After Napoleon

Abstract

This chapter recounts the upheaval brought upon the Scandinavian countries by the Napoleonic Wars, which led them all to the brink of annihilation, before it assesses the impact of the Napoleonic experiences on their short- and longer-term development. A general sense that they were too small to survive as individual countries gave them impetus for unification. What Eric Hobsbawm has labelled as the ‘threshold principle’ thus fundamentally impacted ideas about nation-statehood. But whereas Sweden and Norway were united in 1814 and Finland was granted autonomy and protection after Russia’s conquest of that country in 1809, Denmark fought for its very existence at the Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815. Its German possessions brought the Danish state into the orbit of the German Confederation and triggered national conflict over Schleswig. Situating the post-Napoleonic political and national development in Scandinavia in a context of international politics and a European ideological landscape, this chapter traces the advent of the Danish-German conflict and explores the uneasy relationship between Sweden and Norway, arguing that the different constitutional paths embarked upon by the Scandinavian countries and the influence of liberal nationalism facilitated the emergence of Scandinavianist ideology from the late 1830s, at which point Denmark, Norway and Sweden had reconciled and ended several centuries of rivalry.

Beginnings

‘In the beginning was Napoleon’—the opening words of Thomas Nipperdey’s monumental work on German history—are equally applicable to the Nordic countries. The Napoleonic Wars brought massive upheavals that were instrumental in redrawing borders, introducing constitutional reform and as such contributing strongly to the creation of the modern Nordic countries. These wars also brought about new forms of national and political identity and mobilisation and gave concepts such as Nordic and Scandinavian new meaning and new force.¹ Still, the dramatic events that took place in the Nordic countries during the Napoleonic Wars demonstrate clearly that this development was neither predictable nor inevitable. These events created situations whose outcomes were not predetermined. The fate of the Nordic countries was not determined solely by chance events, but during the Napoleonic Wars the unthinkable entered the realm of the possible, offering potential futures that people at the time were fully conscious of.²

It is with such sudden and unexpected changes in mind that we need to look at the brief intermezzo during Prince Christian August of Augustenburg was crown prince of Sweden, after king Gustav IV had been toppled in March 1809 and the feeble and heirless duke Charles elected as king Charles XIII. The choice of Christian August as successor to the Swedish throne in July 1809, after which he changed his name to Charles August, came in the wake of a series of monumental events—the bombardment of Copenhagen and the loss of the Danish-Norwegian fleet, a Scandinavian war, Sweden’s war with Russia and loss of Finland, a coup d’état in Stockholm and a new Swedish constitution—all in the period between August 1807 and June 1809. The events that took place after Charles August’s unexpected death on 28 May 1810 were no less dramatic. As we saw in the introductory chapter of this book, the Swedish Riksdag had once again to address the question of the succession in the summer of 1810. Three Danish-Norwegian princes, including Duke Frederick Christian of Augustenburg, were considered, all of whom would have offered Scandinavian reconciliation and unity, if not union.³

The choice fell instead on a Marshal of the French Empire, Jean Baptiste Bernadotte. Four years later, Bernadotte, as Crown Prince Charles John of Sweden, had transformed the Nordic countries forever. In 1812, he allied Sweden with Russia and quietly put aside any thought of a Swedish reconquest of Finland in exchange for Russian support for his acquisition of Norway. This blocked Frederick VI’s access to the coalition that in 1813–1814 defeated Napoleon, and it ensured Charles John the support required to overcome the Danish-Norwegian king. Norway was ceded at the Treaty of Kiel on 14 January 1814 and, following a series of dramatic events, was united with Sweden on 4 November. Denmark was left as one of the biggest territorial losers of the Napoleonic Wars, rightly fearing complete annihilation.⁴

All these events had immediate and tangible consequences for the Nordic countries and their peoples. Crises, traumas, defeats, triumphs, new institutions, new constitutions and new borders resulting from the Napoleonic Wars altered the way in which people understood identity, politics, law and geography. This could be seen not least in new constitutions and in demands on how the ideas of this new era should shape society. All over Europe, questions about sovereignty and division of power became central, for it was no longer accepted that all power should be vested in the hands of the monarch by the grace of God.⁵

In line with a number of other European states, Sweden and Norway emerged from the Napoleonic Wars with modern constitutions, while Denmark remained under an absolutist monarch. This came to influence the political culture in these countries—and exchanges between them and the rest of Europe. National mobilisation during the war years led to new forms of self-understanding, partly as a means to cope with institutional changes and to reshape identities. In Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, territorial changes and new frontiers made it necessary once again to address and define what it meant to be Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish. In Iceland, Jørgen Jørgensen’s short-lived republic in 1809 posed questions as to what the political future of Iceland should be. These events gave several generations of Icelandic students and intellectuals something to ponder. In the same way, the wars set in train by the French Revolution and Napoleon made some people reflect on what it meant to be Scandinavian.⁶

On the Brink of Annihilation

The deceased Swedish Crown Prince Charles August had believed that only by being united under a constitution would the Nordic countries be strong enough to survive and preserve their independence in international politics. The experiences of the Napoleonic Wars ensured that he was not the only person to think along these lines. Even though the Napoleonic Wars played out in different ways and had different outcomes for each of the Nordic countries, these nations nevertheless had one experience in common: At one time or another, they had all stood on the brink of national annihilation. These traumatic experiences had a variety of consequences, both in the short and longer term. They left deeper marks on some countries than on others, but they made a perpetual impression on subsequent generations. This also applied to ideas of uniting the Nordic countries, which were based on many of the same ways of thinking that found expression in the threshold principle.⁷

Icelanders quite literally feared extinction from starvation and felt its threat when in 1807 Great Britain carried out what was effectively a blockade of the entire Danish state. With the help of Joseph Banks, the great explorer and voyager however, Iceland became a British protectorate for the duration of the war. Norway, on the other hand, got to feel the full brunt of the catastrophic effects of the British blockade. This contributed to the Swedish decision to invade the country in 1808, in belief that the Norwegians were on the verge of total collapse. The Swedish-Norwegian border war of 1808 never really threatened Norway’s existence, but the ironworks proprietor, Jacob Aall, was still able to put into words how many Norwegians experienced the war when in his memoirs he described it as a struggle ‘to exist as a nation or to be wiped off the list of nations’.⁸ The experience of the war with Sweden in 1808–1809 and the British blockade had profound effect on the Norwegians. Despite the trauma, their experience installed them with a sense of self-confidence which helped motivate their declaration of national independence in 1814. The liberal Norwegian constitution introduced on 17 May of that year was a monumental declaration of Norwegian nationhood, but also a formidable institutional barrier against integration into Sweden in the event of unification. The question of unification with Sweden was the subject of hot debate among the Norwegians. Many of them regarded it as necessary since they felt that the country did not have the resources to manage by itself. The majority of the Norwegian elites drafting the constitution in the spring of 1814 wanted independence, but a number of them were nevertheless open to reunification with Denmark under political conditions other than absolutism.⁹ Still more Norwegians feared the country’s incorporation into Sweden and the annihilation of their national identity. Indeed, after 1814, the institutional, legislative and national merging of Sweden and Norway into one nation remained an ambition Charles John never abandoned, but he never managed to break down Norwegian resistance.¹⁰

Sweden was one of the victors in the Napoleonic Wars, and the union with Norway gave both countries geostrategic security and a certain international room for manoeuvre after 1814. Things had, however, been quite different in 1809, the crisis year that later came to constitute an integral part of the Swedes’ sense of national identity. Finland had been lost, and Russian troops were invading Sweden itself. The existential threat was, therefore, felt to be something very real and was a contributory factor in the palace revolution against King Gustav IV Adolph in March 1809. The Finns were also anxious about their national existence in Russian hands, at any rate while Finland’s constitutional status remained uncertain. For a time, many feared incorporation into Russia—and being subjected to Russian laws, serfdom and the Russian Orthodox Church.¹¹ However, the summoning of a legislative assembly at Porvoo (Åbo) in 1809 secured a substantial degree of autonomy and even protection for Finland as a grand duchy under the tsar.

