Experiences of War and Nationality in Denmark and Norway, 1807-1815

R. Glenthøj, M. Nordhagen Ottosen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137313898
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia europea

This book explores the impact of the Napoleonic wars on Danish-Norwegian society and accounts for war experiences and the transformation of identities among the popular classes and educated élites alike.

1

Denmark-Norway and the Ideology of Patriotism

Between a Rock and a Hard Place

The winter of 1813–14 was unusually cold. Mountains of snow kept many roads in Denmark closed up to the end of March and even the major rivers had frozen over. To survive in these conditions, Danish troops had to fell wayside trees, tear down fences and even demolish houses in order to obtain vital fuel supplies. But combating sub-zero temperatures was not the only element in the soldiers’ struggle for survival. They were also pawns in the battle for power between Denmark-Norway and Sweden that had been contested for centuries and was now nearing its conclusion; a battle for ascendancy in Scandinavia in general and control of Norway in particular.

At the very end of 1813, the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, which were under Danish rule at the time, had been occupied by a Russian-Swedish army led by the Swedish crown prince, Charles John. The choice facing Frederick VI, king of Denmark and Norway, was either to throw the Danish army into a heroic – but in reality hopeless – fight to the death against the invaders, or to accede to Charles John’s demands. In the name of his adoptive father, Charles XIII, the French-born prince laid claim to all of Norway – a kingdom stretching 1700 km. This was an attempt on the part of the lawyer’s son and former revolutionary to realise the dream pursued by Swedish kings for centuries.

Charles John’s dream was Frederick VI’s nightmare. Denmark and Norway had been united since 1380, and, according to the state’s absolutist constitution of 1665, the Danish-Norwegian monarch was duty-bound not to surrender any of his territories. Frederick VI felt a responsibility not only to his subjects but also to God, his forefathers in heaven and the successors to his throne to adhere to the 1665 constitution. Denmark-Norway, however, was isolated politically and militarily, and necessity dictated peace at any price if the remainder of the state were not to disappear into the maelstrom of the Napoleonic Wars. The Treaty of Kiel was accordingly signed on 14 January 1814. It involved surrendering an area of 385,252 km², and meant that the territorial losses of the Danish king were among the greatest during the Napoleonic Wars. The treaty dissolved the 434-year union between Denmark and Norway, a union that had bound the two countries together not only in their constitutional law and fiscal policy but also in their language, culture and family ties.

But how had this situation come about? Why had Denmark-Norway been dragged into the Napoleonic Wars? How had the wars influenced society and the inhabitants of the two countries? And what did the separation come to mean for them? Historians outside of Scandinavia have not found it easy to provide satisfactory answers to questions of this kind, as little has been written in English about Scandinavia during the period. The most recent general survey in English, covering the entire duration of the wars, dates back to 1986 and does not include insights gained from the extensive Scandinavian research conducted over the last 25 years. Nor have other major works in English provided much information, with the exception of a monograph on the bombardment of Copenhagen and one on the Anglo–Swedish alliance of 1805–10. For their part, Scandinavian historians in general have shown relatively little interest in recent international research on the Revolutionary period and its Napoleonic aftermath. It therefore comes as no surprise that Scandinavia has largely been ignored in the surge in international studies of the period, and some scholars have voiced their frustration over the lack of literature in English on Scandinavia.¹

The aim of this book is to help fill this lacuna in international research on Europe in the Napoleonic era. Its contribution is twofold. First, it provides a general overview of war, society and politics in Denmark and Norway in the years 1807–15, and is the first monograph to do so from a comparative perspective. Second, it provides an in-depth analysis of three central subjects in recent international historiography in the context of Scandinavia: the role of nationalism, patriotism and experiences of the Napoleonic Wars.

But in order to understand the turmoil created by the Napoleonic Wars in Denmark and Norway, it is necessary to begin with the conditions that prevailed at the time. This chapter introduces the reader to the Danish-Norwegian state: its structure, geography, economy and society, its domestic and foreign policy, its system of government, view of foreign powers, ideological currents and collective identity on the eve of war.

