Limitations of Enlightened Despotism 301
among citizens, and he then read his Act of Union and Security, which the three
“unredeemed” orders enthusiastically accepted. A week later the nobility met to
consider the act and flatly rejected it; the King, taking the chair in person, declared
it passed.^27
The Act of Union, while restating the constitution of 1772, actually put greater
powers in the hands of the King, while also assuring more civil equality for the
population in general. “All subjects enjoy the same rights,” it declared, six months
before the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; and all were to
be judged in the same courts. There must, however, be both noble and non- noble
judges in these courts. “All orders of the state have the same right to possess or
acquire land.” Offices “shall be accessible to all subjects of whatever rank or condi-
tion,” except that the very highest offices and the court dignities were reserved for
nobles. The diet had the right to consent to taxation, but in other matters to delib-
erate only on proposals which the King put before it. All future kings of Sweden
were to be required to accept the act.
The Act of Union was as successful an example as we may find of enlightened
despotism providing civil equality and even a measure of public participation in
government. It gave general satisfaction, so much so that Swedish burghers and
peasants, though interested, watched the subsequent revolutionary events in Eu-
rope with a feeling of detachment. The act carried with it, however, two trouble-
some corollaries: it left the King free to pursue projects dangerous to the country,
and it left the nobility a dissatisfied and potentially revolutionary class.
Gustavus extricated himself from the Russian war by a lucky victory at sea; de-
veloped a vague aspiration to become King of Poland, putting himself and his
court into Polish costume; and, as the last of his fantastic projects, offered to lead
the European powers in a crusade against the French Revolution. With his high
ideas of kingship, he had even less use for popular than for aristocratic rebellion.
Kept at a distance by his brother monarchs, who could not agree on a policy to-
ward France, and who in any case thought Gustavus’ volunteering to lead their
forces eccentric, he became involved in plans to rescue the French King and
Queen. To this end he worked with Axel de Fersen, whose father he had arrested
two years before. He had a notion that after landing with 16,000 Swedes and
8,000 Russians in Normandy he could cut through to Paris, while French troops
presumably loyal to their King and Queen marched on Paris from the east, after
which the French King, restored to independence, would convene the old provin-
cial parlements or estates, pronounce the National Assembly illegal, and undo its
work. Nothing came of this grand design. He therefore concocted another, and on
June 16, 1791, arrived with fanfare at Aachen in the Rhineland, intending to use
that city as a dramatic meeting place with Louis XVI on the latter’s escape from
France. This plan failed, too, as is well known, because the coach in which Louis
XVI and Marie Antoinette were riding, driven by Axel de Fersen, was stopped on
June 21 at Varennes.^28
27 Svanström and Palmstierna, 283; for the Act of Union see Appendix III, item 3, below; the
King’s speech was printed in the British Annual Register for 1789 (London, 1792), 334–36.
28 For details of Gustavus’ “crusade” against the French Revolution see Bain, op.cit., II, 103–52.