Scandinavica Vol 54 No 1 2015

RUTH HEMSTAD: ‘Like a Herd of Cattle’: Parliamentary and Public Debates Regarding the Cession of Norway, 1813-14 Akademisk Publisering, Oslo 2014. Pp. 561. ISBN: 978-8-28152-042-4.

The Norwegian constitutional debate of 1814, and the circumstances of the cession of Norway from its long-standing position in the Danish- Norwegian composite state to a rather more liberal constitutional arrangement with Sweden (until 1905), are matters of real historical interest: such events not only create new identities and new political relationships, but also provide clear indication of the extent to which political public opinion was (and remains) volatile and highly susceptible to circumstantial pressures. We need to remind ourselves that most early modern states were peculiarly complex dynastic conglomerates which made little ‘national’ sense, and often lacked the kind of coherence that might be reinforced by a shared language, culture, legal system, educational structure, religion, economic strategy, not to mention governmental structure. We should not underestimate the extent to which the geo-political shape of Europe has changed in the last few centuries: the emergence of the ‘nation-state’ as a meaningful concept is a relatively recent phenomenon, and one that we cannot take for granted. The Norwegian case is particularly interesting because the very difficult political circumstances created during the decades of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars severely tested both established ideas and existing political compromises. Denmark was under an old and theoretically quite extreme form of absolute , established in the wake of mid-seventeenth-century wars that nearly destroyed the kingdom altogether. Since 1766, the titular ruler, Christian VII, was on the face of it the worst possible example of hereditary kingship: a disturbed and violently unpredictable individual who from as early as 1770 was totally unfit to govern, and who had to be sedated and paraded from time to time to demonstrate that he still existed. What saved the Danish monarchy was the regency set up in 1784 under the titular direction of the prince, whose

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ministerial advisers instituted one of the most successful and durable, but moderate, programmes of enlightened reform seen anywhere in Europe over the subsequent 12 years. However, Norway was not the main beneficiary: frustrations there at Danish foot-dragging over commercial and monetary policies were understandable, not to mention other grievances such as delays in creating a new university. Disastrously, after the British attacks on Copenhagen in 1801 and 1807, the dual kingdom had no working navy, leaving Norway isolated in terms of transport and vital trade links. The death of Christian VII in 1808, and the succession of the crown prince as in his own right (Frederik VI) did little to restore better links between Norway and Denmark or to maintain the dual monarchy. The expedition to Norway in May 1813 by his heir-apparent, Crown Prince Christian Frederik (as Governor of the northern kingdom), though intended to shore up the Danish-Norwegian union against Swedish claims, did not offer any real support. Given the inherent conservatism of the Danish monarchy, a satisfactory solution seemed unlikely. If Denmark-Norway was a union with major political problems, the situation in Sweden was not much better. Gustav IV Adolph of Sweden was on the face of it not as disastrous a ruler as Christian VII of Denmark, but his loss of Finland to Russia in 1808-09 led to his arrest and forced abdication in the face of a military revolt. The succession of his indecisive and politically inept uncle as Charles XIII merely confirmed the instability of the Swedish monarchy. Since he lacked a legitimate heir, a search for a suitable successor to the Swedish crown started almost immediately, resulting in the ‘election’ of an unrelated outsider, the French military commander, Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, as Crown Prince (future Charles XIV John). Frederik VI of Denmark had already in 1809 made a reasonably plausible claim to the Swedish succession, one that, if successful, would have changed the political shape of Scandinavia back in the direction of the pre-1523 Kalmar union. As it was, bitter rivalry between the two Scandinavian ensued, in which each side was heavily dependent on the Great Powers in Europe for strategic and diplomatic support. Norway became a pawn in the diplomatic horse-trading, whereby Bernadotte was to be rewarded for his role in the international conflict by the

