In the mid-18th century the Danish monarchy or helstat (the “Total State” – often imprecisely translated as the “Unitary State”) comprised the Kingdom of Denmark-Norway (“the Kingdom”, based on 10th-century realms, including the Faroe Islands and Iceland as well as overseas colonies, including Greenland) and the “Duchies”: the German-speaking Duchy of Holstein, a fief of the Holy Roman Empire, and the formally Danish but increasingly German-speaking Duchy of Slesvig, which was in most respects governed as a unit with Holstein (the nobility of both duchies forming a single body).
The Norwegian language had lost its written standard after the language of administration had become Danish in the 15th century, and was often regarded as a variant of Danish, e.g. by Ludvig Holberg. Danish or Norwegian was spoken by almost the entire rural population of the mainland parts of the Kingdom. The Icelandic language had an old written tradition but was too marginal to attract much interest until late in the 18th century. The Sámi languages of northern Norway were only codified by Rasmus Rask in the early 19th century, and the Faroese language by Venceslaus Ulricus Hammershaimb in the 1840s. Some colonial languages (Greenlandic and Virgin Islands Dutch Creole) had been codified by the Moravian Brethren in the mid-18th century, but their speakers were hardly considered “nations” at the time.
Before 1814, nationalism or patriotism addressed a wider field than Danishness in the stricter sense; Danes and Norwegians would be mentioned as one group as opposed to e.g. Holsteiners. As Norway was ceded to Sweden in 1814, the Danish state remained uninvolved in the question of whether Norwegian was an independent language and, as such, the basis of a separate cultural community: that question was played out outside the Danish borders.
In Slesvig the towns had from the late Middle Ages become increasingly bilingual (Danish/German). In Northern Slesvig the peasantry was Danish-speaking, while in Southern Slesvig, which had had German-speaking churches and schools since the Reformation, the peasantry was becoming predominantly German-speaking; North Frisian was spoken on the west coast and the Wadden Sea islands, but did not play into the hardening of national loyalties that took place over the 19th century.
A shared consciousness of a common Danish language and history had developed early among the citizenry, already by the 1740s. The culture of the nobility and the liberal professions was at that time mainly German-speaking; German was also current among the artisan class of the Kingdom’s cities, the German-speaking rural parts of the Duchies, and the mercenary army, which was officially German-speaking until 1773 and partly remained so until 1802. Since the rising citizenry, the supplier of young academics and officials, identified with Danish culture, the class conflict between nobility and citizenry gained a national-cultural dimension as well, with “Danishness” reflecting the social frustrations of the rising citizenry and Danish nationalism gaining an anti-aristocratic dimension.
National-cultural concerns were focused in the fields of theatre (e.g. the plays of the Norwegian Ludvig Holberg, 1684–1754) and history-writing. The historian Jacob Langebek (1710–1775) founded a society for popularizing history; Ove Malling’s Store og gode Handlinger af Danske, Norske og Holstenere (“Great and good deeds by Danes, Norwegians, and Holsteiners”, 1777) recycled elements from the millennium of the monarchy in its promotion of identity.
In 1770-84, while King Christian VII was mentally ill, actual power rested first with his German physician-in-ordinary, J.F. Struensee, and then with Privy Council Secretary Ove Høegh-Guldberg. Since the latter, a strong proponent of a Danish civic identity, had Struensee executed, there has been a tendency to perceive their conflict as a turning point. In 1776, with Høegh-Guldberg in office, the law on citizenship, or “native right”, indfødsret, was introduced, unprecedented in Europe at the time. It granted exclusive rights to all public offices to native-born Danes (including, however, German-speaking Holsteiners) and turned love of the fatherland into an official ideology. Danish identity was thus officially sanctioned by the monarchy, which, for all that it was absolutist in nature, could flexibly ally itself to the rising citizenry – a feature which may be unique in pre-1789 European proto-nationalism.
In the 19th century, Danish nationalism shared most traits with trends in Germany (although the Duchies posed an ongoing irritant between the two): a strong emphasis on cultural mobilization, the primacy of the people as a collective over state institutions, and invoking an outside Other (French in the German case, German in the Danish case).
