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Secret Springs and Naked Truths: Scandalous Political Literature in Eighteenth-Century Denmark–Norway
Ellen Krefting
The private lives of living as well as long dead kings, queens and courtiers entertain millions of readers and series viewers across the world. Disclosure of the hidden (and mostly unverifiable) sides of past and present royals, and especially the royal bodies, intrigues us to the point of becoming a compulsive obsession, novelist and essayist Hilary Mantel noted some years ago. She herself achieved huge literary success by digging up some of the royal bodies buried long ago.
1 See in particular her essay ‘Royal Bodies’, written for the London Review of Books in 2013, republished in H. Mantel, Mantel Pieces. Royal Bodies and Other Writing from the London Review of Books (London, 2020), pp. 269–87. Scandals involving secret affairs of the still living, however, saturate today’s entire media ecology. Defamatory revelations sell because they appeal to voyeurism, but they also form public opinion concerning members of the elite, and occasionally they end up having legal or political consequences. Yet, most of us probably do not think of royal scandals or rumour-based revelations about people in power as a political literary genre, or as being part of a proper political discourse.
When we turn to the absolutist kingdoms of the eighteenth century such as Denmark–Norway, however, their political implications are undeniable. Personal, absolute, hereditary rule based on secrecy as a principle of government made stories about what goes on off stage, beyond the public gaze, especially in royal beds, not only popular and controversial but also fundamentally political. Narratives about the secret appetites and hidden affairs of the political elite, circulating by word of mouth or in print, often mixed scandal with detailed accounts of contemporary history and politics. These could prove to be important agents in opinion formation. Moreover, scandalous stories could support Enlightenment ideas of political accountability, transparency and ultimately political alternatives to absolutism. Hence the importance of considering their role in the political culture of pre-democratic states. If books on sex and power did not necessarily cause revolutions, they still contributed to a widely diffused awareness of – and potential critical attitude to – the hidden structures of power and authority among broader groups of subjects.
2 On political culture and the importance of print for increasing political awareness among subjects during the Early Modern period, see T. Munck, Conflict and Enlightenment. Print and Political Culture in Europe 1635–1795 (Cambridge, 2019), p. 5. They formed a hybrid kind of literature that sold well and surely appealed to many readers’ curiosity while also playing a part in the formation of their burgeoning identities as citizens, in the sense of conceiving themselves as active members of a larger, political community and with the capacity to influence their betterment.
This chapter investigates the presence, popularity and potential impact on political awareness and engagement of the hybrid (semi-historical, semi-fictional) genres of anecdotes, private lives and secret histories in Denmark–Norway during the late eighteenth century. After sketching out this transnational current of literature, I will focus on the library catalogues of two important, but very different, reading institutions situated in the two main cities of the twin kingdom: the library of Drejer’s club in Copenhagen (1792) and Diurendahl’s lending library in Christiania (1797). While the two book collections vary in size and readerships, they both include a number of titles referring to anecdotes, private lives or secret information or histories. The last part of the chapter will show how the reading of these pan-European genres of ‘chronique scandaleuse’ and more particularly of ‘secret history’ influenced the writings of two major Dano-Norwegian intellectuals of the late eighteenth century: Charlotta Dorothea Biehl’s ‘historical letters’ and Peter Frederik Suhm’s ‘Secret histories of the Danish kings after sovereignty’. Not surprisingly given the censorship conditions, neither of these manuscripts appeared in print during the era of absolutism. Nevertheless, I will argue that they both attest to the impact on political thinking, awareness and culture under absolutism of these specific genres of ‘scandalous’ literature, which claimed to reveal the ‘hidden springs’ of political history and the naked truths of statecraft.