In 1791, two French travellers in Sweden, Fortia de Piles and Boisgelin, marvelled at finding themselves in what seemed to be the Versailles of the North—‘the etiquette of this court much resembles that of the court of Versailles formerly, and in many things is absolutely the same’.1 What they saw was a ceremonial court, and at its centre an almost absolutist monarch. This was unlike both Britain, a largely parliamentarian country, and the new France, which was in the grip of revolution. Sweden was different. It was managing to retain the trappings of an ancien régime court without succumbing to violent revolution.
Most European kingdoms, including Sweden, went through various degrees of absolutism and a range of constitutional models before finally arriving at democracy in the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries. Historians have found it easy to fall back on two archetypal monarchies as the epitomes of this process—the French and the British. The French monarchy, a strongly absolutist monarchy that rapidly imploded in 1789, failed to make a smooth transition from one form of government to another, and suffered repeated and bloody political upheavals until 1871. The British monarchy endured, but was obliged to accept the loss of some of its powers and prerogatives in the century that started in the 1680s.
The Swedish model of a resilient European court was tested by several political upheavals, but it managed the transitions more smoothly. Royal authority persisted far longer than in Britain, and when the upheavals came, they were managed far more successfully than in France. A number of European monarchies also fit the pattern of this third model, but Britain and France have been much more influential as ways of interpreting monarchy on the verge of the modern age. In reality, it was not so much Swedish as pan-European, as varieties of the model were to be found in many German states, Denmark, and Russia. At the heart of this model of resilient European courts was a symbiosis of monarchy and nobility. The court provided numerous offices for nobles as well as a space where royalty and nobility could meet. This created not only strong bonds and loyalty between nobility and monarchy, but also a shared mental universe.
Only after the nobility lost much of its power through societal shifts in the nineteenth century were court and monarchy forced to realign. In Sweden, this realignment was remarkably fast from the 1860s onwards. A constitutional monarchy took shape for which holding speeches at jubilees and academic conferences, cutting ribbons to open railways, and taking a keen interest in sporting events replaced the wielding of hard power with its traditional magnificent courtly framework. The refashioned monarchy meant the eventual acceptance of cooperation with the social democrats and liberals in 1917 was easier. The consensus in 1917, borne of necessity rather than choice, in all likelihood helped to preserve the monarchy as an institution. Socialists and liberals in many European principalities were implacably opposed to monarchy, but in Sweden, a modus vivendi was found.
This was not a given in a European context where numerous monarchies collapsed at the end of the Great War and the Second World War. Sweden too, over the course of two centuries, had gone through a series of fundamental political transitions. A coup in 1719 abolished royal absolutism; another coup in 1772 abolished parliamentary rule; a coup in 1789 reintroduced absolutism; a coup in 1809 abolished absolutism and introduced a constitutional monarchy with power shared between king and Diet; a change in the parliamentary system came in 1866; and a last rumblings of royal power in 1914 ended with the acceptance of full parliamentary rule in 1917: a long list to which can be added a messy attempted coup in 1756 and several minor forays into reform over the years. Unlike France, however, and despite the upheavals, Sweden managed all these transitions without prolonged violent crises, and unlike Britain, the Swedish monarchy retained much of its authority until the 1860s and some royal prerogatives as late as the 1910s.
Monarch and Aristocracy in Symbiosis
The royal court was a key factor in Sweden’s successful management of these repeated transitions. The court was an institution as old as the monarchy itself, and even in its heyday in the eighteenth century was dismissed as old-fashioned and sclerotic, not to mention contentious. Yet the truth was that the Swedish court was crucial in managing successive political transitions and preserving royal power. To achieve this, the court had to be flexible and use the politics of familiarity to create a context for both the monarch and the political elite. And the personal nature of the court meant that it provided an unsurpassed forum for aristocratic life. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the court served as a joint venture for monarch and nobility—to be denied the chance to be at court was to be ‘buried alive’ for many members of the aristocracy.
This character of a joint venture between monarchy and nobility does not mean they shared equal influence over the court. Clearly, the court was primarily run on the orders of the royal family, but in order to function well in Sweden, the court needed the broad support and participation of the nobility. As in Denmark and Prussia, the early modern Swedish monarchy was a centralized government with very limited resources, while the vast majority of the nobility were comparatively poor and dependent on government service. Unlike France, members of newly ennobled families had access to the court; unlike the Electorate of Hanover, most courtiers came from the indigenous nobility. For noble families, attending court could mean rewards in the form of offices, but also enhanced socio-political status. From 1718, court office could normally be combined with other military or civilian posts, and thus did not hamper a career pursued on several fronts. In some ways, the monarchy and nobility were bound together by their mutual weakness, with the court as their medium.
Even if the Swedish monarchy and nobility existed in symbiosis, the framework was not static, as the many coups suggest. Each coup was an attempt to readjust the political set-up of court society on the part of members of that society, all ...