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cahnLast post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.
Swedish politics
Date: 2023-03-15 01:48 pm (UTC)Goodricke's original instructions had been directed narrowly to one specific end: the rendering of assistance to Prussia. It was not intended that he should allow himself to be diverted from it by speculating in Swedish party struggles. On his way to Sweden he had been warned against "meddling": by Holdernesse, by Knyphausen, by Frederick himself. Yet it was perhaps only human that as he observed the Swedish political scene at short range he should have felt the itch to meddle after all...By 1762, there can be no doubt, Goodricke had been bitten by Swedish politics, and looked forward with pleasurable anticipation to the day when he should be able to play the part of party manager, vote-manipulator, and distributor of judiciously placed bribes.
Hahahaha, this is hilarious. Okay, so this ties into something I should explain to
Well, there is a reason Fritz and Heinrich agreed that an absolutist coup in Sweden was bad, and it wasn't "Absolutism is terrible and representative government must be defended!" Fritz: *has a coughing fit*
No, it is because in the 18th century, representative governments were largely seen as weaker. Great Britain was an exception, but this view played a huge role in Poland and Sweden, where the Estates (Sweden) or Diet/Sjem (Poland) were in the pay of their neighbors, and "elections" were basically their neighbors bribing the representatives and/or occupying the country to get the monarch they wanted.
Russia (Elizaveta) had chosen Ulrika's husband Adolf Fredrik as king of Sweden in the 1740s, and as we've seen, Catherine put Poniatowski on the throne. The British and French were also extremely in Sweden's business bribing away left and right. Basically, in Sweden, there was one party that was in the pay of the French (Hats) and one party in the pay of Russia (Caps). So, for example, when Fritz wanted Russia to let him fight MT in peace, he thought it would be great for Sweden to invade Russia, so he nudged his ally France to pay the Swedes (the dominant Hat party) to invade Russia, and so they duly did, kicking off a war.
Everyone's opinion was that if Sweden got an absolute monarch, it would be like the time Prussia got an absolute monarch and look what happened, or even the time when Sweden had an absolute monarch (through the death of Karl XII): i.e. not good for their neighbors who don't want to be invaded. As you can imagine, much of Bernstorff's peace-oriented foreign policy over in Denmark involves keeping the Swedish constitution in force and the monarchy limited.
Catherine particularly does not want Sweden to have an absolute monarchy, because Sweden still wants the territory back that Peter the Great conquered from Karl XII at the beginning of the 18th century in the Great Northern War, and don't forget St. Petersburg is astonishingly close to Sweden and vulnerable (Peter built it in newly conquered territory). Catherine is busy fighting her neighbors to the south, conquering Crimea and whatnot (Putin: "If Catherine and Potemkin can do it, why can't I?? Here, ima steal Potemkin's bones."), and does not want to have to watch her back in the north.
And, in this period (early 1770s), Fritz cannot afford for Catherine to be upset. Much of Fritz's foreign policy post Peter III's accession can be summarized as "Don't piss the Russians off, my GOD, man, do you remember Zorndorf and Kunersdorf???"
Likewise, remember when August III of Poland died and Fritz said, "I hate these people who are always doing things at the wrong time?" August III died just after the close of the Seven Years' War, when Prussia was teetering on the brink of economic collapse and Fritz couldn't afford to impose his own candidate on the throne of Poland. So he had to support Catherine's candidate, Poniatowski, and he wasn't happy about it.
SO. When Gustav comes along, everyone assumes Swedish absolutism = strong, unbribable leadership = war, which is why the minor Prussian uncle freakout. And indeed, Gustav does eventually invade Russia, 1788-1790, but the outcome is as embarrassing as the time the Hats invaded in 1741, and after Catherine swats at the Swedish invasion, the Swedes have to go back home with their heads hung down in shame and no new territory.
Fritz's ghost and Heinrich: We *told* you!
Now, the British are an exception to this: due to their location and their navy, they have little to fear from Sweden directly; what they really care about is France, and so what they most care about in terms of who's in charge in Sweden is not whether it's an absolute monarch or a limited monarch, it's whether Sweden is going to support the French. So all their efforts are geared toward foiling the French.
Meanwhile, some more minor tidbits from the book.
