was laughed out of court, and Kellgren’s mistresses were exalted in poems that scandalized the conservatives of the hinterland. The assassination of his beloved King took the heart out of the poet’s hedonistic philosophy. In 1795 one of his amours ran out of control and deepened into love. Kellgren began to acknowledge the rights of romance, idealism, and religion; he retracted his condemnation of Shakespeare and Goethe, and he thought that, after all, the fear of God might be the beginning of wisdom. However, when he died (1795), aged only forty-four, he asked that no bells be tolled for him;53 he was, at the end, again a son of Voltaire.

  A charming aspect of his character was his willingness to open the columns of the Posten to opponents of his views. The most vigorous of them was Thomas Thorild, who declared war on the Enlightenment as the immature idolatry of superficial reason. At the age of twenty-two Thorild startled Stockholm with Passionerna (The Passions), which, he said, “contains the full force of my philosophy and all the splendor of my imagination—unrhymed, ecstatic, marvelous.” He declared that “his whole life was consecrated to … revealing nature and reforming the world.”54 Around him gathered a group of literary rebels who fed their fires with Sturm und Drang, ranked Klopstock above Goethe, Shakespeare above Racine, Rousseau above Voltaire. Failing to win Gustavus III to these views, Thorild migrated to England (1788), nourished his soul with James Thomson, Edward Young, and Samuel Richardson, and joined the radicals who favored the French Revolution. In 1790 he returned to Sweden and published political propaganda that stirred the government to banish him. After two years in Germany he was readmitted into Sweden, and subsided into a professorial chair.

  There were several other stars in this literary firmament. Carl Gustaf af Leopold pleased the King with the classic form and courtly tone of his verse. Bengt Lidner, like Thorild, preferred romance. He was expelled from the University of Lund because of his escapades (1776); continued his studies and irregularities at Rostock; was put on a ship bound for the East Indies, escaped from it, returned to Sweden, and attracted the attention of Gustavus with a volume of poetic fables. He was appointed secretary to Count Creutz in the embassy at Paris; there he studied women more than politics, and was sent home, where he died in poverty at the age of thirty-five (1793). He redeemed his life by three volumes’hot with Byronic fire.—And there was modest Anna Maria Lenngren, wife of Kellgren’s collaborator on the Stockholmsposten. To that periodical she contributed verse that won her a special commendation by the Swedish Royal Academy. But she did not let her Muse interfere with her household chores, and in a poem addressed to an imaginary daughter she counseled her to avoid politics and society and content herself with the tasks and joys of the home.

  Was there, in Swedish art, any movement answering to the literature and the drama? Hardly. Karl Gustaf of Tessin decorated in rococo (c. 1750) the royal palace that his father, Nicodemus Tessin, had built in 1693-97, and he gathered a rich collection of paintings and statuary, which is now part of the Stockholm National Museum. Johan Tobias Sergel carved a Venus and a Drunken Faun in classic style, and commemorated in marble the robust features of Johan Pasch. The Pasch family included four painters: Lorenz the Elder, his brother Johan, his sister Ulrica, and Lorenz the Younger; each of these painted royalty and nobility. They were a modest part in the brilliant Enlightenment that graced this reign.

  4. Assassination

  It was the King himself who brought the bright flowering to a tragic end. The American Revolution, so powerfully aided by France, seemed to him a threat to all monarchies; he called the colonists “rebellious subjects,” and vowed that he would never recognize them as a nation until the King of England had absolved them from their oath of allegiance.55 More and more in his final decade he strengthened the royal power, surrounded it with ceremony and etiquette, and replaced able aides of independent mind with servitors who obeyed his wishes without hesitation or dissent. He began to restrict the freedom that he had given to the press. Finding his wife dull, he indulged in flirtations56 that shocked public opinion, which expected the kings of Sweden to give the nation a model of marital affection and fidelity. He alienated the people by establishing a governmental monopoly in the distillation of liquor; the peasants, accustomed to distill their own, evaded the monopoly by a hundred expedients. He spent increasingly on the army and navy, and was visibly preparing for war with Russia. When he assembled his second Riksdag (May 6, 1786) he found no longer, in the estates, the approval that the Riksdag of 1778 had given to his measures; almost all of his proposals were rejected, or were amended to futility, and he was compelled to surrender the government’s liquor monopoly. On July 5 he dismissed the Riksdag, and resolved to rule without its consent.