The Danish-Norwegian State

Denmark-Norway was a composite state or even an empire, as some Danish and Norwegian historians have begun to call it. The term ‘empire’ should not be misunderstood as an instance of Danish megalomania but, quite the contrary, as a conscious attempt to settle with the methodical nationalism that has characterised the discipline and erroneously equated the Danish nation-state, which was created in 1864, with the polity of the more distant past. It is more appropriate to compare Denmark-Norway with the Habsburg Empire, which united several nations in a community based on loyalty to the same royal house, than with the British Empire. The kings of Oldenburg reigned over a state that stretched from the North Cape in the north to the gates of Hamburg in the south. It was a conglomerate that differed fundamentally from the Danish and Norwegian nation-states of the present.

In addition to the kingdoms of Denmark and Norway, the Danish-Norwegian state comprised the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, the dependencies of Iceland, the Faroe Islands and Greenland, as well as the overseas colonies in the West Indies (today the US Virgin Islands), the East Indies (Trankebar, Serampore, the Nicobar Islands) and the Gold Coast (today part of Ghana). According to the census of 1801, 929,000 people lived in Denmark and 883,000 in Norway. The Danish duchy of Schleswig had 278,000 inhabitants, while Holstein, until 1806 part of the Holy Roman Empire, had 328,000. In total, 2.5 million people lived in the Danish-Norwegian state. This overextended coastal state with its many islands and overseas provinces was difficult to defend – especially in a naval war, and the navy, which was regarded as the pride of the two kingdoms, was therefore vital for the Danish-Norwegian union.

The capital, Copenhagen, with a population of more than 100,000, was the only city of any size by international standards. Yet it had far fewer inhabitants than the major European metropolises such as London (958,000), Paris (547,000) and Naples (430,000). It was more comparable to the populations of the larger German cities such as Berlin (170,000) and Hamburg (130,000) and greater than the population of the biggest city in the United States, New York (61,000), and Scandinavia’s second capital, Stockholm (75,000). In spite of liberal reforms at the end of the eighteenth century, the state was still centralist. A contemporary observer noted that Copenhagen was like a giant’s head on a dwarf’s body. The city was the kingdom’s principal fortress where the court, the administration, the Academy of Fine Arts and the navy were based. Copenhagen was not only the political, military and intellectual capital, but also the financial heart and brain of the Danish-Norwegian state. The banks and the only university in Denmark-Norway were located here – though the duchies of Holstein and Schleswig were privileged in having their own banks and a university – and the capital had a de facto monopoly on colonial goods, which made the Danish provinces and Norway dependent on Copenhagen.

The other ‘larger’ Danish towns – Odense, Aalborg and Elsinore – had only 5000–6000 inhabitants and, in the words of Danish historian Edvard Holm, were little more than pantiled villages with a licence to distil spirits. Towns in the duchies such as Altona (23,000) and Flensburg (13,000) were far more populous, while the biggest town in Norway, Bergen, had 18,000 inhabitants. Trondheim had 8800, while Christiania (today Oslo) had slightly more, with approximately 9000 inhabitants. Even though the town was only half as big as Bergen, Christiania was the closest Norway could get to its own capital. In peacetime, there were limits to Norwegians’ ability to determine their own affairs independently of the administration in Copenhagen. The duchies, on the other hand, had considerable influence on their own affairs thanks to their old landed aristocracy and a separate chancellery in Copenhagen.

The Norwegian towns were generally bigger than those in Denmark, but there were fewer of them. They held a total of about 20 per cent of Norwegians, while the rest of the population lived in the country. The figures for Denmark were roughly similar: 80 per cent lived in the country, 10 per cent lived in provincial towns and 10 per cent in Copenhagen, but the majority of the city’s inhabitants were not born there. The number of Norwegians who lived in Copenhagen is not known, but it was considerable. About 20 per cent of the inhabitants were German speakers who chiefly had their roots in the duchies.

