Napoleon and the Prince of Denmark

His victory over the Russian army at Friedland on 14 June 1807 marked Napoleon’s military apogee. Having also defeated Austria and Prussia in the last 18 months, continental Europe now lay at the emperor’s feet. Most expected that Napoleon would wield his powers to instigate a major territorial reshuffle, as in previous years he had shown that he had no qualms about redrawing maps. A week after the battle at Friedland, Duke Frederick Christian of Augustenburg pondered what the new situation might imply for the future of the Scandinavian countries. Knowing that Sweden’s King Gustav IV Adolph was under extreme domestic pressure following an unsuccessful war against France in northern Germany, and that Denmark-Norway clung onto fragile neutrality, the duke wrote:

The imagination loses itself in conjecture over the consequences of a revolution in Sweden. If it occurs at the moment when Europe is given a new form, it could stimulate grand projects in the mind of the universal master [Napoleon] which could place us in a most embarrassing position. A great empire in the north alongside Russia and England surely plays a large part in his thinking, and since the King of Sweden leaves no choice between the two ruling houses, it could happen that he might bestow upon our Crown Prince [Frederick, regent of Denmark-Norway] the Swedish crown in recompense for his consistent neutrality. At any other time, it would be completely ridiculous to consider such ideas. In the times we live in, the matter is not only possible, but its execution would not be difficult if the proper forms are observed.Footnote 1

A member of the council of ministers and married into the royal family, Duke Frederick Christian of Augustenburg cut a prominent figure in the Danish-Norwegian state. He was keenly aware that he was living in a time of rapid and sweeping change, in which the future appeared to become increasingly disconnected from the past, offering new opportunities that had hitherto been almost unthinkable. Indeed, the unceremonious dissolution of the near thousand-year-old Holy Roman Empire in August 1806 had directly impacted the duke through a quarrel with the Danish-Norwegian crown prince regent over the future of Holstein. The duke claimed hereditary rights to this duchy and therefore resented its incorporation into the Danish-Norwegian state.Footnote 2 The dissolution of the Reich and the annexation of Holstein were testament to how polities and boundaries in Europe were in a state of flux. Some states vanished and new ones appeared, with rulers overthrown and installed at breakneck speed, to say nothing of sweeping reforms in the Napoleonic mould. As a rule, the fate of states was a matter of size. Napoleon’s territorial reshuffles in Europe suggested that small states were doomed, whereas larger ones survived or were created anew.Footnote 3 This lesson was not lost on contemporaries, to whom the future was thus looking increasingly open, if also dangerous. In contemplating the ramifications of the changing times, the Duke of Augustenburg was coming under the impression that the future was determined less by any natural or evolutionary course of history than chance events, circumstances and human agency. In the light of Napoleon’s recent remake of Italy and Germany, Scandinavian unification seemed a logical next step.

The idea of Scandinavian union was not novel. The so-called Kalmar union had seen a dynastic union of Scandinavia from 1397 until 1523, but ever since its dissolution Denmark-Norway and Sweden had been caught up in rivalry and several wars, with new tensions flaring up during the Napoleonic Wars. Yet, in finding the moment right to consider otherwise ‘ridiculous’ ideas of unification, Napoleon’s overriding power was not the only thing on the Duke of Augustenburg’s mind. He was also inspired by a cultural turn in Scandinavia in recent decades that looked to discern commonalities in language, history and literature. Although cosmopolitan and a far way off from advocating political union, this ‘Nordic Renaissance’ attracted individuals who were not necessarily strangers to this idea. The Danish professors Jens Schieldrup Sneedorff and his son Frederik suggested as much in the early 1790s, as did the Danish geographer and political émigré Conrad Malte-Brun a decade later. Malte-Brun published from his Parisian exile the pamphlet Projet d’association coloniale de la nouvelle Scandinavie in 1804, before organising a committee to further the cause. However, Napoleon was not enthused and suppressed the effort. Still, news of Malte-Brun’s activities reached Copenhagen and had some, including the Duke of Augustenburg, believing that Napoleon actively supported Scandinavian unionist ideas.Footnote 4

