Malthe Conrad Bruun: A “Dangerous Democrat”
This blog is part of a series on 'Democratic Identity in the Age of Revolutions'. Click here to see other posts in the series.
As the eldest son of a wealthy estate owner, Malthe Conrad Bruun (1775-1826), was an unlikely candidate for the charge of being a ‘democrat’ in 1790s Denmark. Nonetheless, during his career as a political publicist in that decade, he was branded as one, and prominent historians have concurred with this characterization. Alongside P. A. Heiberg, Bruun emerged as the most radical political writer in Denmark in the French Revolution era and the foremost victim of the government’s eventual crackdown on freedom of the press. At the age of 25, in 1800, he was expelled from Denmark and sought refuge in Paris.
Originally from Thisted in North Jutland, Malthe Conrad Bruun moved to Copenhagen in the summer of 1790 at the age of 15 to study theology. His father hoped he would become a parish priest, but Bruun quickly lost interest in a career in the Church and abandoned his studies after a few years. Instead, he pursued a life in letters and became deeply involved in the cultural life of the Danish capital. He befriended prominent, older intellectuals such as Knud Rahbek, Christen Pram and Rasmus Nyerup, who edited influential journals and held various posts in government service.
Bruun made his mark as a writer soon after settling in Copenhagen. He had poems published in prominent journals, started his own journal as a theatre critic, and continued to produce various literary works throughout the decade, receiving acclaim from critics. However, his writings quickly became infused with politics. At the time, Denmark was unique in Europe for having absolutism enshrined in a fundamental law, the Lex Regia of 1665. Despite this, pre-publication censorship had been abolished in 1770, allowing for a certain degree of freedom of the press. The enlightened government ministers of the mentally incapable king, Christian VII, still had the legal right to intervene against writers, but they permitted political discussion in print as long as it was conducted with decorum and remained within elite circles.
The events of the French Revolution were followed closely and intensely discussed in the press and high society in Denmark during the 1790s. Generally, public opinion was very sympathetic to the revolution. Although the execution of King Louis XVI in January 1793 shifted public sentiment, prominent voices in the press continued to support the French revolutionaries during the Reign of Terror. Malthe Conrad Bruun was among these supporters. In his journal, The Collector, he wrote enthusiastic monthly reports about French developments during the years 1794-95.
Bruun became a member of the most radical of the many clubs in Copenhagen in the 1790s, The Guild of Liberty, later simply known as the Jacobin Club. He lodged with and worked closely alongside Hans Winding, a publisher known for disseminating radical political literature. He also became close friends with the radical enlightened theologian Otto Horrebow. The Collector was a collaborative effort between Bruun, Horrebow, and their publisher.
It was not his reports from France, however, that brought Bruun into the public eye. He gained notoriety following a series of publications between 1794 and 1796, all of which ended up in court. In August 1794, Winding released a new journal directed towards the lower classes, intended to awaken their political consciousness. The Awakener was published anonymously, but it was authored by the 19-year-old Bruun, who aimed to enlighten commoners in Copenhagen about their rights and to expose their enemies. Shortly after Bruun began his journal, workers from the carpenter’s guild went on strike (for wholly unrelated reasons), causing unrest that led many citizens to fear a possible French-style revolution in Denmark. In response, the government initiated legal proceedings against the publisher for inciting rebellion. Winding eventually received a fine, and the journal was discontinued after just three issues.
Bruun did not explicitly use the concept of democracy in the journal, but he conducted thought experiments that could be described as democratic. He wrote about how a city with enlightened citizens from all classes could "elect a council to govern its own matters" and praised the possibility of an entire country doing the same. Bruun described what we would now call democratic political arrangements. When contemporary conservative critics complained about "young men" infatuated with French political fashions, taking on the role of "democrats" and trying to talk politics to commoners, Bruun seemed to fit this description. Referring to The Awakener, the prominent Danish historian Edvard Holm has called Bruun a "democratic agitator."
Malthe Conrad Bruun (1775-1826). The text below his name reads: 'Rousseau gave him heart, Voltaire gave him wit.'
