The Swedish freedom of print proved to be a short-lived experience. On 19 August 1772 Gustav III carried out a coup d’état and restored royal power. His very first proclamation was to ban the mentioning of the two opposing political parties, and he nullified all ‘fundamental laws’ adopted after 1680. It was unclear whether this included the Freedom of the Press Ordinance, but these moves were sufficient to hamper public debate. In the following years there were a few active attempts to explore the limits of public discourse until Gustav III issued what he labelled an ‘improved’ Freedom of the Press Ordinance on 26 April 1774. In essence, it was a redaction of the previous one, but with a few cunning changes he in effect reversed the content of the law. Previously, everything was permitted to be printed if it was not expressly forbidden; from now on, anything could be prosecuted if it was not expressly permitted to print. Ironically, Gustav III also referred to English press laws as exemplary because in Great Britain, in contrast to Sweden, the printer was considered as complicit as the author in violations of freedom of the press.
1 S. Boberg, Gustav III och tryckfriheten, 1774‒1787 (Stockholm, 1951), pp. 162‒4.Dano-Norwegian press freedom ended over several stages in the period 1771‒3. During the summer of 1771 a surge of pamphlets appeared against Struensee and his intimate relationship with the queen. This prompted a restriction of press freedom on 7 October when a new rescript made explicit that the abolishment of censorship did not cancel the existing legislations against libel, blasphemy, lèse-majesté and the like, just as all pamphlets should indicate author or printer as legally responsible. These changes in essence provided the formerly unlimited freedom of the press in Denmark with the same kind of restrictions as the Swedish ordinance was equipped with from the start. After the coup against Struensee in January 1772 the new regime repeatedly considered the reintroduction of pre-publication censorship but finally decided on another course: the intimidation of authors and printers by a stream of small and arbitrary restrictions, threats, fines, prison sentences etc. In 1773 a handful of landmark court cases against authors and bookdealers paved the way for the final dismantling of freedom of the press by two acts of October and November, giving the police the right to prohibit published writings by decree and to punish those responsible with fines, that is, a version of post-publication censorship. This slow process of closing down took place, to a large degree, without public interest or discussion.
It is a surprising fact that very little written evidence connects the two almost simultaneous press freedoms of the two neighbouring realms. Nothing in the sparse documents pertaining to the origin and subsequent developments of the Dano-Norwegian legislation mentions its Swedish predecessor, and the Swedish law was never a reference in the intense discussions on the motivation, character, reach and limits of press freedom, which ran all the way through the 1770‒3 period.
Although the historical contexts were quite different – Sweden being a semi-republic, Denmark‒Norway an absolutist kingdom, a fact that was revealed in the well-prepared and sudden introduction of the freedom of the press respectively – the outcome was quite similar: a vitalisation and diversification of public debate. However, the differences in the systems of government are reflected in a more profound way if we look at the idea of the public present in the two ordinances: the Swedish public ideally consisted of free citizens in open debate with each other, while the Dano-Norwegian public ideally consisted of loyal subjects debating in the pursuit of the common good. This major difference was also mirrored in the Swedish
offentlighetsprincip (principle of public access to official documents), which was not paralleled in Denmark or Norway until much later.
2 See R. Hemstad and D. Michalsen (eds), Frie ord i Norden? Offentlighet, ytringsfrihet og medborgerskap 1814‒1914 (Oslo, 2019). In Sweden the citizens could claim transparency, while in Denmark‒Norway government acts belonged to realm of state secrecy and were of no concern to the subjects. Another striking difference is the Swedish exemption from freedom of religious writings, which had no correspondence in Denmark‒Norway. Here, press freedom was marked by a burst of pamphlets attacking clergy, church, even theology, as well as a new stream of unorthodox mysticist and prophetic writings. The termination of Dano-Norwegian press freedom put an end to this, but still it had the effect of transferring the control of the public sphere from theology professors to the police, that is, from church to state.