On Monday 27 April 1789, the artisan journeymen of Stockholm demonstrated through the Old Town. They had most likely spent the night, not with their masters as they should have, but in hostelries, drunk and up to no good. At about half past eleven in the morning, they occupied the Riddarhustorget outside the House of the Nobility, where they continued their uproar until four o’clock in the afternoon, ‘at which time a heavy downpour, combined with the flexed batons of the police officers, helped to disperse the drunken mob’.¹

It was the last day on which parliament was in session....

Towards the end of the preceding chapter, I attempted to explain what led the artisan journeymen of Stockholm and Johan Hjerpe to take part in Gustavus III’s showdown with the nobility in the spring of 1789, an episode worthy of a war novel. Although this was not stated, my interpretation was based on a set of general hypotheses about the human mind. The hypotheses underlay the text as its analytical precondition, which perhaps made the interpretation difficult to follow, and possibly also more provocative than it would otherwise have been. At the same time, fuller explanations would have been even...

As there is no easy road to popular culture and mentality, one must take the byways: speeches of welcome, for example, books in the estates left by the poor, broadsheets, biographies and the odd diary. Or, basically, through eyewitness accounts, mementoes and various literary artefacts.

Actions occupied the centre of the preceding diptych. Things will be less eventful here, for I nowwant to get at the structure of a gradual unfolding of events. First of all, I will try to clarify certain aspects of the change in people’s relationship to the printed word, above all during the eighteenth and early...

In the preceding chapter, I tried to build up a picture of a certain change in mentality among merchants and artisans in eighteenth-century Stockholm. The picture that emerged demonstrated that a shift was taking place in the cultural frames of reference. But because the change was very slow, it must have been difficult for those involved to notice it, however much they themselves contributed to it. In time, however, its effects became evident to all, and it is conceivable that, in retrospect, the change can be registered with the help of statistics, for instance.

But can it? What do quantitative...

Within the relativistic framework of Enlightenment philosopy, a number of coherent thematic groupings stand out more than others: a secularised deismor atheism, an expanded awareness of the value of foreign cultures, and the transformative idea that history will never return to its starting point – a notion that for some like Fontenelle, Turgot or Condorcet was elevated to a belief in progress.

What concerns me in this chapter is how these attitudes were remoulded when they reached the man in the street. Indeed, the discussion is even more narrowly focused, as it largely concerns a single person who has already made...

The preceding chapter focused its attention almost entirely on one person. Despite the insistent presence of Jacques-Louis Ménétra, it mostly concerned the world according to Johan Hjerpe, the artisan son alone with his thoughts, protected both from the throng of people and from statistical intrusions. And even if Hjerpe had also made an appearance in the second chapter, it was only in the last one that he was dealt with as the central personality.

Studying one individual is no easier and can be done no more quickly than research into many. Even if it is occasionally more entertaining, it produces...