The Duke of Augustenburg turned out to be right in assuming that a Swedish revolution in conjunction with a European reshuffle would offer an opportunity to unite Scandinavia, but little did he know about how events would unfold. When pondering over the future in June 1807 the duke could not have predicted that Napoleon’s peace with Russia at Tilsit on 7 July and the British onslaught on Copenhagen a few weeks later would completely unhinge Scandinavia, plunging Denmark-Norway and Sweden into a war that, paradoxically, would offer opportunities to unite the Scandinavian crowns and bring Napoleon’s attention to both this matter and to the Duke of Augustenburg himself. Yet, when this happened the duke was not caught entirely unprepared. His younger brother was elected crown prince Charles August of Sweden in July 1809 after the revolutionary dethroning of Gustav IV Adolph I four months earlier and was adamant that Scandinavian peace and eventual unification was imperative to protect Denmark-Norway and Sweden against Russian expansion. Charles August confided to his brother the duke his wish for a constitutional Scandinavian union and spent his short stint as crown prince pondering how he might help create it. In another twist of the plot the Charles August’s sudden death from a stroke at 41 years old in May 1810 provided an opportunity for immediate unification. As Sweden was thrown into its second crisis of succession in less than a year, the future course of Scandinavian history hinged on its outcome. It seemed highly unlikely that the election would fall on anyone else than a Danish-Norwegian prince.Footnote 5

The Duke of Augustenburg was initially in pole position to be elected as Sweden’s new crown prince. On 16 July, an emissary from the Swedish court appeared at the duke’s residence on the island of Als carrying an invitation to Stockholm, as well as a letter from the Swedish King Charles XIII, bluntly asking the duke if he was prepared to accept his election as crown prince were the diet of the estates (the Riksdag, Sweden’s parliament) to vote for him. Surprised, and unsure as to how to handle this approach, duke opted to consult his king, Frederick VI of Denmark-Norway. As it turned out, the king was one of his competitors in the Swedish election. Having brusquely rebuffed a Swedish approach the year before, Frederick VI had changed his mind and now had his sights set on the Swedish throne. The appalling prospect of having the rigid absolutist king Frederick as heir to the throne led some influential Swedes to look to the young and liberal-minded Danish-Norwegian heir presumptive, Prince Christian Frederick, as a more agreeable alternative.

What ultimately mattered the most was which of the three candidates Napoleon would endorse, and herein lay the problem. Napoleon was by now no stranger to the idea of a dynastic union of Scandinavia in principle but was very aware that open endorsement of any candidate who could produce this union could compromise his relationship with Tsar Alexander. The Tsar did not want to see a more powerful Scandinavia challenging Russia in the Baltic region and, in any event, regarded Scandinavia as his sphere of influence on grounds of what he had agreed with Napoleon at Erfurt in 1808. Thus, Napoleon remained oblique in his approach to the question of Swedish succession, confining himself to instruct his foreign minister to ‘warmly support the Prince of Denmark’—a reference that could in fact be applied to all three candidates. An article in the Journal de l’Empire on 17 June, no doubt sanctioned by Napoleon and possibly authored by Malte-Brun, appeared to favour Frederick VI, but a mere two weeks later Napoleon replied directly to Charles XIII that he had no qualms about the Duke of Augustenburg if the Swedes wished to elect him. The addition of Prince Christian Frederick to the pool of candidates then led Napoleon to reconsider yet again, the emperor remarking to his foreign minister, Jean-Baptiste de Champagny, on 25 July that ‘I would prefer it to be Prince Christian’. It was only at this juncture that the Duke of Augustenburg overcame his initial reluctance and was ready to act, but it was too late. Napoleon was about to endorse a fourth candidate who had taken even the emperor by surprise.Footnote 6

The election on 21 August 1810 of the Marshal Jean Baptiste Bernadotte as crown prince Charles John of Sweden came about through an unlikely turn of events. An unsolicited approach by the 28-year-old Swedish lieutenant Otto Mörner on a diplomatic mission to Paris in mid-June to sound out Napoleon’s opinion on the Duke of Augustenburg alerted Bernadotte to a window of opportunity. Belonging to a faction of Swedish officers wanting a military competent heir to the throne, Mörner virtually sought out every French marshal present in Paris and after several rebuffs found himself at Bernadotte’s doorstep. Even though he was out of favour with the emperor after his conduct during the battles of Wagram and Walcheren the year before, Bernadotte made sure to leave the Swedes with the opposite impression and then launched what amounted to a PR campaign, involving financial pledges, possibly bribery, and above all glowing references to his military record. All of this was attractive to Swedes suffering from fiscal crisis and looking to reconquer Finland, lost to Russia in 1809. Indeed, Bernadotte’s financial and military muscles were attributes that none of the three Danish-Norwegian candidates could match.Footnote 7