At the time, Denmark-Norway was simply called Denmark, the Danish state or, more poetically, the ‘twin kingdoms’. The last name was later interpreted as a rhetorical instrument used by the state to create a false impression of equality between the two countries. There is no doubt that ‘twin kingdoms’ was part of the rhetoric of absolutism, but the fact that many Danish-Norwegian citizens really did view the two peoples as ‘brothers’ should not be underestimated. The ties between the two nations, which had never been stronger than just before the outbreak of war in 1807, led some Danish writers during the Napoleonic Wars to suggest that either ‘Dannora’ or ‘Dannorig’ should be the common name for the Danish–Norwegian union, just as Great Britain was for England, Scotland and Wales, in order to emphasise the ‘eternal’ merging of the kingdoms. The suggestion was probably never representative of the views of the general public, but it did reflect a powerful sense of the Nordic identity that could be found in some academic circles.

After the war it was claimed that there had been a Danish plan to replace the name of Norway with North Denmark in order to obliterate it. While there is no proof of this improbable conspiracy theory, there were actually some sarcastic statements made by Norwegians during the period to the effect that they believed the Danes wanted to turn them into ‘Northern Danes’, which could reflect the fear of some individuals that there was a policy of ‘Danicisation’ in existence, based on what actually happened in the duchies at the time. What was known as the ‘Danicisation process’ in Schleswig and Holstein had begun even before the outbreak of war in a bid to modernise the state administration.²

Dissatisfaction and Identity in Denmark-Norway

In spite of the reform fervour at the end of the eighteenth century, Denmark-Norway was far from perfect either as a union or as a state, which meant that the patriotism of the period potentially became an oppositional phenomenon. The potential firebrands among Danes and Norwegians alike were young academics, and their base was Copenhagen. Danish national patriotism, materialising out of a challenge from the middle classes to the aristocracy and to pro-German sympathies, helped to strengthen Norwegian national patriotism. National patriotism can be understood as a form of patriotism that primarily involves a citizen’s own nation within the framework of the state. Patriotism of this type can easily be confused with nineteenth-century nationalism but, as the Norwegian historian Odd Arvid Storsveen, for example, has pointed out, it existed side by side with ordinary state patriotism, which had its own political aims such as civic virtue, rationality and the common good throughout the state.³ Thus, working for and serving the cause of the Norwegian nation need not make a Norwegian national patriot an opponent of the union with Denmark and of the king in Copenhagen, as long as the union and the monarch served Norwegian interests.

Norwegian middle-class identity developed, with a brief delay, along the lines of the Danish process that had begun in the 1740s. From 1770 to 1773, when in principle there was full freedom of the press, many young Norwegians expressed their dissatisfaction with the state of affairs. Their complaints were that Norway was not on an equal footing with Denmark, that the central administration had no knowledge of their country and treated it like a colony. They demanded the abolition of the Danish corn monopoly in Norway (which took place in 1788), more Norwegians in the central administration and separate Norwegian institutions. Merchants wanted a bank in Norway and a Norwegian department of commerce, while civil servants demanded a Norwegian university. These demands can be traced back to the seventeenth century, but they increased in vigour in the eighteenth century with the emergence of a self-recruited class of Norwegian civil servants, who were often descendants of Danish, German and British families. From the 1790s, the university cause became a ‘national cause’ for the Norwegian elite. This was rejected in Copenhagen on several occasions for fear that a Norwegian university would militate against the unity of the state and strengthen Norwegian separatism.

The state attempted to make allowances for Norwegian national patriotism without giving in to Norwegian wishes. The opposite held true for the Danish middle classes, who demanded the primacy of the Danish language, the sole right of citizens of the Danish-Norwegian state to occupy government posts and recognition of their social and cultural ambitions. During the last decades of the eighteenth century all Danish demands were acceded to, in direct contrast to the response to Norwegian demands. However, their demand for political influence was rejected out of hand. The policy of absolutism was a balancing act, where the necessary concessions were made in an attempt to tame, neutralise and control burgeoning national and political tendencies to the state’s own advantage.⁴

