by Antal Szerb
First, he allowed the Hats and Caps to quarrel for a full year over the drafting of an oath to the King, that is to say, over the best method for tying his power up in knots. Then, when the two parties duly came to heel, he secretly obstructed the distribution of grain, so that the people would go hungry and become dissatisfied. Next, he provoked a small local uprising so that his brother could raise an armed force ostensibly to put this ‘rebellion’ down. While the government was distracted by this supposed uprising, the real revolution took place miles away, on two fronts. Then he locked all the younger officers up in the palace and would not let them go until he had won them over to his cause.
Throughout all this he gave proof of his remarkable theatrical talent; to the very end he misled everyone around him as regards his intentions, and even allowed the Russian ambassador to think that he was preparing to pay his respects to the Tsarina in the near future. When it came to the final moment, he arrested his senators, occupied all the major strategic locations and toured the capital giving speeches. Everywhere he went the people saluted him as the man who had freed them from the tyranny of the nobles. “This was the king,” says Desmaisons, “who had woken that morning as Europe’s most politically hamstrung ruler, and within two hours had become a monarch as absolute as the Prussian King in Berlin or the Sultan in Constantinople.”
Next, having summoned the Diet, he set up a row of cannons outside the Palace and asked the members of the assembly whether anyone objected to what had taken place. Unsurprisingly, no one did, and the constitution was unanimously amended to ensure that every royal prerogative was returned to the Crown.
All this was done while punctiliously observing the niceties of eighteenth-century decorum. The King personally wrote to the wives and children of the detained senators asking their pardon for having unavoidably kept them as his guests for the duration. At the first opportunity the Diet, now sitting without benefit of cannons, expressed their courteous thanks to the King for depriving the nobility of their excessive privileges and restoring order to Sweden, and ordered a medal to be struck to commemorate the great event.
Considering how little the Swedish Revolution has to do with the story of the Queen’s necklace, we have dwelt on it at perhaps inordinate length. We do so partly because we think it an interesting chapter in European history and one that is far too little known, and, more importantly, because it reveals a course of action that arguably was also open to the French monarch. Here was an eighteenth century Swedish King accomplishing with elegance and humanity what, in the late middle ages, Louis XI of France and Henry VII of England had managed with altogether cruder instruments—reinforcing their own power by forging a bond with the people against the ranks of birth and privilege. The idea that something similar might be repeated in these later times entered the head of only one great statesman of the Ancien Régime, Turgot. He alone saw that the royal power should carry out the much-needed reforms itself, in the interests of the people and at the expense of the aristocracy, and that that was probably the only way in which they might have survived, sparing France the Revolution. But Louis XVI was not Gustav III, and Turgot, a proud man and a complete stranger to compromise and strategy, was easily seen off by the intrigues of the Court.
In Sweden, Gustav represented an enlightened absolutism. He did his best to compensate his people for the loss of freedom by improving their welfare, allowing free trade in grain and total freedom of worship (a purely hypothetical freedom in a country with only one denomination), and amending the Poor Law.
Like Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great and many other rulers of the eighteenth century, Gustav considered himself to be French in mind and spirit. He promoted a French-style literary life in Stockholm, and himself wrote plays which Swedish literary historians continue to mention with great respect. But this domestic literary life simply intensified his interest in the Paris equivalent, and was one of the reasons why he yearned for France. The other was that in the end, in the usual melancholy way of these things, the long-awaited golden age never quite materialised under his rule, and Gustav had to look for other sources of revenue. He deliberated whether to sell himself to Russia or to turn again to France. Unable to decide between the two, he eventually travelled to Italy. He shared the late-eighteenth-century passion for relics of classical antiquity, and bought a vast collection of art works to be sent home to adorn the park of the palace he was building at Lille-Haga (Count Haga was the name he used when travelling incognito). The Italians cannot have been too greatly pleased by his standards of generosity, since they composed this epigram about him:
il Conte de Haga
che molto vede e poco paga
Count Haga,
who looks at everything and pays almost nothing.