Meanwhile, Frederick VI and the Duke of Augustenburg had turned on each other, the latter virtually being placed under house arrest to prevent him from dashing off to Sweden, while Prince Christian Frederick lamented the absence of firm steps to ensure the crucial Swedish election for either of the Danish-Norwegian candidates. On the surface of things, having three Danish-Norwegian princes in the running with the election a mere few weeks away should have made the election of one of them a certainty. However, the fact that none of them ticked all boxes with the Swedes, to say nothing of their internal quarrels, caused vacillation and indecision that played into Bernadotte’s hands. Utterly surprised at Bernadotte’s candidacy, Napoleon wrote to King Charles XIII that ‘I was hardly prepared for this news since Your Majesty let me know that he proposed to elect a brother of the late royal prince [the Duke of Augustenburg]’. But as he could at least reasonably expect Bernadotte to be loyal to France, Napoleon concluded that, ‘I appreciate the views of the Swedish nation to render such esteem to my people and to my army. I authorize the Prince of Pontecorvo [Bernadotte] to accept the throne’. The emperor then proceeded to wash his hands of the entire matter in a personal letter to the tsar.Footnote 8

The Duke of Augustenburg was extremely disappointed at this outcome. His failure to act swiftly at the moment he had the support of both Napoleon and the Swedish government, his quarrel with King Frederick, and above all being overtaken by a more opportunistic and daring actor effectively cost him the Swedish throne.Footnote 9 He died a bitter man in June 1814, just as the Napoleonic Wars in Scandinavia were reaching their climax. He blamed above all Frederick VI for his misfortunes. In passing his bitterness towards the king and the Oldenburg dynasty on to his sons, the duke left a legacy that influenced later events and proved to be of crucial importance when the European revolutions of 1848 triggered rebellions in Schleswig and Holstein, and a Dano-German war that nearly turned into a war of Scandinavian unification.

Bernadotte’s election was a sensational outcome to the Swedish crisis of succession in 1810, and its impact was profound. It put Scandinavia on a path to another war through Bernadotte’s aim to conquer Norway, which he achieved in 1814. Thereby he created his own version of Scandinavia as a geostrategic peninsula, and left Denmark crippled. However, Bernadotte’s foreign policy course, over which he was given complete control in place of the feeble Charles XIII, came just as unexpected to his electors as it came to Napoleon. During his exile at St. Helena, Napoleon regretted both his acquiescence to Bernadotte’s election and his lack of support for Scandinavian unification, which deprived the emperor of a united Scandinavia as a useful ally against Russia.Footnote 10

Napoleon was not alone in applying hindsight. The fact that Scandinavian unification never materialised made several generations of historians regard unification as an impossible option. In researching the advent of the modern Scandinavian nation states, or letting perspectives be confined by modern national boundaries, most Scandinavian historians have had little patience for political Scandinavianism, at best acknowledging its cultural endeavours or its accomplishments in paving the way for practical Nordic cooperation in the twentieth century. Yet, in rejecting the feasibility of political unification, and often ridiculing those who strove for it, historians have deprived themselves of a means to understanding past conceptions of the future and how ‘futures past’—as termed by Reinhart Koselleck—inspired the assumptions of contemporaries and guided their actions.Footnote 11

In writing history often confined to their respective nation states, Scandinavian historians focusing on the nineteenth century have seldom ventured into transnational or comparative European historical perspectives, as evidenced by the virtual absence, until very recently, of works in the English language concerned with Scandinavia after 1814. The Napoleonic Wars are only served marginally better. This has deprived Scandinavian history of important international context and transnational connections. The virtual absence of Scandinavia in international historiography has also left a lacuna in European historiography. Although Scandinavia is located on the geographical periphery of Europe, events in the Scandinavian countries bore influence on contemporary European politics, to say nothing of the continent’s national movements. German nationalists were every bit as preoccupied with the conflict over the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein as were their Scandinavianist counterparts, whereas both Italian and—as Tim van Gerven has recently shown—Dutch and Flemish nationalists saw Scandinavianist matters in tandem with their own. In fact, Flemish and Dutch philologists were driven into each other’s arms for very much the same reasons as the Scandinavianists, concerns of size and fear high among them. Neither Scandinavian nor international scholars have been forthcoming in acknowledging the significance of a ‘threshold principle’—a term coined by Eric Hobsbawm to reflect the ideas that the survival of nations was determined by their size in demographic, economic, cultural and military terms—to contemporary national thought. However, the threshold principle was strongly espoused by key political actors during the Napoleonic Wars, arguing that Scandinavian union was a necessary means of national survival, especially in the face of alleged Russian expansionism. What is more, the lessons of the Napoleonic Wars helped turn the threshold principle into a crucial component in European national thought. Consequently, it bore strong influence on the emergence of pan-national and national unification movements from the 1830s. One of them was Scandinavianism, which emerged as an articulated ideology in the late 1830s. At this point the conflict over the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein was being turned into a national confrontation with Germany while the menace from Russia continued to loom large in the minds of many Scandinavians.Footnote 12

