The late eighteenth century saw the rise of privately or locally organised ‘patriotic’ societies and clubs all over Europe, focusing on a range of topics of public and ‘patriotic’ interest.
1 T. Munck, Conflict and Enlightenment, p. 254. Drejer’s club was one of the first and most prominent private literary clubs in Denmark–Norway. Established in Copenhagen in 1775 with regular meetings at the premises of Jacob Drejer, it soon turned into a hub for the intellectual bourgeois elite, gathering writers and literates, philosophers, actors, editors and printers and other defenders of ‘Enlightenment’ with the common aim of raising awareness of art and social improvement through constructive debate and self-education.
2 See P.M. Mitchell, ‘Biblioteket i Drejers Klub’, Fund og Forskning 7 (1/1960), 85–99. For the emergence and significance of ‘patriotic societies’ in Denmark–Norway, see J. Engelhardt, Borgerskab og fællesskab: de patriotiske selskaber i den danske helstat 1769–1814 (Copenhagen, 2010). A number of clubs emerged across the country based on the model of Drejer’s club, including ‘Den borgerlige club’ in Trondheim in 1783. During the 1780s the club gained a more political profile, with increased attention to social reforms and issues of practical and political concern. The new liberal regency government established in 1784, lasting right through to the late 1790s, inspired this development. An enlightened team of ministers (most importantly Reventlow and Bernstorff) initiated a moderate but wide-ranging reform programme, actively encouraging public discussions and proposals by private individuals.
3 T. Munck, ‘The Danish Reformers’, in Enlightened Absolutism. Reform and Reformers in Later Eighteenth Century Europe, ed. H. M. Scott (London, 1990), pp. 245–63, and T. Munck, Conflict and Enlightenment, pp. 277–8. One of the prominent members of Drejer’s club, literary critic and translator Knud Lyne Rahbek, who was also co-editor of the moderate reformist monthly journal
Minerva (1785–1807), notes in his later memoires of the gatherings at Drejer’s how interest in ‘public matters’ and expectations for the future developed in the club in this period. To him, the club’s significance in the new, emerging political culture was undeniable: ‘the public opinion visited us willingly and frequently, often raised its voice among our midst, and developed from there’.
4 ‘Den almene Mening giæstede os ofte og gierne, ikke sielden opløftede sin Stemme i vor Midie, og udgik herfra’. Rahbek in Erindringer af mit Liv, III (Copenhagen, 1825), p. 37. All translations in this chapter by me, if not otherwise stated.Plate 8.1. Drawing of Drejer’s Club in Copenhagen by F. L. Bernth, 1817.
Typically, the activities of Drejer’s club were explicitly formulated in bylaws [‘lover’], which served as a marker of the club’s independence and self-organisation as a kind of cultural and even political community.
5 For the possible political dimensions of institutions such as libraries, see discussion by M. Towsey and K. Roberts in their ‘Introduction’, Before the Public Library (Leiden, 2018), p. 19. The publication of the bylaws in 1780 demonstrates the importance of print and literary activities. Half of the eighty-eight paragraphs were devoted to the club’s library, or ‘reading society’ as it was called, and its administration. In addition to prescribing the members’ access to newspapers and journals, the book collection was supposed to include: ‘fine arts and sciences [‘de skiønne Videnskaber’], universal history, history of the fatherland, and eventually one or maximum two classical works on each of the other reign’s history, the history of man, culture, arts and sciences, as well as popular philosophy. As regards languages of publication, they were restricted to Danish, Swedish, German, French and English’.
6 Quoted from P. Mitchell, ‘Biblioteket’, p. 87. The collection was divided into an
in situ and an ambulant part. Auctions were held twice a year where members could buy books from the ambulant part, and the income from the auction was, together with a monthly membership fee, used to acquire new books. The laws also included detailed prescriptions for the administration of storage, cataloguing and lending. When the library catalogue of Drejer’s club appears in print in 1792 (entitled
Bogsamling i klubben opprettet i november 1775), however, it does not bear marks of clear principles of classification. Nevertheless, the collection of 1,837 volumes reveals some interesting characteristics, demonstrating for instance a surprisingly multilingual and international literary orientation, mainly towards the contemporary world, which mirrors some general European trends in the late eighteenth-century book market.