The only Norwegian separatist idea we have any definite knowledge of before 1807 was discussed at a meeting close to the border at Eda in Sweden by four Norwegian merchants and a Swedish emissary in 1790. There is controversy about the significance of this particular meeting, but it is clear that the merchants were imbued with a separate Norwegian identity that was in opposition to the royal power and that their political aims were inspired by British parliamentarism and revolutionary France. The excitement felt in Norwegian (and Danish) circles at the beginning of the 1790s, however, turned to some extent into a conservative reaction during the second half of the decade. In spite of a certain amount of discontent, most Norwegians were generally satisfied with the state of affairs, largely due to the long period of peace the state had enjoyed, the rule of law, an economic upturn, traditional dynastic loyalty and the taxation of peasants, which was among the lowest in Europe. The absolutist monarchy consciously combined a certain leniency with regard to the Norwegians with unyielding centralism. At the same time, it was evident that Norwegian national patriotism was limited to the middle-class elites. Contemporary peasant risings and religious movements targeted the local middle class, and their leaders viewed the king as an ally rather than as an opponent in their struggle against the elite.⁵

However, Norwegian identity was not solely political in nature but also cultural, and this came to expression in works dealing with Norwegian history and geography, which, together with poetry written in local dialects, gave the Norwegians material that they could use in subsequent nation-building processes. Their political demands and cultural identity strengthened the concept of being Norwegian, but they did not necessarily conflict with loyalty and state patriotism.

According to the Danish historian Ole Feldbæk, two elements that were decisive for the development of a Danish national identity were still lacking in the establishment of a Norwegian identity: their own language and a distinctive contrast in national character. The language of the people had not yet become a national ‘border guard’ and – according to Feldbæk – Danes were not objects of hatred. As the Norwegian civil servant class was self-recruiting, they had no need to create an object of hatred in order to secure their social position – as was the case with Danish civil servants. On the other hand the Norwegian historian Ståle Dyrvik has claimed that there is a parallel between Danish anti-German feeling and Norwegians’ sense of being unfairly treated by the Danes. Given the closeness of Danish-Norwegian ties, this parallel is exaggerated, but there is no doubt that the Dane – and the Swede – was seen as a potential antithesis to the Norwegian.⁶

Norwegian civil servants were ‘pseudo-Danes’ linguistically, culturally and with regard to their education, and they had ties to Denmark through families and friends. The difference between Danish and Norwegian was fluid; a father might be Danish and his son Norwegian or vice versa, and many Norwegian civil servants were married to Danes. This meant that some Danes considered Norwegians as half Danish and Denmark and Norway as a common fatherland. For some Norwegians who did not regard themselves as pseudo-Danes, this acted as a provocation, which they would demonstrate by flaunting their ‘Norwegianness’ whenever possible. This often happened at the expense of Danes, who found it irritating. Norwegianness became associated with nature, history, allodial rights, and with a particular Norwegian character that comprised stamina, honesty, freedom and loyalty, while Danes were considered softer by Norwegians. According to the later Bishop of Bergen, the difference between Norwegians and Danes was created by nature, but the two peoples were citizens of the same state and shared common privileges and duties, and for this reason, loyalty to the king extended over an area from Vardø in Northern Norway to Kiel in Holstein. As far as the bishop was concerned, the relationship between the two countries was characterised by an honourable competition between brothers as to who could best serve their father, the king.⁷

The Norwegian peasantry’s ties with Denmark were naturally looser than those of the civil servant class, but this did not mean that they considered Denmark a foreign country. Peasants were aware of the basic principles of the Danish–Norwegian union and of the fact that Copenhagen was the centre of the state. Nor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Denmark-Norway and the Ideology of Patriotism
• 2  The Bombardment of Copenhagen in 1807
• 3  Scandinavian War, 180809
• 4  Naval and Economic Warfare
• 5  Internal Changes and External Threats, 181012
• 6  Endgames 181213
• 7  Postlude Freedom and Suppression, 181415
• 8  Denmark and Norway after Denmark-Norway
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index