5. Individualisation and national identity
The final decades of the nineteenth century were characterised by a cultural turn based more on the individual than on social status or gender. This can be referred to as ‘individualisation’. Culturally defined roles for men and women were still patriarchal, but they were also undergoing transformation.
It is unclear how far this transformation of gender roles extended into society. Business and the co-operative movement were men’s worlds, and the top priority of the trade unions was to guarantee the man’s salary as the family breadwinner. However, the 1857 Freedom of Trade Act gave women over the age of twenty-five the right to run a business. Unmarried women were given the opportunity to support themselves by teaching or nursing, but they had to leave these professions once they were married.
In 1903, the old upper secondary school system, which was only for boys, was abolished. A standard education system was established that consisted of primary school (folkeskole), middle school and secondary school. In this system, everybody who left primary school – whether male or female – was able to continue to secondary education if their abilities allowed.
This trend was also reflected in reforms to the parish and municipal councils, where women and servants were given the right to vote. The suffrage was thus connected not to the household or patriarchal notions of the master of the house, but to the individual. Individualisation could also be seen in the social reforms of the early 1890s, in which pensions, for example, became an individual and universal right regardless of gender or status in the labour market.
Women at work in the kitchen at Bejstrupgaard, 1912. This large farm was part of the Danish-speaking community at Rødding, just south of the then Danish–German border. Unskilled men often experienced periods of unemployment, which meant they could not provide enough food for themselves or their families. This did not apply to women, who could work as servants, or wash and sew clothes. However, women often received much lower wages than men. Children of working-class families also had to work. Photo: Skrave Local Archives
Religion and faith
The Evangelical-Lutheran Church remained the state religion in Denmark during the nineteenth century, both during absolutism and after the introduction of the free constitution. The main difference between these two periods was that freedom of religion was introduced after 1849, even though the Church and state were not formally separated.
Several Christian movements emerged in opposition to the state Church, rooted in the far-reaching organisation of religious life in civil society. This was true of the revival movements at the beginning of the century, which wanted a more literal reading of the Bible and more traditional church services than those the rationalist state Church provided, as well as to give lay people the right to preach in private homes – a right obtained in 1839. It was also true of Grundtvigianism, which wanted a Christianity for the living and life on Earth that emphasised the spoken word, conversation and community life, based on the belief that it was the Holy Spirit’s presence in the community that mattered. And it was also true of the Inner Mission (Indre Mission), which emphasised the Bible as the word of God and advocated leading an ascetic life on Earth in order to achieve salvation in the life after death. Grundtvigianism and the Inner Mission came into their own in the later part of the period, influencing many of the state Church’s pastors.
The movements described above show that religiosity was both individual and meaningful for most people. However, as ideologies, these religious movements competed not only with each other but also with political ideologies and faith in scientific and natural explanations. Darwinism in particular divided opinion; it could be interpreted as either compatible or incompatible with the Christian faith.
The formation of national traditions
The formation of national traditions was particularly inspired by German Romantic thought, and such traditions were developed in the period between 1800 and 1850. Romanticism was characterised by the discovery of ‘the people’. Language, history, literature, archaeology and art were all taken as expressions of the Danish people and the Danish national spirit, which had existed since the dawn of time. The period was also marked by an idealistic way of thinking in terms of the whole or an organism (organismetænkning), in which part and whole were always connected through a holistic spiritual principle. The Danish people was perceived as such an organism and the Danish national spirit as the holistic principle which gave the people coherence, the most important expression of which was the Danish language: the mother tongue.
According to the Romantic interpretation, the Danish people were originally a national unit consisting of free and equal landowning peasants, who democratically elected a king from among themselves. This unit was lost during the Middle Ages. A nobility developed as a closed estate, separate from the people, and further distanced itself from the original spirit of the people by aspiring to a foreign culture and language. The same was true of most of the kings and the court with which they surrounded themselves.
According to the Romanticists, the original spirit of the people was preserved only among the peasants, who were untouched by foreign cultural influences while at the same time increasingly oppressed and excluded from political life. Power lay with the cultural elite, who used it to suppress national popular culture, from which they were estranged. This culminated with the patriotism and cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment, which meant there was no regard for the national culture and the importance of the Danish language.
This development was reversed around 1800. The abolition of the stavnsbånd (‘adscription’) in 1788 gave the peasants back their freedom, while the Romantic rediscovery of peasant culture reunited elite and folk culture, and the meetings of the estate assemblies re-introduced political rights. These were all steps towards restoring the original idea of the state as an organic, national and democratic unit. Although much condensed, the above outline represents the basic narrative of the most influential history book of the century, Haandbog i Fædrelandets Historie (Handbook on the History of the Fatherland), written by the history professor C.F. Allen in 1840.
The Danish spirit was considered unique in the sense that it had originally been part of a common Norse identity, expressed in an Old Norse language spoken in ancient times and a common Norse mythology. In 1848, Allen used this mythology to show that the whole of Schleswig was originally Danish, since the population of the duchies shared a mythology with the Danish population in the kingdom of Denmark. Throughout the century, the link between nationality and Norse mythology became firmly rooted as a central aspect of the formation of national traditions.