Hence, the creation of the modern Scandinavian nation states was not predetermined, nor were these the only national ideologies subscribed to by contemporaries. Just like they could imagine different futures past, a number of different imagined communities could appear to contemporaries as open to creation. Benedict Anderson argues that for nationalism to work, individuals have to conceive of cultural, social and political ties to a substantial mass of other people whom they will never meet or know personally. In cultural and linguistic terms, the Scandinavian peoples were kindred enough to be able to imagine having something in common with each other and the Scandinavianists were certainly no less able than contemporary nation state ideologues elsewhere to manipulate history to reflect a common past. The main question was arguably which of the numerous nationalist projects at work in the Scandinavian countries during the early nineteenth century would rise to ascendancy, as it were, by being turned into ‘official nationalism’, as Anderson has put it. This depended in no small part on political circumstances.Footnote 13

The threshold principle and imagined communities as futures past also apply to the rest of Europe, whose modern nation states are no more inevitable products of history than the Scandinavian ones. Indeed, several nation states created in Europe in the nineteenth century, stretching from German and Italian unification to Romanian and Bulgarian independence, suggest that size often mattered and that nations are not perennial communities. Historians using modern nation states as their frame of reference carry a risk of reading history backwards, as it were, obscuring our understanding of the perceptions of contemporaries as well as the multiple national futures open to them.

Even if the Swedish Riksdag had elected a Danish-Norwegian candidate rather than Bernadotte in 1810, a viable and integrated Scandinavian union was not a guaranteed outcome. Different constitutional traditions and political cultures, old enmities and the absence of an articulated pan-national ideology were considerable obstacles to integration, at least in the early nineteenth century. The very creation of a dynastic union could have been a quite swift process, but its longer-term political and cultural viability required substantial structural reform and ideological innovation. Whether or not this could have succeeded is mainly a matter of counterfactual history, although the fate of the Swedish-Norwegian union (1814–1905) underlines the difficult odds a Scandinavian union would have faced at any point in the nineteenth century. But the point is that a different outcome to the Swedish crisis of succession in 1810 would have led to a different chain of events and certainly influenced the trajectory of Scandinavian history, particularly given the twists, turns and above all monumental impact of the Napoleonic Wars. Hence, there was nothing inevitable about the eventual course of Scandinavian history in the nineteenth century, let alone the present Scandinavian nation-states.

While most historians would agree that structural conditions are crucial determinators of history and influence particular events, the role and significance of individuals and circumstance is more contested. As historiography moved away from ‘great men’ and, insofar as they were recognised at all, ‘great women’, even the personal significance of Hitler in bringing about the horrible excesses of the Third Reich was debated by ‘functionalists’ and ‘intentionalists’ in the 1980s.Footnote 14 Although no one denies Hitler’s personal responsibility in the making and crimes of the Third Reich, the notion that individual agency at crucial moments or crossroads can strongly influence or even alter the course of history has come to be regarded with increasing scepticism by scholars. Yet, as Margaret MacMillan argues, this historiographical tilt towards structuralism has contributed to obscuring and even depreciating situations where individuals, sometimes at great risk, made decisions or took action that proved to be crucial in determining the outcome of events at key historical junctures and, by consequence, influenced the subsequent course of history.Footnote 15

Historical crossroads where agency, chance events and timing may prove crucial do not appear constantly. They are perhaps better understood as time bubbles lasting temporarily, to paraphrase sociologist Randall Collins, or as windows of opportunity. They most prominently occur in times of great upheaval, such as during wars and revolutions.Footnote 16 The Napoleonic Wars and the European revolutions of 1848 are cases in point. According to historian Richard J. Evans, the revolutions of 1848 introduced an era of ‘single revolutionary change’ lasting until 1871.Footnote 17 It is no coincidence that the efforts to unite Scandinavia were most intensely pursued during the Napoleonic Wars as well as during the European revolutions of 1848 and especially the following two decades, invoking two of the most contested issues of the nineteenth century: constitutionalism and nationalism. Even if the years from 1815 to 1848 offered a more restrictive international political climate than the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and also more so than the decades after 1848, it witnessed the advent Scandinavianist ideology, which by the mid-1840s had turned into a political movement to be reckoned with. This filled an ideological void that had been evident in Scandinavia during the Napoleonic Wars and made the question of unification one of the major political issues in mid-nineteenth century in Scandinavia.