Bruun’s willingness to appeal directly to the masses or to write in a manner that made his works accessible to them is evident in some of his subsequent publications. In 1795, Winding published another of his anonymous works, Travels to the Moon by Jerusalem’s Shoemaker. This serialized satirical story detailed a shoemaker’s visit to the moon, including discussions on forms of government, citizen’s rights, and censorship regulations in the various 'lands' he traverses. The government interpreted Bruun’s use of the popular antisemitic legend of the Wandering Jew as an indication that he intended to reach a broader audience. Although this time Bruun’s publisher was acquitted—since the satire was judged not to pertain to Denmark (despite its obvious parallels)—the government’s concern was unmistakable.
Shortly after publishing his imaginary trip to the moon, Bruun released another satirical text under his own name, Catechism of the Aristocrats (1796), which was modeled on Martin Luther’s Small Catechism (1529). His choice of a fundamental religious text, familiar to every adult in Denmark regardless of occupation, led authorities to suspect that Bruun framed his political commentary in a way that made it accessible to commoners. It appeared that he was inviting readers from the lower social classes to join the political conversation.
In his writing, Bruun challenged the unwritten rules that underpinned public debate and the precarious truce that existed at the time between intellectuals and the government concerning freedom of the press. This was a significant part of what got him into so much trouble, and from our perspective today, it appears to represent a democratic aspect of his work. As suggested, the term ‘democrat’ was in use in Denmark, often contrasted with its opposite, ‘aristocrat’. The line was probably fine between terms such as ‘democrat’, ‘republican’, and ‘Jacobin’, but being a ‘democrat’ seems to have been associated with support for the French Revolution and an inclination towards social and political leveling, either by empowering the people or by attacking privileged ‘aristocrats’. Additionally, being a 'democrat' also entailed being critical of monarchy and in favor of popular or republican government.
Memoirs from Copenhagen in the 1790s suggest that some consciously embraced a democratic identity in confined social settings, such as clubs and dinner parties. The way critics wrote about 'democrats' as a growing group also seems to confirm that this was possible. We do not have direct evidence of Bruun calling himself a 'democrat,' but given his political views, he might very well have done so. Indeed, following his Catechism of the Aristocrats, he was directly labeled as one, inspiring one critic to write a Catechism of the Democrats in his honor.
The fact that Bruun did not proudly proclaim himself a democrat in print should not surprise us. No one else really did either. Both 'democrat' and 'aristocrat' were primarily used as pejorative labels in the Danish press. Bruun’s Catechism contributed to the popularity of these smears. In it, he satirized the aristocracy, portraying them as trapped in a court culture in which they relentlessly pursued their own interests, had no principles, and were subservient to the will of their superiors, and ultimately the monarch. This led the aristocrats to denounce "democratism" and attack "democrats", while also professing faith in a hierarchical society and absolute monarchy.
Importantly, Bruun’s satire of the aristocracy also implicated the monarchical form of government. The court culture that corrupted the aristocracy was a creation of the monarchy, and Bruun had no qualms about extending his scorn to its potential for despotism, its lack of accountability, and the sheer luck involved in determining whether the country had an able ruler. Nicolai Edinger Balle, the bishop of Zealand, complained to the chancery about the pamphlet’s "democratic spirit", its mockery of the constitution, and its potential to sow discontent among the populace. At this point, Bruun's relationship with the government deteriorated. Fearing arrest, he chose to go into hiding in late spring 1796. Although he was allowed to return in the autumn of 1797, he quickly fell out of favor again and fled to Sweden later that same year.
In the end, King Gustav IV Adolf was unwilling to harbor what he called a “dangerous democrat,” and expelled Bruun by decree in April 1799. Bruun was already on his way to Paris when the judgement was passed on him in Denmark. The men in power at court were increasingly doubtful about the value of the political debate in the Danish press and were now taking a more aggressive stance towards writers like Bruun. A new law concerning freedom of the press, enacted in September 1799, marked the culmination of this shift, with Bruun among its first victims. In 1800, he was convicted in absentia and denied the right to return to his homeland.
Eventually, Malthe Conrad Bruun successfully reinvented himself in France as the scientist and geographer Conrad Malte-Brun. He proved more willing to accommodate Napoleon and the Bourbons than the government of Christian VII. Nevertheless, his life in Copenhagen in the 1790s sheds light on the first stirrings of a democratic identity in Denmark—one that was elusive, perhaps embraced among friends in clubs and at the dinner table, but not in the public sphere. In print, 'democrat' and 'aristocrat' remained words of abuse. Only during the Danish constitutional struggles of the late 1840s did 'democrat' become an affiliation that was possible, albeit controversial, to adopt publicly.
Håkon Evju, University of Oslo