The folk high school movement
The most obvious expression of the connection between nationality and Norse mythology can be found in the folk high school (højskole) movement, based on the thinking of the theologian N.F.S. Grundtvig. Grundtvig believed that a true Danish national or popular education should take its point of departure in the people’s own myths and legends – as opposed to those of the Greeks and Romans, which were imported via the German-speaking countries to Danish secondary schools. Instead of this foreign or un-Danish education, students should be given a national education that taught them learn to love their homeland and mother tongue.
Especially after 1864, folk high schools were established across the country as an attempt to consolidate Danish national identity following the military defeat. There was some place for practical subjects and lessons on the organisation of society, but Norse mythology, national history and Christianity were central to the folk high schools, which were designed to arouse national and Christian sentiment. These schools were intended to create a spiritual Danevirke, consolidating the support of the Danish people for an independent, national life. Between 1864 and 1890, sixty-one folk high schools were founded in Denmark. The summer and winter courses they offered attracted 2,833 students in 1872 and 3,806 students in 1890. Between 30% and 40% were female, and most were from wealthier farming families.
The Modern Breakthrough
The Modern Breakthrough (Det moderne gennembrud) was also an answer to how Danish culture should be developed following Denmark’s defeat, though it was radically different from that of the folk high school movement. It was initiated by a lecture series given by Georg Brandes in 1871. Brandes was a promising literary scholar who had earned his doctorate the year before and later became a renowned literary critic with an international reputation. According to Brandes, the problem facing Danish culture was partly that excessive interest in ‘the Danish’ had cut it off from recent cultural and scientific trends in Europe, and partly that an idealistic worldview, which emphasised spiritual life, had destroyed people’s ability to perceive the world as it was.
The solution was therefore to embrace European trends and allow them to nourish Danish culture and ensure its development. Traditions should be subjected to critical validation; scientific methods should be used to clear up national myths and misinterpretations; and everything should be the subject of debate. Realism should replace idealism, so that perceptions of the world could be free from distracting elements and idealistic fog. Social problems and deprivation should not be masked behind peasant Romanticism, but instead be shown as they were.
En landevej (A Country Road), painted by H.A. Brendekilde (1857–1942). After 1880, Brendekilde and many other painters were keen to paint life as it was, realistic and undisguised. Poverty and hard labour was a reality and should be depicted as such. Brendekilde came from a poor background himself, and several of his paintings show poverty and the harsh living conditions in rural communities. This painting depicts a stonebreaker and his family. They had to live off his work, which consisted of breaking stones into chips for use in paving roads. The carpenter is preaching God’s word, which gives the picture a neo-Christian-religious dimension. Photo: National Gallery of Denmark
In general, the Modern Breakthrough was a Copenhagen phenomenon, particularly important among authors, artists and scientists after 1870. It paved the way for the realistic novel, examples of which are Henrik Pontoppidan’s Lykke-Per (Lucky Per) and J.P. Jacobsen’s Fru Marie Grubbe: Interieurer fra det syttende Aarhundrede of 1876 (Mistress Marie Grubbe: interiors from the seventeenth century). Jacobsen also translated Darwin’s On the Origin of Species into Danish in 1872. In these novels, the protagonists did not perform heroic deeds or great feats but instead struggled on a more down-to-earth level to find their place in society. The questions of the time, such as women’s sexuality and their place in society, poverty and the morality of the business world, were taken up in literature. Most modernists believed in progress and were confident that scientific and technological development would create a better future.
As well as influencing literary production, the Modern Breakthrough also had an impact on the field of history. Many historians of the social liberal tradition attempted to create what they believed to be a more realistic picture of Denmark’s past. The tradition has been denoted ‘social liberal’ because most of its proponents were explicitly connected to the Social Liberal Party (Det Radikale Venstre), besides being positivists. The movement provided education for workers, but it never became as widespread as the Grundtvigian folk high schools. It met with opposition from circles that wished to adhere to the traditions and holistic thinking of Romanticism, as well as encountering resistance from the Grundtvigians and the culturally conservative circles in the capital, who viewed the movement as un-Danish. This was often connected to an overt and widespread antisemitism directed towards Brandes’ Jewish heritage.
Popular culture
Belief in science and progress was stimulated in popular culture by the writings of the mass media. Weekly magazines became increasingly widespread. A good example of this is the largest weekly magazine of the time, Illustreret Familie-Journal (The Illustrated Family Journal), which was first published in 1877. In 1885, this magazine had a readership of 100,000, but this number had risen to 200,000 by 1900. Weekly magazines and journals used many illustrations, but Illustreret Tidende (The Illustrated Times), first published in 1859, marked a turning point in this respect. After 1880, photographs became an increasingly prominent feature of the pages of newspapers and magazines. Judging by the content of these weekly magazines, people in this period had a great thirst for knowledge, including fundamental knowledge about how the world was organised. History, Classical works of art, expeditions to unknown corners of the Earth, the newest technology and the latest scientific observations were presented from an ‘objective’ and optimistic perspective.