While thus engaged he received an invitation from the French royal couple. Marie-Antoinette wrote to him personally to say that if he found himself in the vicinity he should look up his old acquaintances at Versailles. The French Court understood the great struggle going on in his mind, and were prepared to make real sacrifices to rescue him from an alliance with Russia.
To avoid unnecessary suspense we can reveal that Count Haga’s visit was a complete success. Versailles promised him a substantial subsidy of 1,200,000 livres for six years, in addition to the existing generous support. Of course, payment of the full sum was prevented by subsequent historical events.
But these manoeuvres were not the only reason why Gustav visited Paris. Amongst other things, he was curious about the lady who was so much talked about. His Paris correspondents and diplomats faithfully reported all the current gossip surrounding the Queen, rather like events in a theatre, and these stories interested Gustav not only for political reasons but for personal ones. Like almost every other ruling prince of the century, he too had an exemplary bad marriage. He hated his wife, the royal Danish Princess, and refused to live with her. It was only after 11 years, in 1777, that he could bring himself to take the necessary steps in the interests of the succession, and that great event was undertaken as a ceremonial duty for the sake of the country. There was almost as much gossip in circulation about the Swedish Queen as there was about Marie-Antoinette, and so Gustav must have had a certain professional fellow sympathy for the French royal couple.
But as a rule he did not much enjoy contact with monarchs. Though it may seem strange, he had a sense of inferiority when dealing with the rulers of more powerful countries than his own, for which he overcompensated by behaving too familiarly or too uproariously. Thus he turned up at Versailles unannounced, like an old friend dropping in on a neighbour, and caused considerable distress to the pernickety Louis XVI, who was not attired in the manner in which he received foreign princes.
On one occasion, Mme Campan tells us, Gustav called unexpectedly on Marie-Antoinette just before lunchtime. The Queen sent Mme Campan to enquire whether he had sufficiently dined and, if not, to make the necessary arrangements. The Swedish King modestly replied that anything would do. The lady smiled, because she knew that nothing less than a full meal was ever served, and she found a way to point out the gaffe he had committed: she remembered that, in the world she had grown up in, what people did on such occasions was to scramble a few eggs. The Queen later let him know that this had been done as a lesson to him not to be overfamiliar.
Gustav was much happier dealing with people who were charmed by the fact that, although a king, he treated them in such a kind and informal way. This was especially true of writers and artists. Through his respectful yet unmistakably regal correspondence with the Baron Melchior von Grimm we can trace his passage through the intellectual world of Paris, where we find him mixing with the leading wits of the age. This Grimm was a Frenchman of German origin who wrote perceptive and witty letters to foreign rulers describing literary and artistic events in Paris. The letters, written very much in the manner of the period, show an equal fascination with theories of state economics and the epigrams about actresses quoted in the salons. Their
lively shrewdness and rococo lightness of touch make them most enjoyable reading.
Above all, Count Haga frequented the theatre. In his honour the Royal Academy of Music staged some eight or ten operas in three weeks, more than they would normally do in two or three years. The Comédie Française obligingly put on every play he asked to see. This began, apparently, when he arrived unannounced at the theatre after the first act of Beaumarchais’s The Marriage of Figaro had finished. The audience demanded that they begin again in honour of their distinguished guest. “Whatever that truly French, truly generous and perfectly proper act of attention cost the actors,” writes Grimm, “they never performed the piece better or earned greater applause.” The other major theatre, the Comédie Italienne (which was Italian only in name, since by then its last remaining Italian actor, the great clown Carlin, was dead) put on Le dormeur éveillé in his honour, with music by Piccini and libretto by Marmontel, whom Gustav had greatly admired since his youth.
