Biehl’s ‘chronique scandaleuse’ and Suhm’s ‘secret history’

Biehl was raised in the outer circles of the Danish court, and through self-study she became an important intellectual in Copenhagen. She was renowned for her epistolary novel, poems, moral tales and comedies as well as her translations from English, French, Italian and Spanish, of which her most famous is Don Quixote (1776–7). In 1784 Biehl was encouraged by her intimate friend at the court Johan Bülow to write him letters on the contemporary political history of Denmark–Norway. Bülow is the chamberlain of Crown Prince Frederick (later Frederick VI), and he provides her with important source material, especially on the very latest happenings at court. The result is a series of ‘historical letters’ where Biehl presents and analyses the human characters, physical and moral deficits, indecent relations and secret motives that are deemed the true driving forces behind the reigns of Frederick IV, Christian VI, Frederick V and Christian VII, the Struensee period and the coup by Crown Prince Frederick in 1784. In what she herself calls ‘a sketch of the recent Danish history’ she describes, in great detail, sicknesses, births and sexual excesses at court and how domestic life and bodily lusts and insufficiencies affect public decisions and the course of events. Anne-Marie Mai has called the letters ‘the history of sexuality during the reigns of Christian VI, Frederick V and Christian VII’ in which Biehl traces the springs of all the problems and bad decision back to the relations between the sexes and ruthless education.1 A.-M. Mai, ‘Historien som scene hos Ludvig Holberg og Charlotta Dorothea Biehl’, Sjuttonhundratal, 8 (2011), p. 203. Biehl herself, however, explicitly attaches her accounts to a particular genre of political historical writing, the ‘chronique scandaleuse’: ‘I have wanted to convey to you the Histoire Scandaleuse in one unbroken chain’, she tells Bülow in one of the letters.2 ‘Da jeg har vildet meddele Dem L’Histoire Scandaleuse i en uafbrudt Kiede, saa nödes jeg nu at gaae langt tilbake i Tiiden’. ‘Charlotta Dorothea Biehls Historiske breve’, Historisk tidsskrift, vol. 3, række 4 (Copenhagen, 1865–6), p. 266.

‘Histoire’ or ‘chronique scandaleuse’ is probably the most openly provocative of the key words used in titles belonging to this current of literature involved in the ‘politics of disclosure’ in early modern Europe. A descendant of French heroic romance, the ‘chroniques scandaleuse’ in various formats had gained success in the underground market of print in France as well as in England during the latter part of the seventeenth century. The genre’s popularity reached a climax in pre-revolutionary France, first with Le Gazetier cuirassé, ou anecdotes scandaleuses de la cour de France (by Charles Thévenau de Morandes, anonymously published) appearing in 1771, at the height of the greatest political crisis during the reign of Louis XV. It contains endless anecdotes about prostitutes and their aristocratic clients, venereal diseases and other slanderous episodes, targeting the leading figures in the French government, recounted in an open mixture of fact and fiction that left it to the readers to sift the truth from the rumours, as a kind of game.3 R. Darnton, The Devil, pp. 17, 21. We know that the pamphlet was read in Copen­hagen during the Struensee period by Luxdorph, see H. Horstbøll et al., Grov Konfækt, I (Copenhagen, 2020), p. 39. More publications of a similar kind followed, most famously La Chronique scandaleuse, ou Mémoires pour server à l’histoire de la génération présente, contenant les anecdotes et pièces fugitives les plus piquantes que l’histoire secrète des sociétés a offertes pendant ces dernières années (1783–8), which conspicuously includes all the attractively ambiguous key words in an elaborate subtitle. Biehl was apparently well acquainted with the genre of ‘histoire scandaleuse’ even before this last publication appeared in France, although her own ‘historical letters’ uses the scandalous, private details from the Danish court in a more analytical and compassionate way than most of the French libels. Rather than try to denounce ministerial despotism in the Dano-Norwegian monarchy, Biehl seems to want to explain the political problems by pointing to the all too human side of royals. Moreover, her letters are not written in order to shock and amuse a broad reading public hungry for scandals. As Sebastian Olden-Jørgensen argues, their content may have been intended as a record of contemporary history for use and interpretation by future historians, according to the ancient Greek Lucian’s distinction between histories of the past and those of the contemporary world.4 S. Olden-Jørgensen, ‘En fortidshistoriker og en samtidshistoriker. Ludvig Holberg og Charlotta Dorothea Biehl’, Temp. Tidsskrift for historie, 17 (2018), pp. 54–6. In any case, the letters remained unpublished until 1865, when they appeared in the Danish scholarly journal Historisk tidsskrift as ‘Charlotte Dorothea Biehls historiske Breve (meddelte af J. H. Bang efter Originalerne, som findes i Sorø Academis Manuskriptsamling Nr. 71, 20)’.