After the loss of Finland, there were many who doubted whether Sweden could manage to survive alone. For them, Norway became the most obvious replacement for Finland. A propaganda pamphlet directed at the Norwegians in 1809 declared that if ‘the Russians take Sweden, they will take Norway later. If both are united, they can stand against the whole world’.¹² This was neither mere rhetoric nor Greater Swedish power politics aiming to restore Sweden’s status as a great power, but an expression both of fear of annihilation and of the threshold principle. From the very start, Sweden had feared the consequences of the Russian border being moved to Torneå and the Stockholm archipelago. Russia was permanently the notional enemy in Sweden’s defence plans and remained the geopolitical justification for the Swedish-Norwegian union. Even some leading Norwegian officers, who otherwise opposed the geostrategic idea of a Scandinavian peninsula, feared Russian expansion towards the Atlantic at the expense of Sweden and Norway.¹³

Denmark survived the Napoleonic Wars by the skin of its teeth. The fact that Denmark had come to the very brink of annihilation was to influence the way several generations of Danish politicians and national ideologists perceived their present and future. After the British attack on Zealand in 1807, the Danish government’s fears for the existence of the state had already been such that it had thrown themselves into the arms of Napoleon. This left Denmark standing on the wrong side at the conclusion of the Napoleonic Wars, and a partition of the Danish state was a subject of discussion among the victors. In November 1812, during his period of service as counsellor to the Russian Tsar Alexander, the Prussian Karl vom und zum Stein suggested dividing Denmark between Sweden, Great Britain and a unified Germany, while the following year the Prussian chancellor, Karl von Hardenberg, took soundings in the Swedish cabinet about a Prussian-Swedish partition of Denmark. Charles John unveiled several creative proposals to eliminate Denmark, one of them being to establish a Cimbrian kingdom made up of the duchies and Jutland under a Prussian prince and to divide the remainder of the Danish monarchy between Sweden, Great Britain and/or Russia.¹⁴

However, what really incited Charles John to want to do away with Denmark was the suspicion that Denmark had collaborated in the Norwegians’ revolt against the Treaty of Kiel in 1814. With 60,000 Russian troops under his command in Holstein, he was also in a position to exert military power. The tsar let his troops remain at Charles John’s disposal but rejected a plan for ‘le démembrement de la monarchie Danoise’ that the Swedish crown prince laid before him. At all events, Charles John’s military victory over the Norwegians in August 1814 rendered Russian help superfluous, but Russian troops remained in place in Holstein throughout the winter of 1815. For a long time the tsar delayed ratifying the peace with Denmark of February 1814. Under these circumstances, the continued existence of the Danish state could not be taken for granted.¹⁵

The Congress of Vienna

The Congress of Vienna in 1814–1815 has had a bad press both among many writers of the time and among many historians since. The gathering of monarchs, princes and aristocrats, who apparently danced and sipped champagne as they drew up new national frontiers, swapped peoples around and reinstated absolutist monarchs, led many people to feel that the dream of social and political change had been betrayed. Nineteenth-century historians pursuing a national or liberal agenda—not least Scandinavianists—similarly condemned the congress as a betrayal of popular demands for participation in political decision-making and national affairs.¹⁶

This, however, presents a caricature of events at the congress. In the first place, a degree of attention was, in fact, paid both to public opinion and to nationality in the negotiations. Norway is a good example. The Norwegian struggle for its constitution and independence in 1814 convinced European leaders that Norwegians could lay legitimate claim to nationhood and independence. There was, therefore, no discussion in Vienna of abolishing the Norwegian constitution. In the second place, only a minority of deposed monarchs were reinstated and by no means all of them became absolutist. In the third place, while there certainly was both dance and drinking, this was not only for pleasure. As Brian Vick has demonstrated, balls and festivities had a political and symbolic function and, alongside the salons, made up important fora for the exchange of information and for discussion. They were also arenas in which women played important political roles. When, in November 1814, the Russian Grand Duchess, Anna Pavlovna, sister to the tsar, allowed herself to be introduced for the first time to the Danish Prince William of Holstein-Beck (father to the later King Christian IX), it was an important signal of the thawing of relations with Denmark. Shortly afterwards, the tsar ratified the Danish-Russian peace treaty, which he communicated to Frederick VI at a ball.¹⁷

First and foremost, Vienna was a site for negotiation. The four great powers, sometimes accompanied by the French negotiator and foreign minister Charles Maurice de Talleyrand, reached their most important decisions with those whom they found it expedient to confer with.¹⁸ Historians Paul W. Schroeder and Bo Stråth maintain that ‘the North European problems were solved already before the Vienna Congress’, and that the treatment of the Scandinavian question at the congress was therefore merely ‘a matter of wrapping up final details’, as Schroeder puts it. This is not correct. Denmark fought for its existence at Vienna, while Sweden pursued a diplomatic campaign to have the Treaty of Kiel disallowed. The standing of the two states could scarcely have been further apart. As a victor and one of the signatories to the Treaty of Paris, Sweden was accepted as belonging to good society. Charles John’s personal friendship with Tsar Alexander further strengthened Sweden’s position. Denmark, on the other hand, was a pariah state in international politics because some of the great powers believed that Frederick VI had pursued his commitment to Napoleon for a suspiciously long time. Denmark was, therefore, not even formally invited to the congress. Nevertheless, the Danish king travelled to Vienna as the guest of the Austrian emperor. But the little delegation was hived off to the salons, the ballrooms and banquets, since Denmark was not recognised as a participant in the formal negotiations. Dance and champagne thus played their part in rescuing Denmark, whose continued existence was at the mercy of Sweden and Russia. Frederick VI nervously noted the brutal fate meted out to other loser states, especially Saxony, at the hands of the victors.¹⁹

The most daunting task facing Danish diplomats was to get Sweden to abide by the terms of the Treaty of Kiel. Apart from the fact that Denmark was to cede Norway to the king of Sweden, the treaty stated that, as compensation, Sweden should hand over Swedish Pomerania and a million rix-dollars to Denmark, while Norway had to pay its portion of the Danish-Norwegian national debt. The Norwegian revolt against the Treaty of Kiel and the subsequent Swedish-Norwegian war of August 1814 led Sweden to claim that the treaty had not been complied with and was therefore no longer valid. The conflict was further complicated by Prussia’s involvement in the question of Pomerania. In Stockholm, Charles John and the foreign minister, Lars von Engeström, did what they could to mobilise the great powers against Denmark, even threatening threatened war. However, these threats failed to have the desired effect, as, after Napoleon’s flight from Elba, the great powers had no interest in a Nordic war that might muddy the waters. Following gentle pressure from the great powers, an agreement was reached in May 1815 that involved Pomerania being ceded to Prussia, who in exchange gave the duchy of Lauenburg to Denmark and paid two million rix-dollars plus the 600,000 still owing from Sweden. Yet, the inclusion of Holstein and Lauenburg in the newly created German Confederation left Denmark tied to Germany, holding territories that were part of the confederation.²⁰

This was, however, not the end of the complications. The Treaty of Kiel was to be included in the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna, which was to bring together all the peace treaties that had been agreed in the final phases and in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. This meant that the Danish and Swedish governments had to declare that they now regarded all the terms of the Treaty of Kiel as valid. Sweden’s negotiator, Carl Axel Löwenhielm, was not authorised to sign that kind of agreement but he felt himself obliged to do so anyway. Napoleon was back in France and preparing for war, and the great powers wanted to get the Final Act signed off. This final treaty was a crucial document. With it, the great powers aimed to introduce a new era in international politics in which treaties were moral and judicial authorities. Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo on 18 June 1815 marked the start of this new epoch in international relations.²¹