  That consent, by the constitution of 1772, was necessary for any war but one of defense, and Gustavus was meditating an attack upon Russia. Why? He knew that Russia and Denmark had signed (August 12, 1774) a secret treaty for united action against Sweden. He visited Catherine II at St. Petersburg in 1777, but their mutual pretenses of friendship deceived neither the hostess nor her guest. As Russian victories against Turkey mounted, Gustavus feared that if nothing were done to end them the Empress would soon direct her immense armies westward in the hope of subjecting Sweden to her will as she had done with Poland. Was there any way of frustrating that design? Only, the King felt, by aiding Turkey with a flank attack upon St. Petersburg. The Sultan helped him decide by offering Sweden a subsidy of a million piasters annually for the next ten years if she would join in the effort to check Catherine. Perhaps now Sweden could recover what she had surrendered to Peter the Great in 1721. In 1785 Gustavus began to prepare his army and navy for war. In 1788 he sent to Russia an ultimatum demanding the restoration of Karelia and Livonia to Sweden, and of
the Crimea to Turkey. On June 24 he embarked for Finland. On July 2, at Helsingfors, he took charge of his assembled forces, and began to drive toward St. Petersburg.

  Everything went wrong. The fleet was stopped by a Russian flotilla in an indecisive battle off the island of Hogland (July 17). In the army 113 officers mutinied, charging that the King had violated his pledge to make no offensive war without the Riksdag’s consent; they sent an emissary to Catherine offering to place themselves under her protection and to cooperate with her in making both Swedish and Russian Finland an independent state. Meanwhile Denmark dispatched an army to attack Göteborg, the richest city in Sweden. Gustavus accepted this invasion as a challenge that would arouse the spirit of his people; he appealed to the nation, and especially to the rugged peasants of the mining districts called the Dales, to give him a new and more loyal army; he went in person, dressed in the Dalesmen’s characteristic garb, to address them from that same churchyard, in the village of Mora, where Gustavus Vasa had asked for their aid in 1521. The people responded; volunteer regiments were formed in a hundred towns. In September the King, fighting for his political life, rode 250 miles in forty-eight hours, made his way into Göteborg, and inspired the garrison to continue its defense against twelve thousand besieging Danes. Fortune turned in his favor. Prussia, unwilling to let Sweden fall subject to Russia, threatened war upon Denmark; the Danes withdrew from Swedish soil. Gustavus returned in triumph to his capital.

  Now, emboldened by a new army dedicated to him, he summoned the Riksdag to assemble on January 26, 1789. Of 950 men in the House of Nobles, seven hundred supported the mutinous officers, but the other houses—clergy, burgesses, and peasants—were overwhelmingly for the King. Gustavus declared political war against the nobles by submitting to the Riksdag an “Act of Unity and Security” which ended many privileges of the aristocracy, opened nearly all offices to commoners, and gave the King full monarchical powers over legislation, administration, war, and peace. The three lower estates accepted the act, the Riddarhus rejected it as unconstitutional. Gustavus arrested twenty-one nobles, including Count Fredrik Axel von Fersen and Baron Karl Fredrik von Pechlin—one honorable and ineffective, the other clever and treacherous. But the power of the purse still remained with the Riksdag, and appropriations required the consent of all four chambers. The three lower orders voted the King, for as long as he might consider necessary, the funds he asked for continuing the war against Russia; the House of Nobles refused to vote supplies beyond two years. On April 17 Gustavus entered the Riddarhus, took the chair, and put to the nobles the question of accepting the decision of the three other houses. The noes preponderated, but the King announced that his proposal had won. He thanked the nobles for their gracious support, and withdrew, having risked assassination by the infuriated magnates.

  He now felt free to prosecute the war. During the remainder of 1789 he rebuilt the army and the fleet. On July 9, 1790, his navy met the Russian in the Svensksund part of the Gulf of Finland, and won the most decisive victory in Sweden’s naval history; the Russians lost fifty-three ships and 9,500 men. Catherine II, still busy with the Turks, was ready for peace; by the Treaty of Väräla (August 15, 1790) she agreed to end her efforts to control the politics of Sweden, and prewar boundaries were restored. On October 19, 1791, Gustavus persuaded her to sign with him a defensive alliance which pledged her to send Sweden 300,000 rubles per year.

  Doubtless their common fear of the French Revolution turned the old foes to this new partnership. Gustavus remembered gratefully that France had been Sweden’s faithful friend through 250 years, and that Louis XV and Louis XVI had supported him with 38,300,000 livres between 1772 and 1789. He proposed a League of Princes to invade France and restore the monarchy to power; he sent Hans Axel von Fersen (son of his enemy Count von Fersen) to arrange the flight of Louis XVI from Paris; he himself went to Aix-la-Chapelle to lead the allied army; and he offered asylum in his camp to the French émigrés. Catherine gave money but no men, Leopold II refused to co-operate, and Gustavus returned to Stockholm to protect his throne.

