Livläkarens besök

Per Olov Enquist

4 ideas

1. Struensee's sixteen months ruling Denmark

   In 1768 the German physician Johann Friedrich Struensee was hired to accompany the mentally ill King Christian VII of Denmark. He became the queen's lover and, by 1770–71, the country's de facto ruler, issuing hundreds of cabinet decrees that abolished press censorship and judicial torture and cut court privileges. In January 1772 a palace coup led by the Queen Dowager Juliane Marie and Ove Høegh-Guldberg arrested him after a masked ball, and in April he was beheaded and quartered, after which most of his reforms were reversed.

2. Reforms decreed from above lack defenders

   Struensee changed laws by signature, not by building a constituency. The nobility, clergy and bureaucracy who lost privileges were organized and motivated, while the peasants and townspeople who gained had no voice or leverage. When he fell, nobody defended the reforms. They were rolled back almost as quickly as they had been written.

3. Freedom's instruments captured by its enemies

   Once Struensee abolished censorship, the newly free press filled with pamphlets attacking him and the queen. These pamphlets helped produce the public contempt that justified his overthrow. A liberty granted without regard to who is best organized to use it can become the weapon that destroys the person who granted it.

4. Power borrowed from an incapable sovereign

   Struensee's authority rested entirely on access to a king who could not govern but whose signature was still law. Legitimacy that flows through a proxy who cannot give real consent is only as secure as physical control of that proxy. Whoever reached the mad king first in January 1772 therefore decided who ruled, and the rival faction took Struensee's power simply by getting Christian VII to sign his arrest.

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