Amongst the most celebrated people in Paris at the time were the Vestris family, famous opera dancers. Count Haga was naturally very curious about them, and when he paid his final visit to the Opera before his departure, Marie-Antoinette sent word on three separate occasions requiring the younger Vestris to appear without fail. But he had returned from a guest appearance in London “with an injured foot”, and the doctors “had forbidden him to appear”. “It could be that this reply pushed the degree of stupidity or impertinence beyond what was permitted to a dancer,” says Grimm. It was enough to persuade the Interior Minister Baron Breteuil to lock the young man up, and, in the heat of revolutionary fever, all Paris took sides for or against him. The older Vestris, the leader of the troop, observed with tears in his eyes:
“Helás! this is the first disagreement our house has ever had with the Bourbon family.”
(No less pleasing is what Vestris said when he heard that his son had incurred a debt: “Auguste! I want no Rohan-Guéménées in my family!”)
Naturally Count Haga, like the whole of Europe and especially the French, was greatly intrigued by the ‘Aerostatics’, or aeronautical experiments, of the brothers Montgolfier and their followers. The Montgolfiers, as is well known, had realised that warm air rises more readily than cold, so that if we take a strong balloon and fill it with hot air it will rise into the sky. Later they attached a basket underneath the balloon and flew in it. The notion of people flying drove the entire nation into ecstasies of amazement, and the general miracle-hungry mood of the times produced the suitably fairytale name for this—‘the conquest of the air’—to the great amusement of those of a more sober disposition.
The strange thing is, how many of those charming fairytales have since come true. For example, Grimm made great fun of the coffee house politicians who had already started to calculate how much more it would cost the state if they had to maintain a fleet of these machines. The time would come, joked Grimm, when people could fly off to China in the evening and be back the next morning. The King’s high-spirited younger brother the Comte de Provence composed an epigram on the subject:
Les Anglais, nation trop fière,
S’arrogent l’empire des mers—
Les Français, nation légère,
S’emparent de celui des airs.
The proud English claim empire over the seas—the French, in their levity, do the same for the skies.
Before the Montgolfiers, a canon named Desforges had designed a gondola fitted out with wings, in which he sat and threw himself off a height, in the hope that it would swim through the air. Apart from some minor damage, no harm was done, but he was very thoroughly bruised.
An almost equal degree of interest was provoked by our own countryman Farkas Kempelen, with his famous chess-playing automaton. In September 1783 Grimm quotes from a book which described the device in detail. The machinery consisted of two parts: a low chest of drawers covered by a chessboard, and the figure of a Turk with a pipe in his mouth, who lifted the pieces and set them up in their correct positions. There was no question of trickery: both the cupboard and the pipe-smoking Turk could be opened up to show the wheels and springs inside, so there was no one hiding there: after a few moves the Turk had to be wound up again. Nowadays it is impossible to believe that it was making the moves by its own volition and playing to win; that in some automatic way it was calculating the moves for itself. No, it was being operated by Kempelen, standing there just a short distance away but too far to be able actually to touch it. In his hand he held a strange device with which he was obviously manoeuvring it from where he stood, but he refused to reveal the secret to anyone.
There were other, more comical, inventions. A watchmaker, for example, caused a great sensation when he conceived the ‘flexible wooden shoe’, with the aid of which you could walk on water. At first people thought it was a fraud, but when they looked into it, it proved to be nothing of the sort—but nor was it very interesting. The worthy inventor had designed two little rafts, one for the left foot and the other for the right, and that was how you could travel on water. The people of Paris had expected more. It was a time when anything was thought probable. In London, for example, a vast crowd gathered when someone announced that he was going to squeeze himself into an empty wine bottle—and when he declined to do so on the pretext of a temporary indisposition, they smashed up the whole area around the theatre.
During his stay in Paris, Count Haga became involved in a purely private matter, which neither he nor any of the others involved suspected for a moment would feature in world history. This was the marriage of Baron Staël, Secretary to the Swedish legation.
