ABSTRACT
This chapter is a case study of a palace in eighteenth-century Stockholm, the palace of Count Axel von Fersen, who was one of the most powerful French-oriented politicians and high-ranking officers in Sweden in the second half of the eighteenth century. At this time, Sweden was a political ally of France, and the cosmopolitan aristocracy held similar ideals and practiced a similar lifestyle. The Fersen palace, originally built in the seventeenth century in the very centre of Stockholm, the capital of Sweden, was totally renovated in the 1750s and 1760s after modern French architectural ideals to meet Count von Fersen’s political ambitions as well as the public and social life of an aristocratic family. The chapter explores the gendered division of places and spaces in an aristocratic town palace and examines the role that aristocracy and its lodgings had in the early-modern urban space. It will discuss the everyday life of the Fersen family, the relations between the family, servants and visitors, and the ways that the palace reflects the changing ideas of family and urban political life during this period.