The Famous Land Scandinavia

Scandinavianism had its roots in the Napoleonic Wars and German romanticism. The ideology was preconditioned by a post-war process of reconciliation between the Scandinavian countries, the international political system established at Vienna in 1815, the political repercussions in Europe of the July Revolution in 1830 and the emergence of similar national movements elsewhere in Europe. It is no coincidence that several pan-national and national unification movements in Europe emerged and gained momentum at the same time, and on much the same grounds. In its initial ideological manifestation, Scandinavianism emerged in the late 1830s, centred on cultural exchanges, but many of its adherents had liberal or radical sympathies. Several young Swedish and Danish liberals saw Scandinavian unification as a vehicle for constitutional reform, preferably modelled on the Norwegian constitution of 1814.Footnote 18 Fears of Russian and German expansion—as seen through the prism of the threshold principle—further inspired a Scandinavianist search for common national denominators, and made political unification seem imperative to many of the ideology’s adherents. This contributed to consolidating Scandinavianism as a fully fledged ideological movement in the 1840s, ready to seize the opportunities offered by the European conflagrations of 1848 and beyond.

Some historians see the Danish-German War in 1848–1851, known as the First Schleswig War, as the point of culmination for Scandinavianism, and tend to understand subsequent efforts to unite Scandinavia in the 1850s and 1860s as something different, and even as repellent, centred as it was on realism and dynastic ambition more so than the realisation of liberal ideological goals and cultural aspirations.Footnote 19 However, while it is true that Scandinavianism was transformed by taking on an overt realist outlook in the 1850s and 1860s, and lost many of its left-wing supporters along the way, there was still a great deal of continuity within the ideology and movement across 1848—this year being a watershed in Scandinavian as much as in European history. Scandinavianism attracted new and influential adherents after 1848, who widened its ideological scope, embraced the realism brought to the forefront of international politics after the European revolutions of 1848–1849 and especially the Crimean War, and nearly succeeded in uniting Scandinavia. This transformation of Scandinavianism and the concrete political efforts it produced after 1848 took place in a complex context of international politics, political and economic reform and increasing national tensions that, all combined, require a separate study. The current book focuses mainly on the political and cultural chronology of Scandinavianism between the Napoleonic Wars and the First Schleswig War of 1848–1851, but the anatomy and historiography of Scandinavianist ideology cannot be properly understood unless taking its contested life and development in the following decades into account. Indeed, the experiences of the 1850s and 1860s were crucial to contemporary and later understanding of Scandinavianism, including yet another Danish-German war over Schleswig in 1864—the Second Schleswig War and also the first of the so-called German wars of unification that, in fact, could well have turned into a Scandinavian war of unification. Thus, several of the chapters in the current book offer perspectives extending beyond the turbulent years of 1848–1851, although stopping short of diving into the complex political history of Scandinavianism in the two decades preceding its political demise around 1871. That is the subject of another book, Scandinavia and Bismarck, which serves as a sequel to the present study.

Like most national ideologies and movements that came of age after the Napoleonic Wars, Scandinavianism was elastic and spanned an eclectic range of adherents whose common denominators were a desire for Scandinavian cooperation in cultural, spiritual, economic and/or political terms. Yet, their aims and means were ever-changing and contested, as was the very term ‘Scandinavianism’. Although ideas of Scandinavian commonality, cooperation and unity had gained relatively widespread support from Danish, Swedish and Norwegian elites by the late 1840s, there was no consensus as to precisely what kind of unity was desired, how to achieve it, let alone when.

Nor was there any consensus as to where the boundaries of future or even contemporary Scandinavia ran. ‘Where lies the famous land Scandinavia?’, the poet Henrik Wergeland asked in the second edition of his ‘The Norwegian’s Catechismus’, published in 1845. He answered in scathing prose: ‘I stare all I can through the blue of the air / for if it lies somewhere, it probably lies on the moon’.Footnote 20 Wergeland was an ardent opponent of Scandinavianism, but his scorn struck a sore spot with Scandinavianists, who had various and sometimes even competing visions for the national anatomy and boundaries of Scandinavia.