Alongside popular scientific material, the weekly magazines also presented the latest knowledge on household matters, hygiene and child rearing, which, along with many of the adverts, was aimed at women. The modern middle-class home should be characterised by light, air and cleanliness – and hygge (a specifically Danish term approximating ‘cosiness’, ‘comfort’ or ‘conviviality’). Weekly magazines reproduced middle-class values and gender roles, which placed the woman as the housewife in the home and the man as the extroverted conqueror of the outside world.
National culture
Popular culture also encompassed places of remembrance, including statues, monuments and memorial stones, which were erected across the country throughout the nineteenth century as memorials to wars, heroes and national battles. They created a collective space for remembrance and helped to spread the idea that there was such a thing as collective memory. Perhaps more subtle was the appearance of national symbols on coins, banknotes and – after 1850 – stamps, while the daily use of the national flag was an unconscious reminder of national community.
From around 1840, the national-historical narrative, which can be seen in Allen’s work, began to form part of textbooks used in schools. But this did not shake the Christian foundation on which the school system had rested since 1814. Schoolchildren were expected to form their identity based on a combination of religion and nation. In school, Christian texts were preached but not discussed.
When a common framework for the school syllabus was first formulated in 1900, it led to an expansion of national-religious educational goals within the subjects of religion and history, and a strengthening of Danish as a subject. In the intervening decades, the concept of school had developed into folkeskole (‘people’s school’) as opposed to the former almueskole (‘common school’), where children were educated in order to form a people with a common love for God, the Danish people, the homeland and the mother tongue.
National identification and a national reality
What is now referred to as the mass media had a dual function at the time. It created the sense of belonging both to a people, and also to a specific section of this people. The folk high schools had their particular version of national education, while the Modern Breakthrough offered a different take on enlightenment. Prominent in the period was right-wing national patriotism, which connected Danishness to the desire to defend the country. The question of defence was framed within an ideology that aimed to re-establish national pride after 1864 and create unity around common defence policy. Conversely, after the turn of the century, social democrats like Gustav Bang wanted to seize national sentiment from the bourgeoisie; purify from militarism, royalism and the cultivation of stereotyped enemy images; and equate nationality with democracy and social justice.
For the socialists, internationalism was an ideologically conditioned declaration of intent, whereas the labour disputes occurring in the real world were national, as the 1899 case described above shows. Around the turn of the century, Danish trade union leaders were frontrunners in establishing an international federation of trade unions (fagforeningsinternationale), but such international collaboration could only take place if there was successful collaboration between national trade unions.
The nation state around 1914 was therefore a reality in which people acted and organised themselves, orienting themselves towards it based on various political-ideological, cultural and social points of departure. As a result of the war in 1864, members of the Danish-speaking population of northern Schleswig were no longer Danish citizens, but throughout the period they developed and maintained an identification with Denmark.
♦ Modernisation, democratisation and nationalisation
In 1914, Denmark was a capitalist country integrated in the international economy. It had been fundamentally changed by population growth and urbanisation. Industrialisation after 1870 was initially connected to agriculture but was then supplemented by urban industrialisation and large-scale industry, which developed internationally with Copenhagen at its centre. Technological development and mechanisation were central in all fields.
In 1848, absolute rule was abolished, and in 1849 a free constitution was issued. In 1864, the composite state collapsed as a result of national movements in Denmark and Schleswig-Holstein. The war in 1864 made the Danish-speaking population in northern Schleswig into German citizens, and Denmark became a small nation state on the periphery of Europe. Outwardly, successive Danish governments sought to safeguard the country’s existence through an alliance-free policy of neutrality in which awareness of Germany played a key role.
Internally, the state’s most important active role was to develop an infrastructure to facilitate modernisation, while only limited progress was made in the alleviation of society’s most pressing social problems. There were major differences between the groups who had benefitted from the internationalisation of the economy and those who had not. Poverty was widespread, and there were large social disparities in urban and rural areas alike.
The creation of associations was an important new aspect of Danish society. The first associations were created during absolute rule in the upper middle classes of Copenhagen society, but in the second half of the nineteenth century they became part of organisational activity for all social classes, aside from the poorest. These associations had political, economic, social, cultural and religious aims.
Within the narrow constitutional margins of political enfranchisement between 1849 and 1866, which only included male heads of households, large-scale political mobilisation took place. After 1870, this mobilisation took the form of political parties, which focused their attentions on specific social classes in the towns and the countryside. Party newspapers communicated the various party lines and played a role in creating a political life characterised by oppositions between rural and urban, high and low, and inside and outside the parliament.
At the end of the period, a more individual-oriented mindset broke through, which paved the way for the political enfranchisement of women and servants at the local level. At the same time, modern mass communication laid the foundations for people from various social backgrounds and with various political perspectives to identify as Danish – and thus as part of a cohesive imagined community.