A New System of International Politics

The Congress of Vienna introduced a new era in international politics, but scholars disagree as to precisely what kind of international political system was created. To Paul W. Schroeder, the new system was based upon the hegemonic distribution of power and cooperation between the great powers through congresses and conferences, based on the normative authority of treaties and international law. However, critics such as Wolf D. Gruner sees the international political system after Vienna as a ‘reformed, multipolar, and intertwined balance of power system with built-in checks’ in which set rules—most notably a new system of international law—for international relations were accepted, and in which lesser powers and intermediary bodies also played part. To Gruner, this ‘Vienna System’ was thus first and foremost a matter of balance of power, albeit of a different brand than in the eighteenth century. More recently Bo Stråth has argued that the international system emerging from the Congress of Vienna intertwined international law with politics to prescribe a ‘utopia of peace’, a normative ideal that eroded with time as it turned into international political use as an apology or ex post self-justification, before collapsing altogether. Thus, Stråth regards the international system from the Congress of Vienna to the Crimean War as less stable than do Schroeder and Gruner. Beatrice de Graaf sees the creation of a European security system after 1815 as a collective enforcement of balance of power, albeit more as vehicle for pacification and institutional innovation than of rivalry and war.²²

Whatever the anatomy, merits and label of the Vienna System, at its core was a quest for international political stability to prevent revolution and major wars—generally regarded at the time as communicating vessels—through the creation of a political system in which the great powers bore the strongest influence, albeit not entirely arbitrarily. ‘The Concert of Europe’ became a term for a system of alliances, congresses and conferences to address and resolve interstate and domestic issues and conflicts of the day, also meaning that domestic and foreign politics became more intertwined than before. The Concert encompassed two alliances, whose complex operations turned them into an ‘Allied Machine’. The Quadruple Alliance of all great powers (with the accession of France in 1818 making it the Quintuple Alliance) was initially meant to hold France in check, whereas the Holy Alliance of Russia, Austria and Prussia was intended to promote conservative and Christian solidarity between the Eastern powers. The chief aim was to avoid war between the great powers, and as such to avoid war on the scale of the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, but the Concert did not altogether reject war or military power as means of conflict resolution, let alone to preserve social peace. War and intervention were acceptable as long as the great powers were in agreement (or agreed to disagree), and as long as it did not threaten major war or European revolution. The point of the new system was to prevent the great powers from turning on each other and to prevent social unrest from turning into revolution.²³

Monarchical legitimacy, a principle strongly associated with the Congress of Vienna, where it was tied closely to monarchical sovereignty and authority, was considered as the opposite to revolution. But despite the efforts of the French negotiator Talleyrand to make an icon of this principle and use it to thrust a rollback of revolutionary regimes (especially that of Napoleon’s former cavalry general Joachim Murat in Southern Italy), the principle of monarchical legitimacy came to serve as a cloak for a variety of practices and decisions. Traditional depictions and contemporary misgivings about the Congress of Vienna may leave an impression that absolutist monarchs belonging to dynasties of age were considered the only legitimate form of rule, but the negotiators at Vienna were pragmatic. Rulers were often reinstalled or installed according to what the great powers found to best serve peace and stability. Thus, even if he never quite felt secure the former revolutionary general Charles John remained in Stockholm as heir and later king of Sweden, whereas hundreds of German princes were not given their miniature thrones back. Frederick Augustus of Saxony only barely clung onto his throne after the so-called Polish-Saxon question had nearly torn the congress apart. Shortly before the congress began the Bourbon dynasty in France had only been given their throne back on the condition that Louis XVIII would rule constitutionally, giving the lie to any notion that absolutism was the only principle of rule accepted after the defeat of Napoleon. As far as the great powers were concerned all princes could introduce constitutions if they deemed it as best for their states and were not forced into doing it. In the final analysis, it was less important how states were ruled than that they were stable and did not threaten the international order. Thus, the great powers had no qualms about accepting the Norwegian and Swedish constitutions as long as they were not considered as export commodities, as it were. Even republics were tolerated where they had historical traditions, such as in Switzerland and the Hanseatic cities.²⁴

The turning point came around 1820. Up until then all the great powers had tolerated constitutions. The German Federal Act agreed at Vienna in 1815 even stipulated that all German states were supposed to be constitutional, and in the following years constitutions were introduced in several South German states. Moreover, the Prussian chancellor Karl von Hardenberg was working on a draft constitution for Prussia, while Tsar Alexander ruled Congress Poland as constitutional monarch. Austria’s foreign minister, Klemens von Metternich, and his secretary Friedrich Gentz are sometimes portrayed as incarnations of reaction, but still they contributed to the constitutional paragraph of the German Federal Act, tolerated constitutions and bicameral parliaments in the South German states and even advised Italian states to introduce constitutional reform. Still, far from being avid constitutionalists, Metternich and Gentz accepted constitutions when they saw revolution as the only alternative to them, and as long as the constitutions did not promote popular political participation or otherwise challenge monarchical sovereignty and authority. South German constitutionalism and parliamentary politics were thus curtailed by federal censorship legislation (the ‘Carlsbad Decrees’) and the monarchic provisions of the Wiener Schlussakte for the German Confederation in 1820. However, when revolutions did break out in Spain and Naples in 1820, and thence spread to Portugal and Piemont, Metternich, Gentz and most of the great powers were cured of constitutional tolerance. The revolutions in Italy were brought to an end by means of Austrian military intervention, whereas King Louis XVIII of France sent troops into Spain. Regarding the Concert as having essentially turned into a military machine for political repression, Britain found its limits too narrow and left the Quintuple Alliance in 1822. The Greek War of Independence (1821–1829) also saw the great powers pulling in different directions, as did British and Russian rivalry in Central Asia. In the 1830s Britain and France, whose regime had become more liberal after the July Revolution, came to pull more frequently in the same direction, whereas at Münchengrätz in 1834 Russia, Prussia and Austria renewed their pledges to suppress the forces of revolution. The great powers may not have split into two separate blocks, but by the 1840s there were contours of a schism between a relatively liberal Western and a more reactionary Eastern great power camp fuelled in no small part by antagonism between Britain and Russia.²⁵

The July Revolution in France in 1830 introduced a golden age of liberalism in Western Europe. Countries such as Britain, France, Spain, Belgium, Norway and Sweden all had liberal or liberal-conservative regimes, whereas some conservative states compromised with or made concessions to liberals, such as in the case of Prussia’s economic policy and leadership of the German customs union. The advances made by liberalism in the 1830s took much wind from reactionary sails, even though Russia, Austria and Prussia did what they could to block political reform. Although some states hitherto considered as rather liberal, such as Bavaria, did move in a decidedly more conservative direction after the July Revolution, reactionaries generally came to be considered as even less tolerable than radicals in Western and Central Europe. During the First Carlist War in Spain in 1833–1840, Britain and France intervened on the side of the liberal-radicals against the reactionaries, as opposed to France’s intervention against the radical revolutionaries in Spain some ten years previously. The Holy Alliance, still advocating the counterrevolutionary principle of intervention, did nothing. The forces of reaction were clearly fighting a rearguard action, but not one sufficient to unleash war between the greater powers.²⁶

Although scholars disagree as to its precise workings and time of demise, the international security system created at Vienna and its managing device, the Concert of Europe, survived, by and large, the revolutions of 1848–1849 but was undermined by the Crimean War in 1853–1856. Yet, by the early 1860s Europe’s small and medium-sized states could still reasonably expect treaties to carry a certain weight in international politics, and that the great powers would seek in the first place to solve international conflicts by means of diplomacy and conferences. However, they could no longer expect the great powers to strive for consensus, or even to avoid war between each other.²⁷

Scandinavia in International Politics

The Congress of Vienna and the international political system established in its wake taught Denmark once and for all that the country was a small state. Danish foreign policy is to have none, the diplomat Johann Georg Rist remarked shortly after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. The realisation that Denmark had been close to disappearing off the map meant that for the next 50 years Danish statesmen of all political persuasions were haunted by fear of Denmark’s annihilation. A small state mentality found expression, meanwhile, in the low profile in international politics that was maintained by the country after 1815. For all that, to avoid total diplomatic isolation Denmark sent 5000 men to take part in the allied occupation of northern France in 1816–1818. This was a far cry from the status afforded to Sweden-Norway. As one of the signatories of the Vienna Final Act, Sweden-Norway had expected carry a certain weight in international politics but like Europe’s other medium-sized and smaller powers, Charles John quickly discovered that the great powers were in the driving seat. There was a place for smaller states within the new international system, Metternich explained to the diplomat Hans von Gagern serving Prince Willem of Orange, but only as the ‘lapdog’ of the greater powers. Whereas Gagern was, in the words of Beatrice de Graaf, ‘amongst the more polite and traditional envoys to notice this transformation’, the fiery Charles John was not one to quietly acquiesce to the domination of the great powers. Time and again he raged against being dictated to by them. He protested against France’s military intervention in Spain in 1822 and against the failure to consult Sweden-Norway, as one of the guarantors of the Vienna Final Act, when the great powers were discussing what to do with the revolution in Belgium in July 1830. During a crisis that erupted among the great powers in 1840–1841 concerning the Ottoman Empire, the ‘sick man of Europe’, Charles John attempted one last time to become involved and to allow for Sweden-Norway to play an active role in international politics, but in truth after 1815 he was limited to playing second fiddle in a limited Nordic sphere of influence. So, Sweden-Norway, too, was largely deprived of an independent voice in international politics.²⁸