The terms ‘Scandinavia’ and ‘the North’ (Norden) were long used interchangeably, as were their adjective forms Scandinavian and Nordic. Yet, as the historian, Tim van Gerven notes, in terms of their use in contemporary intellectual circles, ‘“Nordic” can be considered a more backward-looking term, connoting a cultural orientation on the Old Norse, while “Scandinavian” had stronger political implications that, during the 1830s, transformed “Scandinavia” into “the land of the future”’.Footnote 21 Whereas present-day Scandinavia is neatly defined as encompassing Denmark, Norway and Sweden, with the Nordic countries also including Finland, Iceland, the autonomous Åland archipelago, Greenland and the Faroe Islands, boundaries were quite different at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Finland and Åland were part of Sweden, which also included a part of Pomerania and a Caribbean colony, while Norway, Greenland, Iceland, the Faroe Islands and a number of overseas colonies belonged to the king of Denmark, who was also duke of Schleswig and Holstein. The Napoleonic Wars brought a substantial territorial reshuffle, as Sweden lost Finland and Åland in 1809 before being united with Norway in 1814, with Denmark eventually being compensated with the small German duchy of Lauenburg, which Prussia exchanged in return for Swedish Pomerania. Their union turned Sweden and Norway into a ‘Scandinavian peninsula’, a term even put into official Swedish use, whereas the acquisition of Lauenburg in return for the loss of Norway increased the German-speaking population of the Danish state from 25% to 40%, essentially rendering Denmark less Scandinavian. This further served to confuse and create conflicts over the boundaries and very definition of Scandinavia.

Crudely speaking, there were four concepts of Scandinavia and the North during the early to mid-nineteenth century. These were either based on the existing unions or visions for future unions. The most extensive concept, advocated for example by the Augustenburg family, encompassed all the present-day Nordic countries as well as Denmark’s then-German-speaking territories. But when conflicts over Schleswig and Holstein became increasingly national in kind after the Napoleonic Wars, this comprehensive brand of Scandinavian unionism was marginalised, even though it still inspired unionist plans in the 1840s. The other three concepts perceived Scandinavia as either consisting of Sweden and Norway; Sweden, Norway and Denmark; or as Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland. As such these can be labelled as two-, three- and four-state Scandinavianism, respectively.Footnote 22

The different concepts of Scandinavia’s boundaries generally mirrored contemporary national conflicts as to where, and according to what principles, the boundaries between nations, peoples and states ran or should run. As such, some of the different concepts of Scandinavia were competitive, as demonstrated by how the union of Sweden-Norway in 1814 was conceived as a Scandinavian peninsula expressively excluding Denmark. This was borne out of the French-born Charles John’s adherence to the revolutionary concept of natural borders, but it faced resistance even from within these borders as the Norwegians habitually resisted anything that smacked of Swedish attempts to amalgamate the two nations. Charles John’s two-state Scandinavianism also came into direct conflict with Scandinavianist ideology as it emerged in the 1830s, which for the most part promoted three-state and sometimes four-state concepts of Scandinavianism on grounds of commonality in culture, history, and origin. However, three- and four-state concepts of Scandinavianism were also much contested. In excluding Denmark’s German possessions and drawing the boundary along the river Eider separating Schleswig and Holstein, both concepts essentially called for the partition of the Danish ‘unitary state’ (Helstat)—a term coined to describe the Danish-German state between 1815 and 1864. This term requires some explanation, as the Danish state (or empire) was more composite than unitary in practice. The term helstat can essentially be translated into ‘all of the state’ or ‘the whole of the state’, and its proponents strove for increased unity and uniformity within the Danish state, regardless of ethnic or historical diversification, hence them being labelled in the present book as ‘unitary statists’, and the state they strove to maintain as ‘unitary state’. Were the Danish unitary state to be partitioned along the lines advocated by Scandinavianists, it would also pose a challenge to the German Confederation and an international order rather hostile to defining borders according to the principle of nationality, at least before 1848. Moreover, four-state Scandinavianism called for direct confrontation with Russia, from whom several Scandinavianists wanted to liberate Finland, even if linguistic differences left some ambivalence as to the precise terms of Finland’s membership of a Scandinavian union.

In other words, Scandinavianism was controversial and as such resisted from many quarters. To a nationalist like Wergeland, Scandinavianism was virtually a betrayal of a purely Norwegian national spirit, threatening to reintroduce the Danish yoke he perceived the Norwegians as having shaken off in 1814. To radicals and democrats, the ideology of limited suffrage adhered to by the liberal proponents of Scandinavianism was seen as too restrictive. But to Charles XIV John, crowned king of Sweden and Norway in 1818, its liberal aspirations challenged his increasingly authoritarian regime. Conservatives in Denmark saw it as a threat both to the absolutist regime and the Danish unitary state. Nor was Scandinavianism welcomed by Russia, whose reactionary regime loathed liberals as harbingers of revolution and was not inclined to see a united Scandinavia challenging Russian ascendancy in the Baltic Sea. Even some of those sympathetic to the cultural aspects of Scandinavianist ideology, such as King Christian VIII of Denmark (1839–1848), baulked at its political aspirations. Political Scandinavianism thus faced veritable obstacles, but this did not daunt its most ardent adherents. Taking ideological inspiration from contemporary national movements such as Young Italy and Young Europe, the Scandinavianists of the 1830s and 1840s were mostly students, young academics, publicists and junior officials who centred their activities on associations and student gatherings. They strongly believed that time, history and the Zeitgeist, was on their side. When Europe erupted in 1848, most of them felt as though they were about to be proven right.

