ABSTRACT
The Second Sexual Revolution of the mid-eighteenth century entailed that people increasingly made their own choices in matters of mating. For many women, individual choice led to catastrophe. Many slept with higher-status men who claimed to want marriage but whose motivation was libertine. Across Northwestern Europe, illegitimate births doubled, tripled, or quadrupled. In Stockholm, half of all childbirths were by unwed mothers. Arguably, no artistic work conveys the transitional ideology of libertine love, and its ramifications, more masterfully than Fredman’s Epistles (1790). Carl Michael Bellman has been praised as Scandinavia’s greatest poet. His drinking songs, which remain among Sweden’s most cherished songs, have been compared to the literature of Shakespeare and Dickens, and the paintings of Hogarth and Rembrandt. His English standard biographer calls him “the Mozart of Swedish poetry” and “the greatest of all song-writers, in any language.” The early epistles portray sex as such a wonderful source of intoxication that individuals should have the right to copulate, irrespective of social implications. Later epistles center on the horrific consequences this ideology would have for women. After 20 years of composition, Bellman retires his libertine morality in a manner that points toward the romantic love that would supersede it.