Denmark had even fewer cards to play and during the crisis of 1840–1841 feared being dragged into a war as a result of Holstein and Lauenburg being members of the German Confederation. In France, demands were at this point once again being heard for a ‘natural’ frontier along the Rhine. This reawakened German memories of the Napoleonic Wars and fuelled German nationalism. The confederal army—including contingents from Holstein and Lauenburg—was mobilised to stand ‘Wacht am Rhein’ (watch on the Rhine). National liberals in Denmark saw this as a step towards the country’s incorporation into the German Confederation and would offer neither blood nor money on a German altar. This strengthened their conviction that a national border should be drawn between Danish and German territories.²⁹

Recognition of their ever-decreasing influence in international politics and the repercussions of international crises were two factors that led the Scandinavian states to adopt neutrality from the 1830s. For Denmark, neutrality was favoured as a foreign policy, but it was not the only option. Holstein and Lauenburg’s inclusion in the German Confederation were clear evidence that the Danish unitary state had acquired military and political connections and obligations that could draw Denmark into a major European war. The Danish government declared, therefore, that, in the event of a war that involved the German Confederation, the kingdom of Denmark and Schleswig would remain neutral. The chances were, however, that the Danish state would be unable to avoid following a German line. On the other hand, Holstein and Lauenburg’s confederate rights provided a degree of security against Prussian expansionist ambitions. The price to be paid was the Confederation’s right to interfere in the internal affairs of the two duchies, and in practice this led to German influence in the entire unitary state.³⁰

For Sweden-Norway, a policy of neutrality was first and foremost a matter of maintaining a balance in the increasing rivalry between Russia and Great Britain, in which Sweden-Norway was allied with Russia and had important trade connections with—and public sympathy towards—Great Britain. As tensions rose between Russia and Great Britain in 1833, Sweden-Norway and Denmark discussed a joint declaration of neutrality. Construction of Russian defence works at Bomarsund on Åland, however, frightened Charles John sufficiently for him to send out feelers to London, but his fears intensified when Russia demanded to know which side Sweden-Norway, in fact, were on. In January 1834, therefore, he issued a declaration of neutrality on behalf of Sweden-Norway. This delicate balancing—at times wobbling—act between Great Britain and Russia lasted throughout Charles John’s reign. It could be seen in a relationship to Russia characterised more by fear than friendship, which resulted both in a degree of foreign policy orientation towards Great Britain and in a tendency to surrender to Russian demands in bids to remain on friendly terms with the tsar. In 1837, the Russian government’s protests at anti-Russian and Scandinavianist opinions voiced in the liberal Swedish newspaper Lunds Weckoblad swiftly made Charles John issue a diplomatic circular condemning such expressions and warning against movements advocating the reestablishment of the Kalmar Union or promoting thoughts of new Scandinavian unions. Denmark was feeling similarly squeezed by pressure from two sides. As in Sweden, the king paid lip service to the powers of the Holy Alliance, while public opinion (and the heir to the throne) favoured Great Britain. When Christian VIII ascended to the throne in 1839, however, he was also forced to recognise that Denmark was in a situation that left it dependent on the Holy Alliance. The balance between east and west was maintained through an official policy of neutrality, but both the small size of the country and its bonds to the German Confederation made this a fraught and fragile course.³¹

The discussions on neutrality in 1833 marked the dawn of a new era, as diplomatic relations between Denmark and Sweden-Norway, which had for so long been icy, slowly began to thaw. True, disagreements continued in the years ahead such as during negotiations on Oresund customs in 1837–1841. Moreover, Charles John never forgot the events of 1814 and continued to voice his distrust of Denmark among the great powers. Also, some time would pass before Stockholm’s aristocratic circles would come to regard Denmark as anything but an arch-enemy. These were the circles from which Swedish-Norwegian foreign ministry officials and top diplomats were recruited.³²

The final serious conflict between Denmark and Sweden-Norway took place in relation to the settlement of the Danish-Norwegian national debt in 1815–1821, when those involved also came to make their acquaintance with the new system of international politics. National bankruptcy in 1813 left Denmark with an astronomical national debt. The Treaty of Kiel stipulated that Norway should pay its share, and in the autumn of 1815, Denmark submitted its demand. The Norwegians, Charles John and the Swedish Foreign Ministry were aghast. In the eyes of the Norwegians, it was rather the Danes who were indebted to Norway. The Swedes protested that the terms of the Treaty of Kiel had not been observed and therefore argued yet again that the treaty was invalid and, moreover, that the matter of Denmark’s national debt really had nothing to do with Sweden. Negotiations thus came to a complete standstill, and in 1816 all sides complained to the great powers. Since requests from the great powers initially also failed to get anywhere, they decided to provide the Scandinavian capitals of Stockholm, Copenhagen and Christiania with a lesson in how the new international system worked.³³

The view of the great powers was still that the Treaty of Kiel was valid and that both Sweden-Norway and Denmark had ratified the treaty and therefore should abide by it. Swedish-Norwegian protests were rejected on the grounds that the Swedish negotiator had signed a declaration in Vienna that confirmed the validity of the Treaty of Kiel. This was scarcely a consequence that Charles John had thought about when he had ratified the Vienna Final Act. Now it was used against him, and even his friend, Tsar Alexander, requested him personally to respect a valid treaty. As Charles John still continued to resist, the great powers took matters into their own hands. During a conference of ambassadors in London in the summer of 1818, the conflict was assessed in a report penned by the Prussian diplomat Wilhelm von Humboldt. The conclusion was that Sweden had a responsibility to abide by the Treaty of Kiel, that Norway had to pay and, equally, that the great powers had the right to take action in the event that the treaty was not honoured. This was the basis for discussions among the great powers during the Congress of Aachen in the autumn of 1818, in which they agreed to put pressure on Charles John and if necessary to intervene directly. There were even discussions about giving Norway back to Denmark if Sweden continued to claim that the terms of the Treaty of Kiel were not valid.³⁴

When the great powers presented their points of view to Charles John in the Christmas of 1818, he had a fit of anger. Denmark and Christian Frederick had to bear the brunt of his fury, as usual, but even Tsar Alexander found himself in Charles John’s firing line. Now king, Charles John fulminated that the great powers had reached agreement on the matter at Aachen without even consulting Sweden-Norway, which Charles John compared with Napoleon’s tyranny. It particularly infuriated him that Sweden-Norway had been ignored despite being one of the signatories of the Vienna Final Act. Were the great powers really to function as a High Court when it came to issues between the nations?, Charles John fumed. This was precisely how the international system had come to function but not as arbitrarily as Charles John made it appear. The great powers did act as a High Court, but they based their decision on the Treaty of Kiel, which both Denmark and Sweden had ratified. In a system with treaties and international law as crucial components, acceptance and ratification of a treaty was incontrovertible evidence.³⁵

In truth, Charles John had no alternative but to give in, but he resisted as long as he could. In the winter and spring of 1819, he threatened both Denmark and the great powers with war and even proceeded to make military preparations. The Russian ambassador in Stockholm assumed that the great powers would need to intervene. Following mediation, however, Denmark and Sweden-Norway agreed to a convention in September 1819, but ratification was made dependent on the Norwegian national assembly, the Storting. In the summer of 1821, it agreed, under Swedish military pressure, to pay what had, over the years, been reduced to a significantly smaller Danish demand. Nevertheless, there was still an enraged Norwegian minority who would prefer war against Denmark, Sweden and the great powers to acceptance of that debt.³⁶

The settlement of the debt in 1815–1821 was a toxic affair that left considerable resentment behind it—especially on the Norwegian side—and which could have resulted in a war among the Nordic countries, in the event of which great power intervention was almost certain. However, the case was also a lesson in how the new international system functioned. It was also the last serious diplomatic crisis between Sweden-Norway and Denmark. This was partly because the settlement of the debt demonstrated clearly both parties that they were no longer themselves able to completely control political and diplomatic settlements, and that they had indeed become ‘lapdogs’ of the greater powers.