Like Biehl, Peter Frederik Suhm also left an unpublished manuscript on the ‘unofficial’ political history of the recent past of the Dano-Norwegian monarchy. Suhm was a high-profile intellectual, renowned historian and an extraordinarily prolific writer who published in many learned as well as more popularising genres. He was a member of Drejer’s club in Copen­hagen for several years. He developed radical political ideas, some of which he tried to make public in different ways, with varying success vis-à-vis the censorship authorities.5 See E. Krefting, ‘De usminkede sannhetenes forsvar. Peter Frederik Suhms publika­sjonsstrategier og offentlighetsidealer under det dansk-norske eneveldet’, in A. M. B. Bjørkøy et al. (eds), Litterære verdensborgere: Transnasjonale perspektiver på norsk bokhistorie 1519–1850 (Oslo, 2019), pp. 332–76. During his years in Trondheim in Norway he co-founded the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters (1760). This is also where he started spending his considerable fortune on collecting books. The book collection came to comprise around 100,000 volumes, and he opened it to public use in Copenhagen in 1775. Unfortunately, there is no existing catalogue of this collection, which was purchased by the Royal Library in 1797. In 1811 the doublets were offered to the new Norwegian University Library in Christiania, which is why we find many eighteenth-century books carrying Suhm’s signature or ex libris in today’s National Library of Norway.6 See E. Eide, ‘Reading Societies’.

When the publication of Suhm’s complete works in sixteen volumes was completed (posthumously) in 1799 it contained several of his most controversial manuscripts and works, some of which had never been published before. One manuscript that remained excluded, however, was his ‘Hemmelige efterretninger om de danske konger efter soveraineteten’ [Secret histories of the Danish Kings after Sovereignty]. It was not published until 1918, more than half a century after the publication of Biehl’s ‘histoires scandaleuses’.

Suhm’s manuscript gives a dense and concise account of the political history of Denmark–Norway from the introduction of absolutism in 1660 until the death of Queen Caroline Mathilde in 1775, three years after the fall of her lover, Struensee. The text was probably conceived in this latter period. Like Biehl’s historical letters, it may have been intended for the use of future historians. No more than 80 pages long, it begins with well-known accounts of the legitimate introduction of absolutism in 1660, when the assembly of the four estates freely transferred all power to the hereditary throne. The narrative then turns to the hidden aspects of the history, recounting how the ambitious Queen Sophie Amalie to Frederick III played a crucial part in the introduction of absolutism, which ‘for the time present liberated the country from the chains of the aristocracy’ but soon degraded into a series of despotic acts based on the highly affective personalities of the royals.7 ‘befriede landet for nærværende tid fra adelens haarde slag’. P. F. Suhm, Hemmelige efterretninger: om de danske konger efter souveraineteten, meddelte ved Julius Clausen (Copenhagen, 1918), p. 7. Suhm sums up the different characters and mental dispositions of the succeeding kings and the people in their surroundings that influence the execution of power. Like Biehl, he traces the ‘secret springs’ of their actions back to moral deficiencies, bodily lusts and shortcomings and the relation between the sexes at court. The narrative reaches its apex in the accounts of Christian VII and the Struensee period, with all its physical and moral excesses. Suhm describes how ‘the king was skinny and weak. The queen strong and fat, and he only preferred skinny women of a good taille; sufficient reason for disagreement. Therefore, they did not have sex for months’.8 ‘kongen var smækker og svag. Dronningen sterk og feed og han kunde ei lide uden smækre Fruentimmer og af god taille; Leilighed nok til Uenighed. De laae derfor i hele Maaneder ei sammen’. P. Suhm, Hemmelige efterretninger, p. 49. Struensee, however, took advantage of the queen’s voluptuousness, which resulted in a ‘bastard’, Suhm notes.

Not only does the manuscript’s title attest to Suhm’s familiarity with the genre of secret history; early in the text he explains why his accounts are entitled ‘secret histories’. Actively deploying the procopian anekdota motive, he declares that he narrates ‘things that are not to be found in printed books and that cannot be found there, at least not in books printed in this country, and therefore with time would be forgotten.’9 ‘Ting, som ei findes i trykte Bøger og som til dels ei kan findes der, i det mindste i saadanne, som trykkes heri Landet, og hvilke derover vilde med Tiden komme i Forglemmelse’. P. Suhm, Hemmelige efterretninger, p. 7. He presents the unofficial, hitherto unknown history of the Dano-Norwegian absolute monarchy. Suhm also insists, like nearly every secret history before his, on the factual liability of his accounts by claiming that the information relies on trustworthy persons’ ‘eyewitness’ testimonies (including his father’s) and even on his own, personal observations. Last but not the least, his ‘secrets’ refer to a specific kind of historical causality, pointing to the deep, hidden springs of politics and therefore also the true mechanisms of history. Behind the public chain of events there are always the private, domestic, intimate, bodily worlds of the people in power. The real and true causes of the degeneration of the monarchy of Denmark–Norway after 1660 are to be found behind the curtains, in royal beds.

Suhm’s secret histories remained secrets and did not appear in print until long after the end of absolutism. We can easily understand why. His narrative does not present itself as an entertaining, piquant, playful piece of text, thriving on the blurred boundaries between fact and fiction, history and allegory. The text shows the extent to which this kind of writing of contemporary history was not only frivolous, but also deeply political. Suhm was probably one of the most radical critics of absolutist hereditary monarchy as a political system in eighteenth century Denmark–Norway. His ‘rules of government’, suggested in an appendix to a privately distributed edition of his political novel Euphron in 1774, attest to this.10 The version of Euphron including the suggestion of a new form of government, in effect a constitutional monarchy, was published posthumously in 1799 in vol. 16 of his ‘collected writings’ (Suhms Samlede Skrifter), pp. 29–36. Yet nowhere is his critique of absolutism demonstrated more empathically than in the ‘secret histories of the Danish Kings after Sovereignty’, where he reveals why states should be ruled by laws, and not people above them.