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cession of Norway to Sweden, as ‘compensation’ for the loss of Finland, whilst Denmark was punished for its unavoidable siding with the French after the British assaults on Copenhagen. In this context, it is not difficult to see why the Norwegian political elite was keen on gaining independence, and why Britain, in particular, was embarrassed by its undignified role in insisting that the Norwegians be handed over ‘like a herd of cattle’ to the Swedish crown. International diplomacy has always had some very unedifying components – but this particular piece of cynical cattle-trading was very obviously open to serious criticism, not only from all the Scandinavian participants, but also from the domestic political opponents/critics of the British government. The scope for a substantive British debate became even greater when Britain imposed a punitive blockade on Norway in April 1814, ostensibly in order to enforce the international treaties of Stockholm and Kiel, according to which the cession of Norway appeared to be an essential diplomatic component of the restoration of ‘stability’ and ‘security’ in Europe. How this was discussed in public, in Britain, is therefore of key interest. As a framework for her analysis, Hemstad uses the term ‘public diplomacy’ – that is, the kind of diplomacy conducted in part by means of a deliberate generation of public debate as a form of propaganda for a political cause. The phenomenon was strictly speaking not new in 1814. Napoleon had developed it specifically to project his foreign policy to a wider audience in order to foster public acceptance of what he was trying to do. Before him, it is fair to say that the French Revolutionary government had at several key stages shaped political discourse very deliberately for public propaganda purposes, both in respect of internal opponents during the civil wars of 1793, and in terms of its aims to ‘liberate’ neighbouring peoples (notably the Austrian Netherlands, Alsace-Lorraine and Savoy) from the yoke of what was defined as tyrannous ancien-régime government. We could go back further, and note that for example Frederick II of Prussia earned his epithet as ‘the Great’ partly because of his brilliant self-projection as a ‘servant of the state’ through his many writings and through his style of government; or indeed see the Danish-Norwegian government itself, during the later 1780s and 1790s, encouraging public debate

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as in part a means of reinforcing moderate reform policies within the dual monarchy. So deliberate reference to public opinion as a tool in politics was not new, but its international deployment as diplomatic propaganda in great-power relations had developed rapidly since the 1790s. British interests in Scandinavia and the Baltic region were in any case very strong, not least for strategic and commercial reasons. Ruth Hemstad’s book is a landmark in applying this concept of ‘public diplomacy’ to the debate within Britain regarding the cession of Norway, between February 1813 and June 1814. A highly informative Introduction provides a full explanation of the diplomatic and legal context, introducing a rich and well-chosen selection of primary sources including 17 extracts from the Hansard records of the debates in the Houses of Commons and Lords over the crucial period 1813- 14; 2 pro-Swedish pamphlets written as part of Bernadotte’s efforts to persuade the Norwegians as well as the international community (especially in Britain) to understand both his legal claim and the economic and constitutional benefits that would accrue; 2 similarly intended pro-Danish ones published in London; 3 further pamphlets from 1814 arguing various points, including a pro-Swedish one written in French but here translated into English; and some other relevant material altogether amounting to around 500 pages of contemporary political texts, each with a clear editorial commentary. This rich material gives a superb insight into the kinds of political writing that was intended to inform and persuade the British political elite (and perhaps even a wider readership) of the issues to do with Norwegian demands for independence as opposed to international diplomatic commitments concerning its cession to Sweden. Despite older claims to the contrary, the British press was of course far from ‘free’, but the direct restraints of censorship had long since been replaced by the more indirect pressures of libel laws and political manipulation, both of which had been all too visible in the 1790s. Now that a final peace settlement looked possible, British public debate was vigorous, and its terms of reference highly informative. Equally, actual British governmental decisions were crucial both for the Norwegians and for Bernadotte, so there was much to be gained by trying to influence British public opinion from outside.

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The selection of relevant texts included in this volume is broad enough to allow us to draw conclusions concerning the types of arguments used in public discourse and, in other words, the ways in which the Norwegian predicament and the international context could be described by different interested parties in Britain with the intent of influencing parliamentary debates and British policy. Ruth Hemstad also mentions a number of other contemporary publications, allowing her to discern a number of key component strands in the arguments at the time: (1) arguments based on natural law and the law of nations. When applied in this case there were conflicting outcomes: on the one hand, positive law arguments relevant for international treaty obligations (notably the Treaty of Kiel, and in particular Britain’s legal commitments to Sweden); and on the other, natural law arguments applicable to the rights of subjects (in this case a whole ‘people’) in respect of their sovereign. Arguments based on international positive law had long antecedents going back to Grotius or before, whilst the arguments based on the natural rights of subjects had even more complex origins going further back still. In Britain, one of the key authors cited was Vattel’s The Law of Nations (1759), emphasising the impropriety of handing over a people ‘like a herd of cattle’ to another ruler. (2) two further strands of argument were deployed by Bernadotte to justify the Swedish position. One was the natural frontier argument – that Norway and Sweden made a natural geographic identity in effect taking up the whole Scandinavian peninsula. Bernadotte himself cleverly used such arguments in public to distance himself from his own former head of state, Napoleon – notably by claiming that Napoleon was himself in manifest breach of the ideas of natural frontiers and international law. The resulting public-relations battle between Napoleon and Bernadotte, conducted through pamphlets using hired writers, by no means restricted itself to just to the Norwegian debate. But it allowed pro-Danish writers to point to the absurdity and cynicism of the ‘natural frontiers’ argument. (3) Bernadotte also adopted a more sophisticated positive policy of offering significant constitutional concessions and guarantees to the Norwegians in order to make a union with Sweden more attractive. As