Europe after Napoleon

The period from 1815 to 1848 was long regarded as a historical dark age when reactionary princes and aristocratic statesmen attempted iron-fisted reversals of all political, social and institutional development since the French Revolution in a bid to turn the clock back to 1788. This traditional view has been fundamentally undermined by recent historiography. Administrative and legal reforms were mostly retained where they had been introduced, new constitutions attempted to reconcile division of power and political representation with monarchical sovereignty and legitimacy, while new political ideologies and movements contributed to the creation of a political vocabulary that is largely still in use.³⁷

The post-Napoleonic era was therefore more a case of balancing new and old, which by itself necessitated new inventions. As Ambrogio Caiani has demonstrated, conservative regimes, which was the norm in Europe after 1815, cloaked new institutions and legislation in old terms and linen. As such the past was used actively in the post-war reconstruction of Europe, but not in a bid to recreate past times. For many regimes there was rather a matter of using the past instrumentally to invest both the regimes themselves and their institutions with legitimacy by depicting them as legacies of the ‘old regime’. As such the post-Napoleonic regimes often became what Caiani has aptly termed ‘new old regimes’, because the romanticised pre-revolutionary times they often referenced were no more ‘real’ than the dark image of the ‘old regime’ created by the French revolutionaries.³⁸

As most contemporary monarchs and statesmen acknowledged, it was not possible to reverse 25 years of events and development—and few monarchs and statesmen really wanted to do it anyway. As such there was hardly any question of literally restoring societies of times past. Rather, the revolutionaries and Napoleon had accomplished much of what enlightened absolutist rulers had attempted for decades before 1789. The power of the state had increased at the expense of corporations, privileges and the church. Napoleon had created a highly centralised, standardised and efficient apparatus to collect taxes, recruit soldiers and maintain law and order defined by the state itself. Monarchs who inherited such an apparatus rarely wanted to rid themselves of it, least of all when they ruled as absolutists—even if only Prussia ultimately retained conscription. Yet, Napoleon’s legacy came at a price. The revolutionary and Napoleonic era had demonstrated that the public sphere and public opinion could not be ignored, while French cultural imperialism and military occupations had inspired ideas that ethnic groups with common linguistic and cultural features had rights of their own. From such ideas there was only a short way to making national and political demands, even if the extent of the social foundation of such demands around 1814–1815 should not be overestimated. Still, these demands had sufficient force and articulation to force princes and regimes to contend with them, and they were often given concrete expression through constitutional demands closely related to national aspirations. This raised much potential for conflict, but the battle lines were much more complex than traditional dichotomies between reactionaries and progressives suggest.³⁹

As Michael Broers argues, there were generally three types of regimes in Europe after 1815. The first was regimes who attempted to reconcile themselves with the revolutionary legacy by introducing constitutions that granted civic rights and liberties and a degree of political rights. France, the South German states of Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria as well as Norway and Sweden may serve as examples. The Norwegian and Badenese constitutions provided relatively wide suffrage, 40% of adult males in Norway and some 72% in Baden, but in return the Badenese system of representation was more restrictive than in Norway. Thus, despite being two of Europe’s decidedly most liberal states, neither Norway nor Baden were democracies, or even represented a first step in a process that inevitably had to lead to the introduction of democracy in the modern sense of the term. The second type was regimes that kept or emulated parts of Napoleon’s model of government, providing basic rights and liberties for the citizens of the state but rejecting constitutions that would entail sharing power with them. Prussia, Austria and Denmark were among the states following this path. Still, the Danish absolutist regime was framed by the absolutist constitution of 1655, the only absolutist constitution in Europe. The third type of regimes rejected the French Revolution and Napoleon and all their works, and even attempted to reverse them, such as in Piemont, the Papal States, Spain and Naples. The consequence for most of them was the outbreak of revolution in the early 1820s, which not only contributed to the reactionary turn of the Holy Alliance and France, but also to the abandonment of constitutional reforms or plans elsewhere.⁴⁰

The reactionary turn of the 1820s also had consequences for the constitutional states in South Germany, where parliaments were rendered as politically impotent bodies and further constitutional development was thwarted by the introduction of federal censorship legislation, the so-called ‘Carlsbad Decrees’ designed by Metternich and Gentz. Still, the South German states retained their constitutions. Indeed, constitutional states generally resisted attempts by their own monarchs to do away with the constitutions, such as in Baden in 1819 and France in 1830. The same was the case with Norway, where Charles John’s repeated attempts to revise or even abolish the constitution failed. Resistance from the Storting played a crucial part in this, but the greater powers proved decisive. In 1821 they rejected Charles John’s proposal for something amount to a plain coup d’état in Norway to strengthen the Swedish-Norwegian union. In 1828 Charles John was told in no uncertain terms by Tsar Nicholas I of Russia that when a prince had granted the people a constitution in the first place, he should retain it. Charles John was also given a Russian word of warning when he ignored the constitution and dissolved the Storting a few years later. This demonstrated that even reactionary powers found opportunity to protect liberal constitutions when it suited their interests, such as was also the case with Tsar Alexander and the South German constitutions in the late 1810s and early 1820s. Moreover, the greater powers wished neither war nor revolution in Scandinavia, and a loose rather than strong Swedish-Norwegian union was obviously in Russia’s interest. For all that, Charles John’s thwarted attempts at constitutional revision or abolition was also a sign of how impotent the Scandinavian states had become with the introduction of the new international political system, not even being able to completely control their own internal affairs.⁴¹

Sovereignty was a highly contested matter in Europe around 1815. The revolutionary principle of popular sovereignty posed a fundamental challenge to monarchs, who attempted a variety of compromises without accepting the principle itself. Monarchical constitutionalism was one such compromise, introducing a number of constitutions that proved to be surprisingly durable as some lasted throughout the nineteenth century and even slightly beyond. This also goes to show that the nineteenth century was not only the century of the people, nationalism and democratisation, but also of the monarchies. In some cases sovereignty was essentially shared between the monarch and the people, albeit not nominally, whereas constitutions based on popular sovereignty still vested significant powers in the king. Indeed, in Sweden legislative powers were shared between the monarch and the diet of the estates (Riksdag), whereas the Danish constitution of 1849 granted extensive executive powers to the king. Even the Norwegian constitution, with the separation of power heavily tilted in favour of the parliament, was introduced with a proclamation that its makers had ‘sought to separate the sovereign power in such a way, that legislation is vested in the hands of the people, and the executive in the hands of the king’. Of course, there was also another constitutional model not entirely forgotten, namely the republican ‘Jacobin’ style constitution which contrasted directly popular sovereignty with the monarchy. But any restoration of France or a French model as per 1792 was anathema to all European regimes after 1815. Radicals were confined to the margins of Europe’s political landscape, insofar as they were not driven completely underground, and left to form secret societies and plot insurrections and assassinations.⁴²

Scandinavia after Napoleon

Seen from the outside, Scandinavia can appear as a tranquil and politically stable part of Europe after 1815. The relative political stability in the Scandinavian countries was partly due to them all being well-ordered polities, with unitary legislation under which the great majority of citizens were equal and where there were relatively few corporate privileges. As such the Scandinavian countries did not need to start constructing a modern state in the Napoleonic mould, with all the conflicts that this often entailed, as seen in many other parts of Europe. Not everything, however, was sweetness and light. The Napoleonic Wars had left all three states with serious economic problems that would affect them for the next two decades. At the same time, each country in its own way came to feel the political and ideological tugs-of-war that affected the rest of Europe.

