302 Chapter XII
Meanwhile, a kind of revolutionary sentiment spread among the irritated nobil-
ity of Sweden, many of whom, like nobles in Hungary, understood revolution to
mean the downfall of kings, and admired the French Revolution as the nemesis of
tyrants. A handful of them resorted to direct action. Gustavus III was assassinated
at the opera in Stockholm on March 16, 1792. It was only a month before the war
between France and Austria. All those involved in the death of the monarchist
crusader were noblemen. There is an illuminating postlude with the same ironic
message. When another king of Sweden died in 1810, it was again popularly sus-
pected (though falsely) that he had been done to death by a conspiracy of nobles.
Count Axel de Fersen, celebrated in French royalist annals as the paladin of mon-
archy, was murdered in the streets of Stockholm, in 1810, by a mob which believed
him to be guilty of poisoning the king of Sweden.
Mr. Liston, the British Minister at Stockholm, reported at the time of Gusta-
vus’ death that members of the conspiracy could not agree on what they wanted.
The “elder part,” he said, “desired the ancient form of the Swedish government
[before 1772], or to imitate that of England; while the younger men were eager to
adopt the greatest part of the modern ideas of France.”^29 In fact the government
remained unchanged in 1792, since the dead King’s supporters were not dislodged.
An enlightened absolutism remained in effect. It assured advantages to the non-
noble classes; but its weakness was that the nobility remained very unmanageable,
and the King himself not even personally safe.
More concessions were made to aristocratic principles in Russia and in Prussia.
These were both very different countries from Sweden. In Sweden all four estates
had long enjoyed rights of one kind or another, and the diet in which they met had
a lively tradition. In both Russia and Prussia (most of Prussia then lay east of the
Elbe) the country people were mostly serfs, the towns were small, sparse, few, and
feeble, and the important class was the serf- owning landlords. Nothing like a Eu-
ropean assembly of estates had ever developed in Russia, and those of the compo-
nent regions of the Prussian monarchy had mostly fallen into decay.
Of the Russian empire in the eighteenth century it may be said that no one
had any lawful rights on whose continuing enjoyment he could rely. This was as
true of the upper classes as of the lower. Indeed, European commentators noticed
a lack of class structure as they understood it. There were big men and little men,
there were rich and poor, and those higher or lower on the ladder of government
service, and some who made a boast of their ancestry. There was not, however, the
respect for birth and station that were common in Europe. High rank gave no
assurance of independence, nor of that “honor” said by Montesquieu to be neces-
sary to free monarchy, nor even any security from physical punishment or public
humiliation. The Empress Anna, on one occasion, annoyed at Prince Golytsin,
made him squat in the corner pretending to be a hen, clucking and cackling on
a pile of straw as if laying an egg. “A gentleman is nothing here,” reported the
German Schlözer in 1781. “Birth here gives but little claim to preference or
consideration,” said an Englishman; “both are regulated by the degree of rank
29 Great Britain, Historical Manuscripts Commission, The Manuscripts of J. B. Fortescue Preserved
at Dropmore, 10 vols. (London, 1892–1927), V, 518.