The "good enemy" of democracy:
The Finnish nobility on the second half of the nineteenth century
as depicted in the romantic and realistic fiction of the period
Marja Vuorinen, University of Helsinki
The 19th century was for the European nobility in general a century of decline. The
population growth starting in the 18th century and the cumulating innovations on various fields of
technology resulted in a greater productivity and led to industrialization and urbanization, to the
development of military technology and logistics, and to the massive growth of bureaucracy. The
growing need for technically qualified civil and military personnel brought on first the state control
and standardization, then the expansion and democratization of higher education, both military and
civil. All these factors together enhanced the possibilities and increased the demand of the mass
press and other public, printed forms of communicating knowledge. This in turn enlarged the circle
of those who were able and willing to form an articulate conception of the society, which caused a
growing pressure towards a more democratic decision-making process.(1) All this undermined both
the status and the power potential of the small and exclusive noble elite.
When Finland, as a remote result of the Napoleonic wars, in 1809 was annexed to the
imperial Russia as an autonomous grand-dutchy, the situation of the Finnish nobility changed
radically. What had been a provincial, military and local elite (when Finland was still a part of
Sweden the central government of course was situated in Stockholm) now got the limelights.
Members of the Finnish nobility served as intermediaries in the annexation process, and they
became the core of the newly-established central government of the autonomous state. A university
degree then became a necessary part of the education of a nobleman, while the traditional military
career lost most of its attraction.(2) Another typical sphere of noble activity, the court, was still
outside the country, now in the imperial St.Petersbourg.
The ongoing growth of the bureaucracy soon brought on a need to recruit civil servants
in large numbers also from among the university-educated commoners. The so-called modern
professions were also open for all who had the necessary education and/or abilities. The ensuing
intermingling of the noble and the non-noble element of the society would have made possible a
development of a mutual understanding, and a gradual integration of the two groups. This indeed
seems to have been the case on the noble side of the barricade: a considerable part of the
bureaucratic-professional nobility seems to have developed a moderate, fairly democratic view on
the society.(3) On the other side of the barricade the experience was different: the new non-noble elite
found itself in a situation of unequal competition, of being put on the defense - even though it was
they, who actually were the newcomers. An obscure conflict of interest led into a decisive conflict
of ideology.
The conflict of the elites gained momentum through another contemporary development
- the emergence of the mass press and other public printed forms of communicating knowledge. The
new type of publicity created a new type of power: who held the voice in the newspapers and books
in the beginning of the era of the so-called public opinion, soon mastered the social field: his
notions and opinions prevailed. As those who reflected the new social situation in public were
mostly members of the new non-noble, professional elite, many things that we "know" (particularly
the things we on the subconscious level automatically accept as true or proper) of the life and times
of those early democrats, and, even more so, of their adversaries, has passed through their own
minds and pens.
While the daily press was the main forum for the political debate of the period, the
fictional literature was more suitable for dealing with the deeper ideological, social and emotional
contents - for giving a comprehensive meaning to old and new phenomena in a changing society.
The newspapers can be said to have been at that time a truly interactive media, as writings from the
public were regularly published, whereas the slow, heavy machinery needed to produce and publish
books of fiction was more elitist in character - a one-way street, a channel of indoctrination rather
than discussion.
When a new phenomenon - be it an ideology, a religion, an elite, a cultural phase or a
scientific paradigm - seeks to replace a former one, it has to justify its takeover. This cannot very
well be done by defining the predecessor as a legitimate option. Instead, it is usually done by
defining it as something totally out-of-date, absolutely unjustified, and generally unwanted. It thus
becomes the other: the official adversary and "good enemy" of its successor.
In Finland, the second half of the 19th century saw the coming into power of a new elite
group of essentially non-noble, middle-class, origin. The new elite defined itself as national, popular
(= of the people), democratic, educated, responsible, modern and justified. The old noble elite,
having been in constant contact with the before-1809 mother-country, Sweden, did not speak the
language of the majority of the people, and was accordingly defined as anti-national and anti-popular: it could not have the best interest of the people at heart - as the new elite naturally had.
Also its elite structure was that of a hereditary nobility, which meant that it had to be a sworn enemy
of any democratic development; therefore it was also unjustified as an elite. Indeed, it could easily
be blamed of all the mistakes that had been made by the government so far, and the new elite could
start off with a clear conscience and an even clearer reputation.
To enhance this impression, the power of definition was applied even further. The old
elite was re-defined to exhibit the unwanted side of "eliteness": pride, cunning, greed, ignorance,
power-madness, corruption and degeneration - either in corpore, or at least in the most part. It was
even presented as the only elite, while the new one took to preserving its middle-class group
identity. It thus became a hidden elite: those who internalized its self-image could, or would, not see
it for what it really was: an elite to replace an elite. In this constellation the old elite served
brilliantly as the elite - the new one just happened to have a growing share of the power.
