In 1809, following a coup d’état and the king’s expatriation, Sweden regained freedom of the press with the new Instrument of Government (Section 86): ‘With freedom of the press is understood every Swedish man’s right to, without any prior restraints from official authorities, publish writings’. This paragraph was mirrored in the Norwegian constitution of 1814 (Section 100), which made Norway an independent kingdom in union with Sweden: ‘Freedom of the press should prevail.’ In Denmark, on the other hand, after the reaction in the 1770s the authorities had displayed a relatively relaxed attitude to the printing press in the 1780s and 1790s, whereas Swedish authorities had tightened their grip on the printers. For instance, Swedish disciples of Emanuel Swedenborg’s had to take nearly two dozen of their teacher’s writings that were banned in his home country to be printed in Copenhagen by Johan Rudolph Thiele. In 1792 Thiele also printed a Swedish translation of the
Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen, which was smuggled into Sweden only a few weeks before the assassination of Gustav III.
1 The title mixes Danish and Swedish spelling: Menneskeliga och medborgerliga Rättigheter, p. l. [Copenhagen, 1792], National Library of Sweden, Rar. 608o. H. Ilsøe, Bogtrykkerne i København ca. 1660‒1810 (Copenhagen, 1992), pp. 172‒6; T. von Vegesack, Smak för frihet: Opinionsbildningen i Sverige 1755‒1830 (Stockholm, 1995), pp. 121‒3. However, in 1799 Danish authorities regained strict control with a Freedom of the Press Ordinance. This was the first Danish law on a par with the exhaustive Swedish ordinances and with detailed regulations on the limits of the freedom of the press and defined penalties for infringements.
2 H. Jørgensen, Trykkefrihedsspørgsmaalet i Danmark 1799‒1848: Et bidrag til en karakteristik af den danske enevælde i Frederik VI’s og Christian VIII’s tid (Copenhagen, 1944).Curiously, this legislation, as opposed to previous laws, proved to have significant impact on the new and liberal Swedish ordinance issued in 1810. The Swedish legislators had studied the Danish ordinance closely and copied, for instance, parts of its list of crimes, its methods of determining authorship as well as its control organs. Inspiration was also drawn from the Danish lawyer Anders Sandøe Ørsted’s principled treatise
Forsøg til en rigtig Fortolkning og Bedømmelse over Forordningen om Trykkefrihedens Grændser (Attempt at a Proper Interpretation and Assessment of the Ordinance on the Limits of the Freedom of the Press, 1801).
3 E. Nyman, Indragningsmakt och tryckfrihet 1785‒1810 (Stockholm, 1963), pp. 180f, 246, 252.Despite the apparent inspiration, the Danish and Swedish legislations were nevertheless guided by opposing principles. The Danish ordinance was restrictive whereas the Swedish was liberal; the Danish ordinance was an administrative statute whereas the Swedish was part of the constitution. From being permanent foes, politicians and lawyers in Sweden and Denmark now formed a literary citizenry with a communal language, but their shared experiences and views nevertheless continued to be rooted in different political soils.