Bernstorff's first impression of Catherine:
Not that Bernstorff felt any great inclination to quit [the alliance with France] for the sake of winning Catherine's friendship. He was far from sure that she had abandoned the policies of her late husband, and he had at first no great respect for her character or abilities. He thought her lacking in those solid qualities which he admired; inclined (no recommendation, this) to ape Frederick the Great; worst of all, too sympathetic to her relative in Stockholm.
Ha. ("Her relative" being Ulrika's husband King Adolf Frederik.)
Domestic turmoil in Sweden, with more entertaining descriptions of the personalities involved:
In 1762 the crown prince [future Gustav III] was seventeen; and already he seemed to many, for good or for ill, to be the man of the future. Patriots and idealists could see in him the country's best hope of extricating itself from the political slough in which they were laboring; friends of the constitution looked forward with dread to the prospect of his accession, judging him a much more formidable enemy than either his passionate and capricious mother or his harmless necessary father. A settlement with the Court in good time, while Adolf Fredrik still lived, might be worth a few sacrifices.
[Gustav] saw the remedy for Sweden's ills in a large increase in the powers of the crown; and so far he and his mother were at one. But Lovisa Ulrika knewherself too well not to be sure that her haughty and domineering temper would never suffer gracefully the relegation to political insignificance which would be her lot if she should survive her husband; and in the conflict with her son which she already foresaw she had no wish to give him more advantages than she need. Absolutism had few attractions for her if it were not to be she who would wield it; fewer still, if it were to be exerted against herself.
(I am annoyed because this whole discussion is reminding me that I was reading a scholar in the last few months who claimed the liberum veto in Poland has been exaggerated as much more harmful than it really was, and said scholar cited a source that I wanted to read someday, and now that my German's a little better I would like to check it out...and of course I can no longer remember either the source or the scholar who cited it. *frowny face* )
Re: Swedish politics
Date: 2023-03-15 02:03 pm (UTC)Re: Swedish politics
Date: 2023-03-15 07:27 pm (UTC)So it turns out that we were not kidding about "Goodricke had been bitten by Swedish politics, and looked forward with pleasurable anticipation to the day when he should be able to play the part of party manager, vote-manipulator, and distributor of judiciously placed bribes," for lo:
Goodrick's figures for corruption were anything but reassuring. Sinclair's figure, it appeared, was £20,000; Lowenhielm's, £40,000, "to be quite sure"; Osterman believed that £30,000 would be the minimum.
There's a whooole lot of haggling with Russia over how to split the bill and whether Russia is interested in splitting the bill at all (Goodricke is being sneaky and convincing both GB and Russia that the other will do what they want, in the hopes of getting them to meet in the middle before they figure out he's been playing them both), and then there's this amazing section where the finagling gets out of hand because letters keep missing each other. Goodricke is trying to tell his boss* not to use a certain firm in Stockholm because the owner is tied by marriage to many prominent Hat families, but the treasury doesn't get his letter in time, so now the Hats know exactly how much the English have for bribery money, so Goodricke has to do some more juggling of the books with different firms, and in conclusion, lol. For a country like Sweden, bribery isn't casual, it gets a lot of page time!
I can only imagine that when I get around to Poland, things will be equally entertaining. (I have a juicy-looking footnote with a ton of interesting references on Polish politics in English, German, and French, and so once my French is slightly better, it's on my list of things to dig into. Blame the Danes for the fact that my French isn't as good as it was intended to be by mid March.)
* The Earl of Sandwich. Yes, the one who allegedly invented the sandwich.
Re: Swedish politics
Date: 2023-03-21 10:58 pm (UTC)If foreign ministers looked upon Copenhagen as a social desert, they did not make similar complaints about Stockholm. There the trouble was not tedium, but rather the hectic pace of life and the high cost of living. By the middle of the eighteenth century Stockholm had grown to be a city of perhaps 70,000 inhabitants. For more than a century it had been expanding beyond the confines of the old town, huddled on the islands which separate the Malar from the tidewater: to the north, and more recently to the south, extensive new urban areas had come into existence, climbing the steep banks of Söder and the rocky obstacle of Brunkeberg. Nature had endowed the place with charms to which Copenhagen could offer no competition: the romantically broken terrain, still almost unviolated by the leveling activities of the town planners, the scatter of islands and islets, the pines and the birches, water everywhere—stretching wide and blue to the west under the pale Swedish sunlight, pouring tumultuously in spring floods through Slussen and Norrstrommen, malodorously stagnant in Nybroviken during the dog days, icebound for many a mile in winter. It was still an acceptable poetic license for Carl Michael Bellman to imagine Naiads in Brunnsviken. Despite the respectable size of its population, the open country still lay very close to the doors of its citizens, and was indeed plainly visible to most of them. Solna was a village well beyond the city limits when Bellman's Naiads spouted festive cascades over its church tower; Arsta to the south, Taby to the north, where today an egalitarian society plants building complexes of terrifying immensity—these were deep in the country. The long perspective of Drottninggatan was closed by rocks and copses; and the northern customs-post at the city limits stood where today WennerGren's Helicon provides a wellspring and a hospice for the visiting researcher.