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we know, this approach eventually led to a significant level of Norwegian autonomy within the new union (1814-1905), and Bernadotte was right in recognising that this was a theme to which the Norwegians would be sensitive. It gave the Danish crown very little effective come-back, and would also go down well in London (where it was first picked up already in May 1813). (4) In all this, passing reference was made to ‘the real state of the public mind in Norway’ (as described by the Danish publicist Andreas Feldborg, resident in England, but whose pamphlet of August 1813 was also translated for a Norwegian audience in 1814. That translation was no doubt intended to fuel the actual Norwegian resistance which emerged after the signing of the Treaty of Kiel in Januar 1814 threatening Norway’s hopes of independence. British papers started taking more notice of Norwegian claims to independence rather than submission to Sweden, whilst Norwegian papers increasingly reported on British public debates, hoping that British opposition criticisms of government policy would create scope for securing Norwegian independence. It is worth noting that the ambivalence (not to say hypocrisy) in this respect of the Danish-appointed Governor of Norway, Christian Frederik, who was taking a lead in the Norwegian independence movement although he was also heir-presumptive to the Danish crown, seems to have been brushed under the carpet. In any case the resumption in April 1814 of the British blockade of Norway, to force submission to Sweden, polarised the debate. (5) By the time Earl Grey in May 1814 launched a full-blown attack in the House of Lords against British government policy, the two paramount issues had now been clarified: British obligations and commitments in international law, versus the arguments based on Norwegian self- determination. The case for self-determination was made obliquely, in terms of the illegality of the cession by the Danish crown. Denmark could hand its rights to govern Norway, but had no right ‘to alienate the sovereignty of Norway without the consent of the people’. Grey argued that Norway had been self-governing under the Danish crown, so its independence now would be the best option, return to Denmark less desirable but legal, and cession to Sweden the worst possible outcome. In law, Britain therefore had no right to starve the Norwegians

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into submission. In that context British government propaganda clung to Swedish promises of major constitutional concessions to Norway, as a way of making the deal seem more reasonable. This book of course focuses on the British debate: the question of how far Norwegian domestic opinion itself can be determined is another story. It is nonetheless interesting to note that the process whereby the Norwegians drafted their own constitution in 1814 gave considerable momentum towards an internationally acceptable compromise solution, which, as we know, ultimately involved a very brief Swedish-Norwegian war, the abdication of the Danish Crown Prince from his brief spell as King of Norway, and the election of the Swedish King as the new sovereign of Norway. Significantly for the Norwegians, they had to undertake only minor amendments of their new constitution. What matters in the context of this book is the complex international debate, in public, over the legalities and rights of the different government positions – a debate which in Britain does genuinely fit the label ‘public diplomacy’, given that parliamentary debates on foreign policy were both promoted and followed-through by means of detailed reasoning in the press and in pamphlets. For historians who search for solid evidence of the shape and extent of political awareness in the broader reading public, the British debate is interesting not just because of what it says about British public opinion, but also for the evidence it provides about external input into that debate (in this case from those favouring Danish, Swedish, Norwegian and indeed French perspectives on the basis for, and nature of, Norwegian self-determination). The selection of contemporary source material included in this volume (a good 500 pages of it) represents a broad range, from formal parliamentary debates, through carefully reasoned arguments intended to achieve substantive clarification, to much more brazen propaganda pieces favouring either the Swedish or the Danish side. Each of the different types of material is prefaced by a short and extremely helpful editorial comment. And no less significantly for historians of print, we are also given a list of editions, translations and reprints of each text (in those cases where they had a longer shelf-life). The rate of reprinting and/or translation of such material can of

