Mittuniversitetet

Were there liberals and conservatives in Sweden from 1788 to 1840? This dissertation examines changing concepts of political partisanship. Under the late 18th-century Gustavian absolutist regime, the opposing political parties were conceptualized as royalists versus patriots. By the end of the period, liberals versus conservatives prevailed. However, previous research has tended to disregard historical party concepts. Many scholars have construed the antagonism of the time as “liberals” versus “conservatives” based on later meanings. Conversely, some have rejected the early uses of the party concept liberal as too contradictory or deviant from scholarly convention. This study recovers the original meanings with the help of the conceptual historical methodsof Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte. It thus maps the hitherto neglected interplay between party concepts and political action. The results demonstrate how the conceptual pair of royalists versus patriots reflected two sides of the constitutional crisis that arose in the Russo-Swedish War of 1788–1790. They also show that it was not until the Diet of 1809–1810 that a more significant transformation of language and antagonism occurred. This paved the way for the predominance of another conceptualization: ministerial versus oppositional. Concurrently, from the revolution of 1809 and onwards, liberal was an important tool for legitimizing the new constitution and government. The references to liberal political principles invoked an expectation of progress toward liberal values. Political debates gradually became positioned around the mutual understanding of such a societal progression. However, in the 1820s and 1830s, the liberal political position was inverted. At the outset associated with the government under King Charles XIV John liberalism ultimately came to be identified with the opposition against it. It was not until 1840 that liberals and conservatives reflected a bipartisan and conventional, if not unambiguous, contemporary understanding of political antagonism in Sweden.