This Time as Romantic Fiction: Monarchism and Peasant Freedom in the Historical Literature of B. S. Ingemann 1824–1836

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the monarchy and the people as represented by one of the foremost Danish Romantics, the poet B. S. Ingemann (1789–1862), in the historical literature he published in the years when Ingemann wrote his Danish history, the so-called ‘myth of an original peasant’s freedom’, is also inherent in Ingemann’s novels and poems. Drawing on the literature of the Danish historian Peter Frederik Suhm, Ingemann embraces and ‘recycles’ the idea that historically an ancient constitution existen in Denmark to ensure that the peasant was on equal terms with the nobility and the clergy. No decision could be made without the consent of the commonality. The article stresses that this idea had an enormous impact on Danish society, both as a cultural indicator and as an actual political tool, not least in the crucial years following the French Revolution.