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course signify several different things: it may mean that publishers thought more money could be made from what had become a text in demand, but equally, it may merely signify a text which had the backing of a rich or persistent patron. For example, one of the pro-Swedish pamphlets, written by the German pamphleteer August Wilhelm Schlegel in association with Madame de Staël and with Bernadotte, and laying out the Swedish case in extravagant rhetoric, went through no less than 21 editions (including translations into many languages, an achievement that will certainly have been based not so much on its limited literary or intellectual merits as on the support of its two powerful patrons. Indeed Madame de Staël was one of Bernadotte’s most enthusiastic supporters, and in due course also promoted his candidature to the Napoleonic succession in France itself (which of course made him highly suspect in British eyes). Other pamphleteers, however, also had some success, amongst them the pro-Danish Andreas Felborg. His style of argument can be gauged from the second of his pamphlets included here. In a passage mischievously describing how Sweden could gloat at the highly destructive British bombardment of Copenhagen, he notes (p. 528):

Gustavus may therefore be excused for going to the nearest spot in his own dominions whence he could most conveniently witness the memorable transactions off Copenhagen in 1807. It was indeed but natural, that he who struck out the first thought of those proceedings should himself enjoy as much as he could, consistently with his personal safety, of the grand and imposing spectacle which Copenhagen at that moment exhibited. The ministers of a friendly power do not every day burn for stage effect a capital in alliance, merely to astonish people and look vigorous.

There are many other wonderful examples, amongst these sources, of political shrewdness coloured with irony and open criticism. For example, Henry Peter Brougham, who intervened in the debate on the side of Early Grey, was quoted in the Edinburgh Review in May 1814, at the height of the crisis, questioned what right the British government

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had to force Norway to accept cession, by force. No less important, he noted (pp. 495f) that:

A thousand facts prove, that any attempt at giving happiness to a people who detest you, by taking them under your protection whether they will or no, can have no other effect but to crush their spirit, while it extinguishes the very possibility of improvement. This must infallibly be the fate of such a scheme, even where it is conceived in perfect good faith; but, on the part of Sweden, in the present instance, it is the vainest and most insulting of all pretences. The Norwegians feel no grievances under their present government. It is not a free one; – but it is, whether from policy of indolence, or necessity, an inactive and a mild administration. Its existence is, in scarcely any shape whatever, felt by the people. – The Danes are not much loved; – they are not strong; – they are distant, – and they let the Norwegians alone. – No oppressive taxes, – no feudal privileges; – no conscription, except to serve in their national militia; – no standing army which can endanger their repose. All they want is that which Sweden has in reality not much more of, than Denmark, – formal securities and checks to the royal prerogatives. They may obtain these for themselves from their hereditary Danish rulers: from their Swedish conquerors they never can expect it.

There are many other wonderful forms of expression of political ideas in the many texts included in this volume. They remind us how much thought went into ‘public diplomacy’, and indeed political public opinion generally, in the aftermath of the tumultuous previous 25 years of change in Europe. More specifically, they remind us of the kind of language, and mental constructs, within which public debate operated. We observe, for example, how contemporaries reconciled themselves to the pragmatic need to adhere to international positive law, even when it was in conflict with natural law. We can also observe a refreshing frankness in opposition criticisms to British government policy, a kind of opposition which was rare elsewhere in Europe at that point, and had made only a fleeting appearance in France during the

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early 1790s. But it is no less interesting to observe at first hand how the core notion of national self-determination was beginning to find some kind of expression in political debate, even if no-one as yet had any clear idea how it might be defined or how it might be measured. Everyone recognised the ideal, in terms of Norway’s traditions and political position by this stage; but in this particular international forum, at this stage, there was no clear precedent or protocol for its actual implementation. Thanks to the source material and analysis in this volume, we can now see precisely how the main arguments were formulated in public debate, in Britain, and how important print had become by 1813-14 in disseminating key political and legal concepts.

THOMAS MUNCK UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW

BÅRD FRYDENLUND: Spillet om Norge. Det politiske året 1814. Gyldendal, Oslo 2014. Pp. 359. ISBN: 978-8-20546-355-4.

CARL EMIL VOGT: Herman Wedel Jarlsberg. Den aristokratiske opprøreren. Cappelen Damm, Oslo 2014. Pp. 408. ISBN: 978-8-20244-688-8.

LEE SATHER: The Prince of Scandinavia. Prince Christian August and the Scandinavian Crisis of 1807-1810. Forsvarsmuseet, Oslo 2015. Pp. 553. ISBN: 978-8-29121-866-3.

The period commonly referred to as ‘1814’, which is usually regarded as spanning the seven years from 1807-1814, is arguably the most researched period in Norwegian historiography, probably even more

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