They were not. ‘Two times we have been disappointed, one time partly (1848) and one time entirely’, the Danish publicist, politician and de facto liberal leader of the Scandinavianist movement since the early 1840s, Carl Ploug, lamented to a Swedish fellow traveller in 1864.Footnote 23 Ploug alluded to the failure of Sweden-Norway to join Denmark in the first and second Schleswig Wars. This prevented the wars from turning into wars of Scandinavian unification and came to symbolise failure of political Scandinavianism altogether. This influenced historiography in two fundamental ways. Firstly, owing in part to contemporary opposition to Scandinavianism and resonating well with notions of peace and prosperity as key components in modern national identities in the Scandinavian countries, the Scandinavianists were depicted by several historians as irresponsible warmongers who had conspired to bring unmitigated disaster upon all of Scandinavia. Secondly, its ultimate political failure in the 1860s also influenced how the advent and consolidation of Scandinavianism in the 1830s and 1840s was perceived by historians. Their associations and student gatherings came to haunt the Scandinavianists as they were ridiculed as intoxicated adolescents who completely lost touch with political reality while they were giving speeches by the punch bowl. Such depictions of Scandinavianists as warmongers and drunk students turned into distinct but interrelated master narratives in Danish, Norwegian and Swedish historiography, which have thus traditionally been quite dismissive of Scandinavianism, particularly its political aspirations and ramifications.

Political Scandinavianism is still generally regarded in Scandinavian historiography as something apart from the proper course of Danish, Sweden and Norwegian national history, in which the nation state is often seen as the epitomisation of modern democracy, peace and social welfare. This has come to be regarded as the end of history in Scandinavia, not only imbuing Danes, Swedes and Norwegians with a certain scepticism towards the possibility of future change but also strongly influencing their perceptions of the past. Such perceptions hold a double historical determinism, insofar as they leave the course of history with a ring of inevitability, or even present it as a self-fulfilling prophecy, while at the same time applying the nation state, peace, democracy and social welfare as rather rigid categories, if not standards, in the understanding of the present as well as the past. This way historical development is largely stripped of political dynamics, circumstance, chance and human agency, with history thus becoming strictly rationalist, and its outcomes perceived more as judgements than matters of chance.Footnote 24 By consequence, the past is deprived of its possible futures, forming not only a barrier to our efforts to understand, to the best of our ability, ‘how things actually were’—as Ranke put it—but also to asking pertinent questions and finding answers about the past on its own premises.Footnote 25 Indeed, this is evidenced by the fact that most historians write about countries still in existence and political and national projects that succeeded, as opposed to nations or political aspirations that failed or never even came into fruition. However, this holds a risk of imbuing our understanding of history with determinisms inherent in such a presentist approach, as Herbert Butterfield warned in The Whig Interpretation of History in 1931.Footnote 26

The controversial legacy of political Scandinavianism has also contributed to an apparent analytical distinction, and sometimes even a schism, between political and cultural Scandinavianism. This distinction was not particularly evident in early scholarship on Scandinavianism, where cultural and political ideas and endeavours were generally seen as intertwined or sequential.Footnote 27 However, a wave of diplomatic histories after the Second World War shifted focus to the high political repercussions of Scandinavianism in the 1850s and 1860s with minimal attention paid to its cultural sphere.Footnote 28 For all this, these diplomatic studies left little imprint on the general understanding of Scandinavianism, going largely unreferenced in major syntheses of Danish, Norwegian and Swedish history. With a few notable exceptions, the study of Scandinavianism lay virtually dormant until the early 2000s,Footnote 29 after which a resurgence of scholarly interest has offered new insight into the cultural and ‘low-political’ practices of Scandinavianism in particular, as distinct from ‘high-political’ aspirations for statehood. Several excellent works emanate from this renewed interest in Scandinavianism, the most recent being Tim van Gerven’s study of Nordic identities across a century and a half and Ruth Hemstad and Peter Stadius’ edited volume on Nordic experiences of pan-nationalisms between the mid-nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. These transnational studies have not only enriched Scandinavian historiography, but having been published in the English language they have also helped fill a void in international historiography.Footnote 30 Still, any dissociation of pan-nationalist studies from high politics—as recently suggested by Alexander Maxwell—may cause problems of its own.Footnote 31 As Joep Leerssen reminds us, in hardly any other ideology or movement ‘is the cultural embrace between self-defining cultural consciousness-raising and social-political demands so intensely intertwined as in nationalism’.Footnote 32 Indeed, Scandinavianist high-political endeavours were quite firmly rooted in a quest for statehood to ensure the cultural survival and self-expression of the Scandinavian nationalities and, insofar as it was considered desirable and possible, help forge a single nationality in the long run. After all, as Leerssen also argues, ‘nationalism sees the state as a means to an end (the state should embody its constituent nationality, and derives its right to exist in part form that function)’. However, in mistaking such concerns for personal glory-hunting, dynastic opportunism, and irresponsible warmongering—traits often attributed to political Scandinavianism—historians have helped reinforce traditional master narratives of the individual Scandinavian nation states (and, hence, the discrediting of political Scandinavianism), whereas the neglection of (high-) political Scandinavianism for well over half a century has left this particular field of study untouched by advances in theory and methodology in recent scholarship.