It is hardly surprising that absolutism in Denmark came into question, but in Norway and Sweden constitutions were not guarantees of political consensus. It was, nevertheless, a general feature of developments in Scandinavia after 1815 that parliamentary culture contributed to creating institutions and mechanisms that could to a large extent absorb the most serious political and social conflicts of the day. Even in absolutist Denmark, the introduction of provincial diets (in 1831–1834) and a public sphere slightly more open to political debate in the 1840s could serve as a safety valve in certain areas while at the same time allowing people to have a voice and develop opinions that those in power had difficulty ignoring. The major exception lay in the clash of national interests that existed between the Danish and German elements of the state, where the provincial diets and the slight opening of the public sphere to political debate transformed the state into something resembling a pressure cooker. Generally, there was significant potential for national conflict in Scandinavia, the contours of which could be seen in the Swedish-Norwegian union but which manifested itself in earnest in the Danish unitary state, where Danish and German nationalism came into conflict and triggered a civil war in 1848. As such the provincial diets played its part in escalating the national conflict in Denmark.⁴³

On 1 June 1815, King Frederick VI returned from Vienna to Copenhagen, where several thousand citizens turned to the streets to greet him. Both Frederick himself and Danish historians of posterity interpreted this as an expression of gratitude that he had succeeded in saving the Danish state in Vienna. The Prussian envoy to Copenhagen, however, wondered whether this demonstration of enthusiasm was attributable to a popular belief that Frederick had returned bearing a constitution. Defeat in 1814 had prompted demands for political change and for a constitution, and in Vienna Frederick had, indeed, through article 13 of the German Federal Act, undertaken to give Holstein and Lauenburg a landständisch constitution. What, exactly, landständisch meant was, however, unclear and left room for interpretation. Holstein’s reactionary aristocracy understood it to mean a reintroduction of old privileges of the estates. Liberals saw in the imposition of the Federal Act the chance for more modern constitutions. At all events, the undertaking also had consequences for the Danish monarchy as a whole. Both Frederick VI’s unitary state policy, in which all parts of the state should be treated equally, and the mood of the people were dictating that any constitution could not be restricted solely to the monarchy’s German regions.⁴⁴

Holstein had been incorporated into Denmark following the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. This incorporation had been followed by a policy of integration, which the people of Holstein subsequently came to regard, in political and particularly in national terms, as ‘Danification’. In Vienna, Frederick VI attempted, in vain, to avoid Holstein becoming a part of the German Confederation. While in part his resistance was due both to reluctance to grant the Confederation the right to involve itself in the internal affairs of his realm and to the restrictions it might impose on Denmark in international politics, Frederick was motivated just as much by lack of enthusiasm for the constitutional obligations that accompanied the German Federal Act. Beyond Frederick’s personal aversion the question of a constitution in the unitary state was also a legislative nightmare.⁴⁵

A commission to review the constitutional obligation imposed by the Federal Act was set up in Copenhagen in the autumn of 1815. It foregathered in November the following year to sort out a constitution for Holstein and Lauenburg. This marked the start of a lengthy process, due partly to conflicting interests between the government and the people of Holstein and internally among Holsteiners, and partly to deliberate government delays in pursuing the issue. The delays paid off, because reactionary developments in the German Confederation after 1820 essentially put a lid on the pressure for a constitution, and in 1823 the Federal Diet in Frankfurt rejected a demand from the Holstein aristocracy that their ancient privileges should be set on a constitutional footing. This meant that the king could put the question of the constitution on hold indefinitely, but new cracks appeared soon enough in relations with the duchies. In 1830, the young official, Uwe Jens Lornsen, published a paper On the Constitutional Framework in Schleswig-Holstein, arguing for a liberal constitution along Norwegian lines. The duchies would be given autonomy but become part of a personal union with Denmark that was reminiscent of the Swedish-Norwegian union. The paper led to Lornsen’s imprisonment, but it represented a watershed. As is evident from the hyphenation in the title, Lornsen regarded Schleswig and Holstein as a single unit. Even though both he and his fellow travellers pictured regional autonomy for the two duchies, it did not take long for the Schleswig-Holstein movement to link up with German liberal nationalism, especially after the mass demonstration at the Hambacher festival in 1832, when a Bavarian constitution day turned into a national rally.⁴⁶

In the meantime, political unrest had been brewing in Copenhagen. In November 1820, the Doctor of Theology, Jacob Jacobsen Dampe, tried to raise the standard of revolution. But he failed to recruit and let alone mobilise a political movement, and the authorities soon unravelled the conspiracy. At first sight, this attempt at revolution might seem harmless and Dampe nothing but a dilettante, but the government took it extremely seriously. This was not only because Dampe’s associates resembled radical societies in the rest of Europe, but also because the attempted uprising took place after six months of unrest in Copenhagen. This unrest also took the form of the persecution of Jews, which was not only a wave of anti-Semitism but used as an occasion to vent anger against the king. Posters and leaflets appeared, condemning absolutism and demanding a constitution.⁴⁷

This caused disquiet in the Danish government, which also had to recognise that many people regarded the Norwegian constitution as a model and, furthermore, were aware that the successor to the Danish throne, Christian Frederick, had had a hand in its conception in 1814. Frederick VI therefore de facto banished Christian Frederick from the capital, first into internal exile and later abroad, and he kept him well away from the cabinet. The secret police hunted down so-called Norwegian parties and tried to stem the flood of Norwegian newspapers in which writers tore absolutism to shreds and even lent voice to Danish demands for a constitution. In addition, the Carlsbad Decrees and the subsequent German federal censorship legislation of 1819 further intensified repression in Holstein and Lauenburg.⁴⁸

The political voice of the people in Denmark was stifled but still not quite dead. For all that, political repression of the 1820s was such that the Swedish historian and poet Erik Gustaf Geijer noted with astonishment during a journey in 1825 that ‘all power is totally concentrated in the government and the monarch’. According to him, Danes were dead as fellow citizens (‘civiliter mortui’) and the Danish state ‘a body full of marrow but with no bone’. Change was, however, in the air. In the face of revolution and unrest in Europe in 1830–1831, Frederick VI felt that, on grounds of previous experiences and particularly feeling pressure from Austria and Prussia, the wisest course was to open a floodgate. The July Revolution strengthened liberalism and nationalism in the German states and this pressure contributed to the introduction of a Provincial Diet for Holstein. To maintain the principle of the unitary state, ordinances were passed in 1831 and 1834 introducing two of these assemblies for Denmark and one for Schleswig as well. At the same time, Frederick VI made sure that the four assemblies were kept separate and sited them in smaller towns, so that opportunities for political mobilisation were limited. The provincial diets met for the first time in 1835. Even though the diets only had an advisory function, many people saw them as a first step towards a modern parliament. Some people suggested, in a thinly veiled reference to the Norwegian constitution of 17 May 1814, that the ordinance of 15 May 1834 establishing the diets had come two days prematurely and had therefore not been quite completed. It can be imagined how much greater expectations were, therefore, when, upon the death of Frederick VI in December 1839, Christian Frederick, ascended the throne as Christian VIII.⁴⁹

Christian VIII never managed to find a constitutional solution to the legislative entanglement that enmeshed the Danish state with the duchies. Furthermore, he had grown more conservative than he had been as Norwegian regent and king in 1814. These conservative tendencies became more evident in the latter half of the 1830s as he prepared to take on royal responsibilities. Christian VIII was sympathetic to ideas of a Scandinavian community on an intellectual and literary level, but he rejected a political unification of Scandinavia and described it as incompatible with his dynastic obligations, with his constitutional plans for the unitary state and with Denmark’s foreign relations, in particular with Russia. This meant that, after 1839, many Danish liberals regarded Scandinavianism as a means to achieve a free constitution. They felt that a process of Scandinavian unification would require the slate to be wiped clean, and that a constitution for the new union should be written in the spirit of liberalism. Both for them and for liberals in Schleswig and Holstein, the Norwegian constitution was a model, not least because Christian VIII himself had played a role in its composition. In that way, the Norwegian constitution could be used to exert pressure on the Danish king, but Christian VIII noted in his diary in 1837 that he would not relinquish the Danish absolutist constitution of 1665 and the provincial diets. A change in Denmark in the direction of the Norwegian model was not on the cards.⁵⁰

