ABSTRACT
Some twenty years before the French Revolution, around 1770, the Swedish commons raged against the privileges of the nobility. The issue at stake was equal career opportunities. A central arena for the debate, besides the Diet in Stockholm, was printed media – pamphlets, newspapers and political periodicals – which flooded the book-market as a result of the first Swedish Freedom of the Press Act in 1766.1 The Swedish experiment in press freedom coincided in time with the Danish one under Struensee – 1766-72 in Sweden and 1770-73 in DenmarkNorway. The present chapter will give an outline of the Swedish experiment as compared to the Danish one, and it will explore in greater detail one specific feature of the Swedish case: the role of the common estates in Swedish political culture in the last years of the Age of Liberty. The conditions of publicity prior to 1766 and after 1772 will be briefly presented in the introductory and concluding sections.
