Food Riots in Nineteenth-Century Sweden

The catchphrases of the French Revolution echoed across Europe in the late 1700’s and early 1800’s. Liberty, equality, fraternity were revolutionary messages of citizenship launched by large violent crowds. Addressed to the ruling elites these messages predicted a shift from a society based on privilege to a more equitable one. But in many countries, with smaller cities and sparser populations, these new ideas were spread not in rapid revolutions, but as an evolutionary process. The Scandinavian countries, located in what Peter Clark has described as ‘outer Northern Europe,’ enjoyed domestic peace during the early modern period from the end of medieval times until industrialisation (c. 1860s); popular disputes were generally solved through non-violent interactions within the local communities. ¹ However, in cities and towns with sufficient population density, violent disputes and riot did occur. From the late eighteenth-century, urban riots in this part of Europe became more oriented towards national politics and thereby challenged the prevailing social order and contributed towards developing a more inclusive conception of citizenship. In the same time, international influences spread widely through the newspapers, especially in urban areas; a gradual fall in censorship from the beginning of the nineteenth-century, augmented this development. ²