Political developments in Norway after 1814 stood out in stark contrast to absolutist Denmark, which many Norwegians looked down upon as politically backward. But a liberal constitution did not mean that Norway was free from political conflict. As early as 1818, the peasants marched on parliament in protest against increased taxes, demanding that Charles John, now king following the death of Charles XIII, reverse the parliament’s decision. This was not something Charles John could legally do, but on the other hand he strove for a revision of the constitution that would allow the king to block parliamentary decisions. This was prompted in part by constitutional monarchism elsewhere in Europe, where the constitutions hardly challenged monarchical authority. Charles John’s revisionist efforts led to a conflict between him and a majority of the Norwegian political elite, partly about the distribution of power between king and parliament and partly about conditions governing the Swedish-Norwegian union.⁵¹

These two matters were linked, for in the eyes of many Norwegians an extension of the king’s power at the expense of the Storting—specifically by giving the king an absolute veto on legislation—would pave the way for a closer union. Everyone was aware that this was what Charles John had in mind. Christian Magnus Falsen, one of the fathers of the Norwegian constitution, supported Charles John. Using a liberal argument typical for the time clearly referencing the excesses of the French Revolution, he warned that ‘as soon as part of the executive power is placed in the hands of legislators, it marks the end of the people’s freedom, and we are threatened with a despotism so much the more dangerous for having so many to practise it’. The conflict culminated in 1836, when Charles John controversially dissolved the Storting before the conclusion of its session. The battles lines were clearly drawn up, but Charles John gave way. He never carried out a coup d’état in Norway—primarily because he was prevented by the great powers, with Russia in the lead.⁵²

In 1833 and 1836, the peasants acquired a majority in the Storting and this majority was used to establish municipal autonomy. The parliamentary dominance of the peasants not only intensified the conflict between parliament and Charles John but also between the peasants and civil servants. Having led the way in the resistance to constitutional reform and the integration of the union in the 1820s, government officials supported the king and the union to a greater extent from the 1830s. This did not make them reactionary, as some Norwegian historians have habitually asserted. The Norwegian ideological spectrum lay considerably to the left, measured by European standards. Those who were considered conservative in Norway had most in common with liberals in other countries. Dislike and, in some cases, fear of peasant power could be felt in official circles both in Norway and in Sweden, and this can be linked to the liberal idea of ‘capacity’ and Bildung as a condition of political participation. This is not to say that politically active Norwegian peasants were radical democrats, for they desired neither revolution, nor a republic nor universal (male) suffrage. As the Norwegian historian Jens Arup Seip has remarked of the landscape of political ideology in Norway: ‘in the liberal world of ideas, everyone, with few exceptions, lived together’. At the start of the 1840s, it was government officials who were most content, and some even claimed that the struggle for political freedom in Norway had been won, and that Norwegian youth could now better concentrate on ‘the highest intellectual pursuits’. But not everyone was equally content. Increased dissatisfaction both with the system of representation and with social conditions contributed to mobilising the opposition, influencing political life in the 1840s and broadening the ideological and political spectrum in Norway.⁵³

Norwegian opposition to a closer union was not synonymous with opposition to the union itself. Many people doubted whether Norway had the resources to manage on its own. There was general recognition of the union’s geostrategic value as a shield against other powers in general and against Russia in particular. At the same time, the Swedish-Norwegian Act of Union of 1815 made the union into a loose structure that ensured Norwegian autonomy. The countries only shared the person of the king and foreign policy. Discussion about the Norwegian celebration of 17 May (the date of the original Norwegian constitution of 1814) instead of 4 November (the date of the revised constitution to accommodate the union with Sweden) as Constitution Day can be regarded as a conflict within the union but not as fundamental opposition to it. It is symptomatic that the culmination of the conflict about the celebration—the so-called Battle of the Square in Christiania on 17 May 1829, where military forces were called in—was, according to the Swedish historian Torbjörn Nilsson, primarily about the right for freedom of movement and freedom of expression in the public sphere more so than about the union itself.⁵⁴

The historian Loyd E. Lee points out that ‘any given constitution is devised to deal with a concrete political society’. This is particularly true of the Swedish constitution of 1809. While similarities between the French and the southern German constitutions in 1814–1818, or between the Norwegian constitution of 1814 and that of the American, the French and the Spanish of 1787, 1791 and 1812 respectively, can be linked to more or less universal constitutional models, the Swedish constitution adopted very particular solutions. For all its inspiration from other revolutionary constitutions, the Swedes ploughed an individual constitutional furrow not least because they needed to balance strong monarchical power with a strong nobility that historically had been a source of conflict. At the same time, they needed to respect the historic position of their diet of the estates (Riksdag). The constitution divided legislative power, therefore, between the king and the diet in what was, by the standards of the time, a relatively modern parliamentary system. The king had the executive power and the estates the budgetary power, while they shared legislative powers. On the one hand, the continued division of the Riksdag into four estates was more out-dated than the parliaments of southern Germany, which had representative lower chambers, but on the other hand the Riksdag had greater power over the king. This solution met Sweden’s needs in 1809 and brought with it a political stability that the country had not enjoyed for a century.⁵⁵

Political stability is, meanwhile, a relative concept. Charles John may have fortified his position in Sweden in 1814 but he also created opponents. His foreign policy, with its friendly engagement with Russia, was particularly controversial, but restrictions on the public sphere were also unpopular. Both of these had their origins in the so-called Policy of 1812. Restrictions on public debate were enforced by government assuming the right to ban publications, which was an administrative measure introduced in contravention of the constitution. With this behind them, the government could expropriate printed matter it considered to threaten the safety of the realm. This might be justified in wartime, but the ordinance was extended after 1814 and used against opinions that were not to Charles John’s liking. This put him on a collision course with the liberal opposition, which increasingly mobilised in the public sphere and found creative ways to avoid the restrictions. The battle for freedom of expression reached its highpoint in the 1830s, when the authorities pulled out all the stops to use the right of expropriation to confiscate various incarnations of the principal organ of liberal opposition, Aftonbladet, owned and edited by Lars Johan Hierta. The newspaper regularly featured attacks on Russia, the government, noble officials and Charles John himself.⁵⁶

Conflicts about freedom of the press reflect three primary tendencies in Swedish political developments after 1815. The first was that King Charles John, the former revolutionary general, became more authoritarian. The second was that Charles John’s foreign policy line had a major influence on Swedish internal politics. The third was that the liberal opposition was striding forwards and demanding reforms. Like his former master, Napoleon, Charles John had a political Janus face, which has led to an ambivalent reputation in history. On the one hand, he is seen as the general and statesman who led Sweden through the last turbulent years of the Napoleonic Wars and won the war, united Sweden and Norway and governed both countries as a liberal monarch. On the other hand, he can be regarded as an opportunist, who ended as constitutional monarch in Sweden and Norway because he had no luck with the alternatives, namely to become king of France, or to amalgamate Sweden and Norway and to restrict their constitutions. At all events, Charles John as a king moved in an authoritarian direction, especially in Sweden, where the constitutional conditions allowed for it more so than in Norway. His rule became ‘the era of monocracy’, where he kept his cabinet at a distance and rode roughshod over the Riksdag, limited freedom of expression and was nepotistic in his recruitment of officials. To foreign diplomats, he lauded absolutism, advocated violence against the opposition and journalists and described newspapers as a cancer. Some of this can be attributed to a volatile temperament, which in the words of an observer of the time made the cabinet meetings into a ‘nervocracy’. During a cabinet meeting in 1821, Charles John even slapped the Norwegian prime minister Peder Anker in the face. Still, despite his temper and efforts to revise the Norwegian constitution, Charles John never directly attacked the Swedish constitution itself. His authoritarian leadership and reluctance to reform nevertheless caused the opposition to intensify and led to many political conflicts, especially in the 1830s.⁵⁷

