Monarchical Image-Making in an Age of Revolution: Embodying the ‘Traditional’ and the ‘Modern’ in Swedish Dynastic Ceremonies, c. 1780–1820

This article deals with the image-making of Swedish monarchs in the decades preceding and succeeding the Swedish Revolutionary Year of 1809, a year witnessing the dethronement of a king and the composition of a new constitution. In this era, the monarchies of Europe faced a great challenge in accommodating conflicting ideals of the Ancien Régime and of emergent bourgeois civic society. In dynastic ceremonies and court culture, the Swedish monarchy made use of various resources in its strive for legitimacy by representing continuity as well as discontinuity, attempting to reconcile the old and the new, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘modern’. In addition to material culture and spatial practices, practices with an immediate relationship to bodies constituted an available resource. Ceremonial deportment and the regulation of bodies and embodied practices (such as manners of dress) thus became a major concern in the endeavoured reconciliation of contradictory themes surrounding kingship in an age of revolution.