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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.
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)