My hypothesis is, that while the new 'democratic' and 'national' elite was more than
willing to take upon itself the functional role of an elite, it nevertheless stubbornly refused to take
upon itself the mantle of "eliteness", mentally soiled by all the mistakes the elites-so-far necessarily
had committed. Therefore it also found it very hard to come out in the open and declare its elite
status. The new political elite wanted to eat the cake, and keep it: have the power, cohesion/loyalty
and possibilities of an elite group, without giving up the eternal goodwill due to a democratic
middle class group striving to better the conditions of their fellow men.
To phrase it differently, in terms of the discourse theory: there were now two competing
discourses defining the nobility, one on the inside, one on the outside - one losing, the other gaining
hegemony. The public 19th century picture of the nobility is thus less a picture of an outmoded elite
group or an elite structure - it has more to do with the sketching of the self-portrait of a new one.
The more idealistic section of the new elite used the nobility as a mirror to reflect the questions such
as what a good elite should be like and, especially, what it should avoid at all costs. The other, easy
way out was far simpler: to define the competitor as the bad guy of the company.
It is my aim to establish, that the semiotic image of the nobility in 19th century fiction
was modified to produce the nobility as the only, and at times pretty ugly, elite of the then society.
All the semiotic signs related to nobility can be traced back to six different frames of reference,
which in their turn point out towards different bases and types of power - military, institutional and
economic power, inherited social capital and inherited networks both inside and outside the family,
and the diffuse 'power of attraction' based mostly on several types of cultural capital. The picture of
the nobility is therefore essentially that of a power group, an elite, not of a social group from which
the members of the functional elite were (once) mostly recruited.
Similar tendencies can be seen in the imagery of the ideal types of noblemen, even
though they show more variety - there are both good and bad examples of how a nobleman should
or should not react to the changes in the society. The most constructive part of the image of the
nobility is its "theory", the ethos of serving, but it was increasingly shared by other, non-noble
groups. The concept of nobility underwent an inflation during the 19th century: it became to mean
the highly ethical, courageous, self-sacrificing frame of mind, 'nobility of virtue', in any person, and
the attribute 'true nobility' was reserved to the noble-born men and women who acted the part with
honour. The social phenomenon of nobility was undermined by the popular democratic themes - for
instance the 'dance macabre', the notion that all men are born equal ("the children of Adam"), the
legacy of the 1789 French revolution ("liberty, fraternity, equality"), the principles of equality in
front of God and of the law, the theme of romantic love between unequals etc. The picture presented
by the romantics differs slightly from that of the realists. The romantics still viewed the nobility
from a safe distance, whereas the realists lived in a society where the two groups increasingly
intermingled and thus had more things in common, but had also entered the phase of a conflict of
elites. I will discuss these matters further at the workshop.
The obvious starting-point of my methodology in the so-called linguistic turn, more
precisely one of its descendants, the discourse theory, which states, that the daily patterns of our
speech are not "innocent" - they do not only reflect, but shape and alter the world we live in. How
we say things affects how we see and understand them, and how we react to them by and while
making our choises and decisions. The net of concepts and figures of speech that surrounds a
phenomenon has a strong effect on how desirable or unsavoury it seems to us.
The second methodological starting point is the cultural semiotics of the Lotman school.
An individual is studied here as a member of a culture, which is perceived as an over-personal
organism, a generator that produces the structures necessary for the human social and cultural life.
The sign systems within a culture can be seen as a kind of a collective memory built inside the
minds of its members - the culture's way to transfer its identity-building elements from one
generation to the next, preserving some and destroying or altering others in the process. The carriers
of a culture take part in it in two different ways: on the other hand they by their action slowly shape
and reshape the structures of their culture, on the other hand realize them unconsciously even when
they believe they are acting as independent beings.(4)
During the process of defining itself, a culture often develops an idea of its opposite, a
non-culture, the zone of chaos. In a situation of two competing cultures both the official and the
counter-culture strive to strenghten the identity of their members by defining the adversary as a non-culture. The 'texts' of the other are either pronounced as non-texts, completely without meaning, or
even anti-texts, strongly opposed to the values prevalent in the context of the culture that is
currently defining itself. A counter-culture can also purposefully shape its own 'texts' in a
straightforward opposition to the 'texts' of the official culture. This kind of texts of negation can
seem very powerful, but their power is actually derived from the power of the culture they are
opposing.(5)
When, and if, what started as a counter-culture then becomes an official culture, its
'texts' and the values they carry in turn gain the position of official 'texts' and values. To
understand them properly it its still important to remember the way they were born, and how they
were shaped by the phenomena they were raised to oppose. The concepts of non- and anti-text and
even the concept of a text of negation come in handy when analyzing the picture of the nobility in
the writings of its ideological adversary - those who wanted to picture themselves as the sole
champions of democracy, modernization, nation-building, emacipation and liberalization.
"Possession of power can be identified with confidence only in cases of overt conflict -
since those who prevail in such cases are able to do so precisely because they do, in fact, have more
power than their opponents."(6)
Nowadays, when it is again considered decent to make public show of one's money,
relations, status, and access to the corridors of power, but the real decicions seem more and more to
be made somewhere out of sight, it is interesting to take a look at a former, more innocent era where
this dual image of power was seen for the first time: those who exhibit the signs of power in public
are not necessarily those who actually wield the power.
* * *
|