Even though liberal thinking influenced both the constitutional compromise of 1809 and the opposition in the 1820s, it was only after 1830 that an organised liberal political movement developed in Sweden—as was the case in most of Europe. Its creation was hastened by external events, first and foremost the July Revolution and the November Uprising in Poland in 1830–1831. These events led to a wave of liberal sympathy, which was linked to currents of anti-Russian sentiment and criticism of Charles John’s unconcealed support for Tsar Nicholas’ suppression of the Polish insurgents. This provided impetus to liberal demands for internal reform, for in their eyes the form of government introduced in 1809 was incomplete. In addition to a state-regulated economy, criticism was directed at the Swedish Riksdag’s division into estates rather than chambers, its unequal representation and the extent of the king’s executive power. Many Swedish liberals were, therefore, wanting a constitution built on the Norwegian model. A specific proposal for constitutional reform was prepared in 1830 by two parliamentarians, Carl Henrik Anckarsvärd and Johan Gabriel Richert. The demand for a parliamentary reform according to the Norwegian model was also expressed by several parliamentary peasants and not least by Hierta, who campaigned for it in the 1830s and 1840s.⁵⁸

Clashes between the liberals and Charles John made the 1830s into the battleground of Swedish freedom of expression. The conflict intensified towards the end of the decade and culminated with the stormy session of the Riksdag in 1840–1841. The prelude to this session was a period of economic depression, of social tension and of increasing dissatisfaction with the way the government was dominating the Riksdag through officials in the noble estate. Their income was dependent on the king, since the 1809 constitution had largely undermined the economic independence of the estate-holding nobility. The immediate cause behind the stormy parliament was the judgement passed in 1838 against the journal editor Magnus Jacob Crusenstolpe, who had been accused of insulting His Majesty after he had accused the king of breaking the law in relation to an official appointment. The judgement became a manifestation of Charles John’s attack on freedom of expression and for some was a symbol of everything that was wrong, both with the system and with the regime. The judgement triggered street demonstrations that cost two people their lives. As in Denmark in 1819–1820, these protests coincided with anti-Semitic persecution. At the same time, the judgement helped to create a powerful mobilisation of opposition forces in the Riksdag.⁵⁹

The Riksdag of 1840–1841 was a liberal turning point. Liberal representatives from the citizen and peasant estates performed more powerfully than formerly, while at the same time liberal opposition impacted on the noble and clerical estates. This helped give the liberals a majority in the committee preparing parliamentary proceedings, among them the important constitution committee. They made use of this to force through both a municipal reform and a constitutional proposal for a bicameral parliament. In accordance with the Swedish constitution, the parliamentary reform was passed by the constitution committee as pending, to be presented for a final vote in the estates at the next Riksdag. In doing so, the Riksdag of 1840–1841 started a battle for parliamentary reform that would come to influence Swedish politics—and have direct consequences for Swedish foreign policy and Scandinavianism—on and off for the next 25 years. In Norway and Denmark, too, political storm clouds were gathering in 1840, and the year of revolutions in 1848 would see disturbances break out in all three Scandinavian countries.⁶⁰

Reconciliation

The status of Sweden-Norway and Denmark after 1815 as second or third-rate powers in an international system dominated by the great powers helped to cool old Swedish aspirations to be a great power and excluded opportunities for Danish revanchism. The international system and Denmark’s crippled finances meant that an important plank of their historical rivalry fell away. On the face of it, the chances of Swedes, Norwegians and Danes being reconciled were negligible—at least to the extent that it might develop into a pan-Scandinavian ideology. The Napoleonic Wars had spread resentment between Danes and Swedes, Swedes and Norwegians, Norwegians and Danes, while at the same time historical rivalries between Denmark-Norway and Sweden had grown into deep-rooted prejudices and stereotypes that coloured Scandinavian people’s views of each other.⁶¹

In Sweden, centuries of conflict and war with Denmark had fostered an increasingly widespread hatred towards Danes, who were referred to using the insult ‘jutar’ (Jutes). A popular folksong about the battle against Danish forces under Christian II in 1520 proclaimed that:

Verse

Verse Then drove they the Jutes into Brunebäcks brook Till waters them bubbled around, And mourned that king Christian himself was not took And met like the others his end.

In 1813, at the prospect of Danish defeat in the Napoleonic Wars, the civil servant and author G.J. Adlerbeth described how delighted he was at Charles John’s plans for war against ‘that Danish rabble’ and how, along with others, he himself, ‘at the stroke of twelve at night drank a toast to Denmark’s death’. The man of letters Lorenzo Hammarsköld was equally gleeful, believing that no one was going to miss Denmark, which he held responsible for all Nordic wars through history. The Swedish view of Norwegians was marked more by a sense of superiority than by hatred. It seldom led to more than somewhat condescending references, although these were perfectly capable of hurting Norwegian pride.⁶²

The Danes and Norwegians were no more affectionate in their view of the Swedes. In Denmark, there was the popular use of expressions such as ‘to swede’ for ‘to swindle’ and ‘Swedish faith’ to mean ‘faithlessness’. In Christiania, the Danish language professor Rasmus Rask noticed the use of ‘to make a Swede of yourself’, which was synonymous with to run away if trouble was brewing or to run off with property entrusted to you. For their part, Norwegians had a deeply engrained perception of Sweden as a semi-feudal country with a protectionist aristocratic government deluded by dreams of restoration of its great power status by warmongering. This drove many Norwegians into opposition to the union with Sweden in 1814.⁶³

Prejudice and antipathy were thus profoundly entrenched. Outside the Swedish-Norwegian border region and a part of the Oresund area, Danes and Norwegians did not consort with Swedes—and vice versa. This led to a physical and psychological division that was reinforced by wars and rivalries. In itself, the union of 1814 did not bring Norwegians and Swedes into closer contact with each other, but a free trade agreement was introduced in 1815 and extended in 1825 to stimulate trade and shipping between the two partners of the union. Divisions between Danes and Swedes continued after 1814, partly due to their governments’ active measures to limit traffic across the Oresund strait. Towards the end of the 1820s, things changed. In the summer of 1828, the steamship Caledonien began to make regular round trips between Copenhagen and Malmö. This new connecting artery coincided with improved political relations and more literary links and exchanges. The new steamship built a bridge between Zealand and Scania and between the universities in Copenhagen and Lund—and people began to fraternise.⁶⁴

The Danish poet Adam Oehlenschläger was among the first passengers on the Caledonien and he declared that ‘that different dialect, which in the time of prejudice grated with such hostility in Danish ears, now charmed with all its tunefulness’. At the time, Erik Gustaf Geijer had already been in Copenhagen and found the Danes ‘quite amiable’. It is true that Geijer rejected the Kalmar Union as ‘an action that looks like a thought’ and, as leader of the Gothic Union, played a central role in the development of a Swedish national identity. However, he shared Oehlenschläger’s romantic infatuation with an ancient Nordic golden age and the pair of them contributed in this way to a gradual cultural reconciliation, which also helped initiate a political process of reconciliation between Denmark and Sweden. In Norway, there was internal disagreement as to how the country should relate to its cultural heritage and its links to Denmark. In the 1830s, this surfaced in bitter quarrels between the so-called patriots headed by the poet Henrik Wergeland and the, by Norwegian standards, moderately conservative Intelligens party led by the man of letters Johan Sebastian Welhaven. The patriots wanted to promote a particular Norwegian culture, personified by the national romantic figure of the yeoman (Odelsbonde), and to tear Norway out of the cultural community it shared with Denmark. It was precisely this union with Denmark that the Intelligens party wanted to cultivate, and it was from the ranks of this party that the foremost Norwegian Scandinavianists were recruited in the 1840s. This dispute also had strong political undertones, because the patriots were linked to the peasant movement while the Intelligens party had its roots in the civil servant estate.⁶⁵

At the royal courts, it took longer for reconciliation to set in. As long as Charles John ruled, relations between the courts were, with a few exceptions, in practice non-existent. With Christian VIII’s accession to the throne in 1839, the two unreconciled opponents of 1814 once again faced each other. However, there would be no resumption of hostilities. Charles John died in 1844, and the 1840s generally came to be a time of Scandinavian reconciliation and a crucial decade for Scandinavianism.⁶⁶