7 See G. Dahl, Books in Early Modern Norway (Leiden, 2011), p. 9.The majority of the titles are from the second half of the eighteenth century, and almost 500 of them from the 20 years prior to the catalogue’s publication. German titles dominate, 327 compared with 232 Danish titles and 69 French. Only ten titles are English, a single one in Latin. The books bear witness to the up-to-date tastes and elite bourgeois interests of the club members, who preferred contemporary authors and topics to the classics, enlightenment to erudition. There is a striking lack of theology and religious works. Significant titles from the French, English and German Enlightenments (including an edition of
L’Encyclopédie) are listed. Among the Danish titles, there is a substantial number of translations (22 from German, 12 from French, 12 from English and 8 from Latin). Literary works of various sorts dominate together with ‘historical books’. In eighteenth-century Denmark–Norway, this large category included a range of different ‘histories told’ about individuals, peoples, places, artefacts and events. Biographies, topographical descriptions as well as travel literature belonged to ‘history’, besides the various accounts of the past in works by proper ‘historians’, such as Ludvig Holberg. Often, even pure fiction could appear under the general label ‘history’, such as in Caspar Herman von Storm’s book collection, which went on auction in Christiania in 1772.
8 G. Dahl, Books, pp. 176–77. On the category of ‘history’ in book collections, see also G. Dahl, Libraries and Enlightenment. Eighteenth Century Norway and the Outer World, (Aarhus, 2014). Anecdotes, private lives and secret histories certainly belong to the composite category of history, and we should not be surprised to find them included in the collection of Drejer’s club in Copenhagen. This hybrid category of semi-fictional, semi-historical literature would fit with the members’ appetite for prose fiction, history writing as well as news and current affairs in Europe, even in the form of slanderous biographies and scandalous political narratives.
The catalogue includes at least six titles that connect to the pan-European current of literature focusing on the hidden, private lives of powerful public personages.
9 I have focused on titles that include the words anecdote, private or secret and refer to the political elite. Another two entries include the key word ‘anecdotes’ in their title. The first,
Journal et anecdotes intéressantes du Voyage de Mr. le Comte de Falckenstein, par Mr. l’Abbé Duval Pyrau (1777) appears to be quite a conventional travel report, lacking focus on the hidden, private world of politics. The other,
En reisende Russers Anecdoter over de danskes Statsforfatning, Sæder og Skikke (A Travelling Russian’s Anecdotes of the Danish Government, Manners and Customs), published in Copenhagen in 1771, contains critical observations on the commerce, the laws, the state of learning, the hankering after rank and the position of women, among other things, in Denmark–Norway, all quite typical for the period of the freedom of the press 1770–3. A more noticeable entry in the library of Drejer’s club is
Vie privée de Louis XV.
Ou principaux évènements, particularités et anecdotes de son règne, probably by Moufle d’Angerville, one of the forbidden bestsellers in Europe in the period.
10 According to Darnton’s estimations, fifteen of the top hundred works on the STN bestseller list were libelles or chroniques scandaleuses, with Vie privée in 32nd place. R. Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers, p. 138. See also his ‘Mlle Bonnafon and “La vie privée de Louis XV”’, Dix-huitième Siècle 35 (2003), p. 369. The STN online database (by Burrows and Curran) gives a hint of the broad distribution across Europe of this four-volume work. It came in several editions from 1781 and gave a detailed, amusing and seemingly authoritative account of French political history from 1715 to 1774 through an extraordinary unveiling of the domestic world of the French king. The printer’s preface places the work within the genre of contemporary history, presenting for the first time ‘the entire life of a prince’, painted ‘in natural’, based on collected pieces of eyewitness testimony.
11 Vie privée de Louis XV. Ou principaux évènements, particularités et anecdotes de son règne (London, 1784), ‘Avertissement du libraire’, vol. 1, pp. 2–3. The narrative includes details about his genital abnormality, numerous mistresses (such as the famous Mme de Pompadour and La comtesse du Barry) and various scandalous incidents, demonstrating how the monarchy had been degenerating since the time of Louis XIV. According to Darnton,
Vie privée de Louis XV supplied ‘a master narrative for contemporary history’ that fuelled new waves of political slander and anti-ministerial pamphleteering during the very last years of Bourbon absolutism in France.