  The nobles whose political supremacy he had ended were not reconciled to defeat. They looked upon Gustavus’ absolute rule as a plain violation of the constitution that he had sworn to support. Jakob Ankarström brooded over the fall of his class. “I bethought me much if perchance there was any fair means of getting the King to rule his land and people according to law and benevolence, but every argument was against me. … ‘Twere better to venture one’s life for the commonweal.” In 1790 he was tried for sedition. “This misfortune … knit my resolve rather to die than live a wretched life, so that my otherwise sensitive and affectionate heart became altogether callous as regards this horrible deed.”57 Pechlin, Count Karl Horn, and others joined in the conspiracy to kill the King.

  On March 16, 1792, a date ominously recalling Caesar, Gustavus received a letter warning him not to attend a masquerade ball scheduled for that night in the French Theater. He went half masked, but the decorations on his breast revealed his rank. Ankarström recognized him, shot him, and fled. Gustavus was carried to a coach and led through an excited crowd to the royal palace. He was bleeding dangerously, but he jokingly remarked that he resembled a pope borne in procession through Rome. Within three hours of the attack Ankarström was arrested; within a few days, all the ringleaders. Horn confessed that the plot had had a hundred accomplices. The populace cried out for their execution; Gustavus recommended clemency. Ankarström was scourged, beheaded, and quartered, Gustavus lingered for ten days; then, told that he had only a few hours of life left to him, he dictated documents for a regency to govern the country and the capital. He died on March 26, 1792, aged forty-five. Nearly all the nation mourned him, for it had learned to love him despite his faults, and it realized that under his lead Sweden had lived through one of the most glorious ages in her history.

  BOOK VI

  JOHNSON’S ENGLAND

  1756-89

  CHAPTER XXVII

  The Industrial Revolution

  I. CAUSES

  WHY did the Industrial Revolution come to England first? Because England had won great wars on the Continent while keeping its own soil free from war’s devastation; because it had secured command of the seas and had thereby acquired colonies that provided raw materials and needed manufactured goods; because its armies, fleets, and growing population offered an expanding market for industrial products; because the guilds could not meet these widening demands; because the profits of far-flung commerce accumulated capital seeking new avenues of investment; because England allowed its nobles—and their fortunes—to engage in commerce and industry; because the progressive displacement of tillage by pasturage drove peasants from the fields to the towns, where they added to the labor force available for factories; because science in England was directed by men of a practical bent, while on the Continent it was predominantly devoted to abstract research; and because England had a constitutional government sensitive to business interests, and vaguely aware that priority in the Industrial Revolution would make England for over a century the political leader of the Western world.

  British command of the seas had begun with the defeat of the Spanish Armada; it had been extended by victories over Holland in the Anglo-Dutch wars, and over France in the War of the Spanish Succession; and the Seven Years’ War had made oceanic commerce almost a British monopoly. An invincible navy made the English Channel a protective moat for “this fortress built by Nature … against infection and the hand of war.”1 The English economy was not only spared the ravages of soldiery, it was nourished and stimulated by the needs of British and allied armies on the Continent; hence the special expansion of the textile and metallurgical industries, and the call for machines to accelerate, and for factories to multiply, production.

  Command of the seas facilitated the conquest of colonies. Canada and the richest parts of India fell to England as fruit of the Seven Years’ War. Voyages like those of Captain Cook (1768-76) secured fo
r the British Empire islands strategically useful in war and trade. Rodney’s victory over de Grasse (1782) confirmed British dominion over Jamaica, Barbados, and the Bahamas. New Zealand was acquired in 1787, Australia in 1788. Colonial and other overseas trade gave British industry a foreign market unrivaled in the eighteenth century. Commerce with the English settlements in North America employed 1,078 vessels and 29,000 seamen.2 London, Bristol, Liverpool, and Glasgow flourished as chief ports for this Atlantic trade. The colonies took manufactured articles and sent back food, tobacco, spices, tea, silk, cotton, raw materials, gold, silver, and precious stones. Parliament restricted with high tariffs the import of foreign manufactures, and discouraged the development of colonial or Irish industries competitive with those of Britain. No internal tolls (such as those that hampered domestic trade in France) impeded the movement of goods through England, Scotland, and Wales; these lands constituted the largest free-trade area in Western Europe. The upper and middle classes enjoyed the highest prosperity, and a purchasing power that was an added stimulus to industrial production.

  The guilds were not competent to meet the demands of expanding markets at home and abroad. They had been instituted chiefly to supply the needs of a municipality and its environs; they were shackled by old regulations that discouraged invention, competition, and enterprise; they were not equipped to procure raw materials from distant sources, or to acquire capital for enlarged production, or to calculate, obtain, or fill orders from abroad. Gradually the guild master was replaced by “projectors” (entrepreneurs) who knew how to raise money, to anticipate or create demand, to secure raw materials, and to organize machines and men to produce for markets in every quarter of the globe.