ABSTRACT
The political history of the Gustavian era set off in a dramatic manner with a coup in 1772, which ended a fifty-year period of weak monarchy and put King Gustavus III at the centre of power. In the year of the French Revolution, 1789, the king forced through the Act of Union and Security, which gave him absolute power at the expense of the Diet and the Council, which de facto was abolished. The epoch ended as dramatically in 1809, during the reign of Gustavus IV Adolf, who had ascended the throne in 1796, four years after his father Gustavus III had been shot at an opera ball in Stockholm. In 1808 Sweden was drawn into the European crisis of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-15), and in the Russo-Swedish War of 1808-09 it lost one third of its area (present-day Finland) to Russia. In March 1809, a group of noble officers dethroned Gustavus IV Adolphus, and at the end of that year he and his family left Sweden. In May of that year, a new Instrument of Government was passed in Sweden, while the Gustavian laws remained in use in the Grand Duchy of Finland, after the Russian annexation of the country under the rule of Tsar Alexander I of Russia.