Nature had indeed done more for Stockholm than man, whose contributions to the environment were not impressive. The old town was picturesque enough, but it was crowded and insanitary; Sodermalm was in the spotty adolescent stage of urban development; Norrmalmstorg, having lost most of the architectural ornaments of the age of Queen Kristina, and not yet having acquired those of the age of Gustav III, offered little to impress the visitor. A single bridge connected Norrmalm with the old town: for the rest, movement from shore to shore depended upon the exertions of a corps of Amazonian boatwomen, whose muscular development and resourceful vocabulary perhaps evoked, for an English traveler, nostalgic memories of Covent Garden porters. A fair proportion of the houses were still of wood; and recurrent fires raged through the city, despite the constant vigilance of the municipal fire service: when Goodricke came to Stockholm he must certainly have seen traces of the great conflagration of 1759, which laid waste great tracts of Sodermalm; and perhaps there were still visible signs of that other outbreak which in 1751 had swept through St. Klara's parish and destroyed most of the scientific collections of Daniel Tilas. Architecturally, Stockholm had little to compare with the glories of Copenhagen. Tessin's Royal Palace, now complete after being half a century a-building, dominated the city; overtopping its only rival, the House of the Nobility, and confronting, with historical propriety, the palaces of Fersen and Pechlin on Blasieholm. Across the elbow of Strommen they glared at each other, symbols of the latent clash between monarchy and aristocracy. The high pomps of aristocratic baroque architecture had by this time paled into a common (and often commonplace) classicism: of the splendors displayed in Erik Dahlberg's Suecia Antiqua et Hodierna little remained, and of that little most has now been turned into government offices. Much has vanished altogether.- of Fersen's house, as of Pechlin's, no trace remains—though to Pechlin, at least, the Grand Hotel may be esteemed no unworthy successor. As in politics, so in architecture, the monarchy has proved to have a higher survival value than the aristocracy; and Stockholm is still ringed—as it then was—by a semicircle of small royal palaces within easy reach of the city center: Karlberg, Svartsjo, Ulriksdal, with Haga soon to be added to the list, and Rosendal to follow after that. Above all Drottningholm, exquisite in its park, mirrored in the waters, speaking French with a Swedish accent, still evoking the brittle culture of the court of Lovisa Ulrika. Thither, on many occasions in the future, Goodricke would go, as all the polite world then went, by water: in a sloop in summer, or by sledge when the Malar was frozen.
