Struensee's Denmark

I have just finished watching A Royal Affair, a Danish movie who depicts the rise and fall of Johann Friedrich Struensee. He was a German physician and anonymous writer of progressive pamphlets who later became the personal physician of the mentally ill King Christian VII of Denmark. Through him, he passed several laws aiming to turn Denmark into an enlightened monarchy. However, the population and at least half the court didn't know of the King's mental problems, so they came to see Struensee not as a necessary regent, but as an usurper - his disregard of Danish traditions only made the nobles and the population hate him even more. The affair he had with Queen Caroline only gave everyone else an excuse to chop his head off.

What if he managed to stay in power? The King wanted to pardon him, but I think that a pardoned Struensee wouldn't have been powerful at all. Would the progressive turn Denmark experienced with Christian VII's son, Frederick VI, be anticipated by a couple of decades?
 

ingemann

Banned
First of all while the movie should be good, it's still a movie. Let me try to put how it really worked in modern context.

The president of USA get a new doctor of who's the son of Mexican immigrants, who barely speaqk English, the POTUS begin to suffer from psychological issues and begin to isolate himself, the new doctor begin to become his only connection with the president stab and the rest of the administration, suddenly the president begin to order the working language to Spanish and more and more contact goes through the doctor.

Do you think it could go on for long?

Struensee problem was that he had no powerbase, and his power only build on him isolating the king from the royal administration and his love affair with the queen, at the same time he succeed in alienate everyone both Danes and Danish Germans, both conservative and liberals, the old nobility and the new one, the administration and the extended royal family.

What he need is to not alienate everyone, the best idea would be to not have put himself in centre, but if he did so, he should have been better to navigate through the different fractions among the Danish court. If he could that, we would likely have seen the Danish agricultural reform a generation earlier (the most important of Christian VI's reforms) and maybe also a earlier push for universal education. The Slave Trade would not be removed before it were in OTL.
 
A major obstacle to Struensee remaining in power was his adaptation of Saint-Germain's army reform. The army had resisted it but Struensee decided to go through with it; that was one of his major errors as he abolished to Guards regiments ordering the troops to be split among the other regiments!
Doesn't sound so bad but it was; the Guards were the only regiments commanded in Danish and not subjected to physical punishment in contrast to the other regiments consisting of hired men from the Low Countries, German states and Baltic who were commanded in German and subjected to physical punishmen like running the gauntlet.
THAT went down badly with the Guards who were mainly Norwegians thus the men of the dowager Queen had no problem getting the needed muscle to get rid of Struensee.

How would Struensee regime look like; actually a Danish historian some years ago wrote a quite good counter-factual novel of it having Struensee live with the Queen, inviting enlightenment philosophers to court and have scientists engineers and inventors develop society.
edit: Quite a good read - short story in "En anden historie" by Michael A. Langkjær - "Min vilje er min skæbne/My wills my destiny".
 
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