The young Erik Magnus Staël-Holstein was not distinguished for any particular talent, but his good manners and sympathetic exterior had charmed the ladies at the Paris Court, and had even earned the goodwill of Marie-Antoinette, who was already well-disposed towards Swedes. Whatever she and her little circle, in their sophisticated flippancy, thought of the institution of marriage, they enjoyed matchmaking every bit as much as the women of the bourgeoisie, and were therefore much exercised by the question of who should marry the young Germaine Necker, daughter of the great banker and Finance Minister and one of the wealthiest heiresses in France. Since her family were Protestant, the French aristocracy were out of the running, so the plan was that she would be paired off with the handsome Count Alex Fersen. Although his father, one of the leaders of the Hats in Sweden, was extremely keen on the idea, Fersen himself gave it a very cool reception, and Marie-Antoinette felt somehow unable to press him with the required conviction. Nonetheless she stuck with the Swedes, and suggested the girl marry Baron Staël-Holstein instead.
The idea of giving his daughter away to a Scandinavian Baron pleased Necker, who was infinitely vain and a parvenu, but he was unimpressed by Staël-Holstein’s position and made it a condition of his consent that the young man should be made Ambassador. Marie-Antoinette asked Gustav to nominate him to replace Creutz, who had gone back home to become Chancellor, but the King, knowing Staël-Holstein’s lack of substance, dragged his heels for a considerable time.
The question was clearly much discussed at the garden festivity at the Le Petit Trianon. In due course Gustav did promote Staël, and in 1786 he married Germaine Necker. The marriage was not a particularly successful one: the feckless Baron cost his father-in-law and his wife (who became famous as Mme de Staël) a great deal of money. As Marie-Antoinette and Gustav strolled in the grounds of Le Petit Trianon they cannot for a moment have thought that in time the girl would become Napoleon’s feared antagonist, France’s ‘foremost exile’, and one of the best known figures of the romantic age of European literature.
On 5th June 1784 King Gustav attended a meeting of the Académie Française, where he was given an enthusiastic reception and eloquent speeches were read out in his praise. The actual agenda was somewhat less delightful. The new member, M de Montesquieu, eulogised the man he was replacing, Bishop Coetlosquet of Limoges, whose only achievement was to have li
ved to a ripe old age. Then the Director, M Suard, rose to reply. To inject an element of topicality into the discussion, he gave a spirited defence of the greatest success of the day, Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro. After that, La Harpe, that arid, sterile critic of his age, read out the second part of his didactic ode on women. According to Grimm, it was received very coldly—if it had to be something instructive, they would much rather have heard the Abbé Delille, La Harpe’s chief opponent in the ferocious row between followers of Gluck and Piccini that caused such dreadful civil war among the Immortals. (This was the war between French and Italian music, in which, for some strange reason, the French was represented by the German-born Gluck, Marie-Antoinette’s former music teacher, who had grown up with Italian music and was a wonderful example of the international spirit of the age. According to Grimm, Gluck was to music what Corneille had been to the theatre, and Piccini was its Racine. Perhaps it might be argued that Piccini was also what Verdi later became, while Gluck was a forerunner of Wagner. For the ‘Italians’, all that mattered in opera was the music, while Gluck wanted to subordinate the music to the drama, or rather, argued that it needed both music and text working together to raise the effect above mediocrity.) Finally, the Duc de Nivernois read out some of his simple and informal fairy stories. When the session was over, the King had a few private words with Suard. Grimm believed he knew what they were discussing: Gustav was telling Suard that he did not agree with him about The Marriage of Figaro, adding that he wanted to see it again.
From this account one might conclude that this was not one of the more interesting sessions of the Academy, but few of the others can have been much better. Some months later, Grimm tells us, a certain M Gaillard so spectacularly bored his audience with a performance so very unworthy of his immortal name that the Academicians met and decided that something needed to be done. At the following session the Abbé Boismont set about lecturing his listeners, whereupon they whistled like an audience in a theatre. From then on, they decided, fewer invitations would be issued, and only to reliable elements.