12 R. Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers, pp. 78–9. Exactly how it was read and potentially discussed in Drejer’s club or elsewhere we cannot not know for sure, but the book was advertised in 1782 in
Kiøbenhavns Adresse-Contoirs Efterretninger, the most important newspaper at the time (of the
feuilles du bureau d’adresse kind), together with other French titles sold at ‘Pierre Steinmann, vis-à-vis L’Eglise de la Garnison’.
13 Kiøbenhavns Adresse-Contoirs Efterretninger (KA), 16 January 1782, p. 7.It is the secret affairs and hidden, private worlds of foreign kings and courts that appear among the entries in Drejer’s club’s catalogue. It includes
Anecdoter om Kongen av Preussens private liv (Anecdotes of the King of Prussia’s private life), translated into Danish and printed in Copenhagen in 1778, and
Geheime Geschichte des Berliner Hofes, 1789, in two volumes. This is most probably the German translation of the French
Histoire secrète de la cour de Berlin, ou Correspondance d’un voyageur François depuis le mois de Juillet 1786 jusqu’au 19 Janvier 1787, originally published anonymously as ‘Ouvrage posthume’ without place of publication in 1789, but easily attributed to the famous Honoré-Gabriel de Riquetti de Mirabeau.
Characters and Anecdotes of the Court of Sweden, in two volumes in English from 1790, is also listed in a German translation published the same year. The most interesting and surprising entry given the official censorship regulation is the one of
Geheime Hof. U. Staatsgeschichte des Königreichs Dänemark, v. Marquv. L. D’Yves from 1790, which offers a veritable ‘secret history’ of the recent political history of Denmark–Norway, in German. ‘Germanien’ is the place of publication given on the title page, commonly used as a cover for Osiander publishing house in Tübingen. Marquis d’Yves was a pseudonym used by Friedrich Buchwald, who had served in a prominent role at the Danish court after the fall of Struensee. The tiny book, 117 pages long, centres on the political history of Denmark–Norway ‘after the revolution of Struensee’, as indicated in the subtitle. Struensee was the royal physician to Christian VII who during an intense sixteen months from 1770 to 1772 gained control over the political machine in Denmark–Norway, introducing a large number of political reforms inspired by Enlightenment ideas.
Geheime Hof und Staats-Geschichte starts out pointing to a ‘huge secret of the state’ concerning the extremely delicate question of succession to the throne after the fall of Struensee.
14 Geheime Hof und Staats-Geschichte des Königreichs Dänemark, Von dem Marquis Ludwig d’Yves. Zeiten nach der Struenseeischen Revolution (Germanien, 1790), p. 1. Struensee’s ‘revolution’ was made possible by Christian VII’s mental illness, and the pamphlet reveals the hidden battles over succession in the case of the premature death of the king. Christian’s heir was only four years old in 1772, when the Dowager Queen Juliana Maria and her son and Christian VII’s half-brother, Hereditary Prince Frederick, led the coup against Struensee. Apparently, the question of succession was still relevant at the time of publication of Buchwald’s pamphlet in 1790, although Christian VII’s son Frederick had served as ‘crown prince regent’ since 1784. The book even discusses the healthy princess Louise Augusta (by Queen Caroline Mathilde, whose father was probably Struensee) as a rightful heir to the throne. While the critical review in the German
Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung shows more interest in commercial and military aspects of the account, it definitely takes it seriously as historical writing.
15 Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, no. 28, January (1791), pp. 20–4. The readers in Drejer’s club would probably be more attentive to the politically sensitive topic of succession. Either way, the book proves to what extent contemporary, political history could traverse linguistic and geographical borders, and probably speak differently to readers of various nationalities. It also proves that ‘secret history’ could be more than ‘good reading’. The account of hidden events and eventualities relating to the future of the Dano-Norwegian kingdom in
Geheime Hof und Staats-Geschichte was literature of a decidedly political character that somehow had circumnavigated censorship regulations, and which we must assume played a part in the rise of political awareness and discussions among the members of Drejer’s club.