The aim of the current book and its sequel, Scandinavia and Bismarck, is to help remedy this situation by offering an interpretive narrative of the origins, emergence and consolidation of political Scandinavianism on grounds of recent research and its cultural background and core, on its own terms and merits, in the transnational and international context of its own time, and in the light of contemporary thinking on nationhood, nationalism and politics. As such we wish to take the Scandinavianists and their political ambitions seriously, and approach Scandinavianism as a future past to discern what contemporaries thought about the future, of nationality and nationalism, and how they manoeuvred in the (international) political landscape of their day. In doing so, we take our cue from Ernest Gellner, who argues that we may learn more about nationalism by understanding the movements that failed than by studying those that succeeded.Footnote 33 Moreover, as fear of Russia following its invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have ultimately brought the Scandinavian countries into a common security policy for the first time since the Crimean War, the present times seems to make ideas of Scandinavian unity in the first half of the nineteenth century even more relevant, as these ideas were in no small part driven by security policy concerns, fear of Russia high among them.

The Wrath of the Augustenburgs

The seething duke Frederick Christian of Augustenburg never forgave King Frederick VI and the Oldenburg dynasty for what he saw as his being deliberately blocked from becoming Sweden’s crown prince in 1810. He promptly offered his resignation from the council of ministers and his other public offices. When the king refused to accept his resignation, the duke simply discontinued his posts and permanently retreated to his residence on the island of Als, far away from the capital. Relations between the duke and the court broke down completely, with the already tense situation aggravated by the fact that the duke’s wife, King Frederick’s sister Louise Augusta, sided with her brother.Footnote 34

In his fury, and with his resentment towards the incorporation of Holstein into the Danish state in 1806 flaring up again after his confrontation with Frederick VI over the Swedish election, the duke devoted the better part of two years to excavating and interpreting the hereditary rights of the ducal family, concluding that the Augustenburgs held claim not only to Holstein and Schleswig but also the kingdom of Denmark itself. His findings were reviewed by Johan Sigismund von Møsting, who held central positions in the king’s administration, and the professor of history, Laurids Engelstoft. Both rejected the duke’s hereditary claims to anything beyond Holstein and parts of Schleswig, and advised him to burn his memorandum from fear that it might earn him a charge of treason.Footnote 35

More inclined to make a point than a coup d’état, the Duke of Augustenburg let the matter be. But his sons, Christian August, who succeeded him as duke upon his death in 1814, and Frederick, adopted his interpretation of the family’s hereditary rights, to say nothing of his resentment towards the Oldenburg dynasty. For the next few decades, they remained a thorn in the side of the Oldenburgs, whose male line looked to become extinct when Christian VIII (Christian Frederick)—married to their sister Caroline Amalie—ascended to the throne in 1839 with his childless son Frederick (VII) as crown prince. Asserting in 1845 that his dying father had instructed him to safeguard the hereditary rights of the family, Duke Christian August of Augustenburg made a claim for the Danish throne and was even the subject of plans, in part inspired by the legacy of his uncle, Crown Prince Charles August of Sweden, to unite Scandinavia.Footnote 36 However, the Augustenburg claim to the Danish throne was sharply rebuffed by Christian VIII in 1846. Two years later, the Augustenburg brothers spearheaded a rebellion against Danish rule in the duchies, unleashing a Danish-German war that would make the question of Scandinavian unification more pressing than at any point since the Swedish crisis of succession in 1810.