Whether at Drottningholm or in the city, whether at Court or in private society, Stockholm in the 1760s was not a place where a diplomat was likely to be dull. Rapid inflation, financial crises, national misfortunes, the uncertainty of the domestic political situation, gave it a tense and feverish quality, and drove men to enjoy themselves as they might until the crash came. It came for some in the autumn of 1763, when great financial houses tottered, and humble civil servants who had lived fashionably beyond their means went bankrupt, or sought refuge from their creditors in Norway. Despite sumptuary ordinances and restrictions upon imported luxuries, men lived lavishly, partly perhaps from a sound instinct to put their money into realizable durables, partly at the bidding of fashion, partly in a spirit of reckless fatalism. The upper ranks of society, and above all the Court, were thoroughly permeated with French culture. They read the latest French publications, they attended performances—in Bollhuset, or in the little theatre at Drottningholm—of the French theatrical company which Lovisa Ulrika had imported; they went once a fortnight to the ridotto or the bal masque; they promenaded in the Royal Garden on Norrmalm. Some of their diversions had an endearing quality of arcadian innocence, characteristic of the age: their delight in picnics, sledge parties, fireworks, illuminations and transparencies, festive salvos on name-days, garlanded arches with floral devices, leafy arbors, occasional verses, "surprises." But many diversions were less reputable: beneath the veneer of French culture the coarse grain of the native timber showed through; at the highest levels polite conversation demanded equivoques which might have shocked Queen Caroline. Lower down the social scale, where the veneer was absent, amusement tended to rely on the basic constituents of food, drink, and women. It was the age of brännvin (the Swedish snapps), as in contemporary England it was the age of gin. One ate inordinately, one drank frenetically, one spewed, slept it off in the gutter, and drank again. No Swedish Hogarth produced a "Gin Lane"; but on the other hand no English Bellman produced a Fredmans epistlar. In England, the flood of gin provoked the artist's reprobation; in Sweden, the greatest poet in the language floated his genius on a tide of liquor. It is no accident that the Swedish tongue is enviably rich in the vocabulary of drinking. In the eighteenth century the worship of Bacchus became a literary cult; and much poetic ink was spilled upon the nice question as to whether it was to Bacchus or to Venus that the preference should be given. In the cellars of the old town, in a dozen city taverns made famous by Bellman's lyrics—Lokatten, Altona, Rostock, Tre Remmare, and the rest—at rustic pubs just outside the city limits such as Stallmastaregarden (which still survives), the men of the sixties, harassed and unhopeful, forgot the uncertainties of the present in carousals, and celebrated the delights of oblivion in anacreontic verse.
Re: Swedish politics
Date: 2023-03-22 06:17 pm (UTC)To go with that, have my favorite modern interpretation of Bellman's 'Fredmans epistel 72'. It's about the worship of, not Venus, but Freja. : )
Re: Swedish politics
Date: 2023-03-23 12:03 am (UTC)Also, gotta love "veneer of French culture" and "coarse grain of the native timber" when Selena has just recently told us what the actual French were up to during the golden age of Louis XIV, like...setting off rockets in women's vaginas! D:
Re: Swedish politics
Date: 2023-03-24 09:15 pm (UTC)Re: Swedish politics
Date: 2023-03-24 09:37 pm (UTC)Re: Swedish politics
Date: 2023-03-25 02:12 am (UTC)Re: Swedish politics
Date: 2023-03-26 08:00 pm (UTC)"Our people are cruel. There are perhaps seven or eight hundred people in France of well-educated society, the flower of the nation, by whom foreigners are deceived. And so one judges the nation by these and is completely misled. Our ancient priests and officials, however, are just like the human-sacrificing druids of antiquity. The customs have not changed."
(Not that educated people themselves aren't likely to commit atrocities, see also Fritz and his war crimes, but the point about France's good PR stands.)
Re: Swedish politics
Date: 2023-04-01 10:29 pm (UTC)Re: Swedish politics
Date: 2023-03-15 02:54 pm (UTC)Found it! I finally remembered how I could do a full-text search of everything I'd read in the last year. Before I forget again, the source is Polen zwischen Preussen und Russland: Souveränitätskrise und Reformpolitik 1736-1752, by Michael Müller, and the thing I was reading that cited it was Rene Hanke's essay "Diplomatie gegen Preußen: Sachsen-Polens Außenpolitik 1740-1748" in the collection of essays Das Reich und seine Territorialstaaten im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, edited by Harm Klueting. The passage:
Nevertheless, matters were not at all as the widespread view would have it, according to which the "liberum veto" of a single representative was available at any time as an arbitrary means of dissolving the Reichstag without resolutions. Michael G. Muller's research has shown that the matter was by no means this simple.
Since I've encountered the widespread view a number of times, this surprised me and I made a mental note to check it out at some point.
Re: Swedish politics
Date: 2023-04-01 10:24 pm (UTC)ahahahaha this is hilarious and informative, my favorite combination :)
Likewise, remember when August III of Poland died and Fritz said, "I hate these people who are always doing things at the wrong time?" August III died just after the close of the Seven Years' War, when Prussia was teetering on the brink of economic collapse and Fritz couldn't afford to impose his own candidate on the throne of Poland. So he had to support Catherine's candidate, Poniatowski, and he wasn't happy about it.
...I completely missed this context at the time. Thank you!