Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Figure 1 The Danish States: Denmark, Norway, and Schleswig-Holstein in the eighteenth century
- Preface
- Figure 2 Denmark in the eighteenth century
- The Danish Revolution 1500–1800
- Introduction
- Part I Denmark, 1500–1750: A Country in an Ecological Crisis
- Part II The Ecological Revolution
- Part III The New Denmark
- Part IV The Driving Forces behind the Danish Revolution, 1500–1800
- Part V The Inheritance
- 11 The Social and Political Inheritance
- 12 The Ecological Inheritance
- Appendix 1 Currency, Weights, and Measures
- Appendix 2 Reigns of Danish Kings and Queens
- Sources and Bibliography
- Index
11 - The Social and Political Inheritance
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Figure 1 The Danish States: Denmark, Norway, and Schleswig-Holstein in the eighteenth century
- Preface
- Figure 2 Denmark in the eighteenth century
- The Danish Revolution 1500–1800
- Introduction
- Part I Denmark, 1500–1750: A Country in an Ecological Crisis
- Part II The Ecological Revolution
- Part III The New Denmark
- Part IV The Driving Forces behind the Danish Revolution, 1500–1800
- Part V The Inheritance
- 11 The Social and Political Inheritance
- 12 The Ecological Inheritance
- Appendix 1 Currency, Weights, and Measures
- Appendix 2 Reigns of Danish Kings and Queens
- Sources and Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The Danish Revolution not only created a new Denmark, ideologically legitimized by an emerging sense of national identity, but at the same time furthered the idea of political democracy. The political transformations resulted in a marked intensification of the central administration's influence on society, and hence led to a much greater interest in the exercise of centralized power. By the end of the eighteenth century demands were being made to the effect that the people should have their own continuous influence on the process of government. These wishes were met by allowing public opinion to exercise greater influence; the end of the eighteenth century has indeed been called “the era of absolutism under the control of public opinion.”
This construction, however, was too imprecise and too informal to be satisfactory in the long run, quite apart from the fact that whenever public opinion might cause difficulties it could always be suppressed by press laws, as happened in 1799. The demand for public influence on the way in which the government conducted its business was therefore reformulated as a wish for political democracy. This was obtained within an astonishingly short number of years. With the consultative assemblies of the so-called Estates of the Realm, Denmark had already by the beginning of the 1830s acquired political bodies that to some extent were democratically elected; by the end of the 1840s the country had secured a democratic constitution that granted the right to vote to a considerable part of the population.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Danish Revolution, 1500–1800An Ecohistorical Interpretation, pp. 261 - 264Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994