Attitudes to the Duchies varied. In the 19th century, Holstein was seen as essentially German (indeed, national consciousness-raising there was fed by anti-Napoleonic resistance in the neighbouring German territories south of the Elbe), Slesvig as Danish. Language shifts in Southern Slesvig gave rise to the “Slesvig question”: should all of Slesvig be included on constitutional grounds, or should the nation be demarcated by the language, or by the self-identification of the people? The question was complicated by the fact that in Southern Slesvig language and national self-identification did not necessarily tally: there was a sizeable population still partly speaking a Danish dialect but nationally identifying itself with German culture.
Danish-national pamphlets and literary works (e.g. plays by Peter Andreas Heiberg) often took an anti-German tone. While the monarchy remained officially oriented towards the Total State, Danish schooling was promoted in the Kingdom, and German schools and congregations became fewer while Copenhagen’s German-language newspapers disappeared. Artisans’ guilds, however, remained bilingual until the end of the 19th century. Meanwhile, there was growing concern at the royal court about the decline of Danish in Southern Slesvig, and plans were made to counter this trend. In 1810 a proposed “language ordinance” was deemed too provocative, but in 1851, in the flush of victory following the First Slesvig War (1848-51), a “language ordinance” did come into effect. This in turn provoked German mobilization and did nothing to reverse the language shift.
The hugely influential and authoritative N.F.S. Grundtvig (1783–1872) shifted his position on the Slesvig question during his life and thus sums up the differing views current at the time. Like most of his contemporaries he was ready to give up Holstein as essentially German, and foreign to a Danish nation-state. At first he supported a partition of Slesvig, surrendering the German-identifying south, but after the First Slesvig War he moved from cultural to constitutional nationalism, wishing to incorporate all of Slesvig. After the Second Slesvig War (1864) he returned to a more culturalist view, hoping for a referendum to enable the northern half to assert its Danishness. However, Grundtvig tended to avoid the question of the delimitation of the people vis-à-vis the state, instead focusing on the relationship between the people and the king.
Grundtvig’s attitudes changed from an initial monarchical Reichspatriotismus after the cession of Norway in 1814. He came to regard the Danes as an essentially “chosen people” which, despite its small size, would play a decisive role in world history, like the Greeks and the Jews. This ethnic nationalism was based on a set of ethnotypes concerning the Danes’ national character, which also found favour with contemporaries like Hans Christian Ørsted and Bernhard Severin Ingemann. Although Grundtvig often invoked Danish “blood”, this was a metonymy for manners, customs, and social values, which also involved a discourse framing the nation in terms of a family or a household. His ethnotypes led him to reject both German Enlightenment philosophy and more recent German ethnonationalism around notions of Volkstümlichkeit; instead, he highlighted kinship with the English (whom, after travelling to Britain, he regarded as “Nordic”); he envisaged a Danish moral mission as establishing a synthesis between “German pondering” and “English action”.
These notions of national character would remain influential for a long time. They played into a typical post-Grundtvig Danish type of nationalism which involved cultural mobilization, if need be against established state institutions, but without folkloristic nostalgia or a static view of the peasantry. The peasantry was perceived not just as a timeless, demotic reservoir of ethnicity, but as a social layer in need of progressive development towards a civil society, comprising free schools, free congregations, and co-operatively owned industries.
The distinction between state and nation/people became obsolete after the cession of the Duchies to Prussia, following the 1864 war: henceforth, the Danish nation-state was perceived to be ethnically homogeneous. The lack of support from other Scandinavian countries signalled the demise of Pan-Nordic Scandinavism (which had a stronger persistence in culture than in politics) in favour of a more inward-looking, monoculturally Danish attitude, which located the nation’s glory in the great past rather than in contemporary geopolitical ambitions. Anti-German feeling expressed itself in the typographical changeover from the “Gothic” Fraktur font to the Roman font in 1870.
In its wider repercussions, the Danish defeat of 1864 heightened the militarist triumphalism of Prussia and proved a stepping-stone on the way to the crisis of 1870-71. In Britain, which since the marriage between Victoria and Albert had tended to sympathize with Germany as the “German Cousin”, anti-German reservations began to grow after 1864; in that process a certain role was played by the strenuously anti-German feelings of the Danish Princess Alexandra, who in 1863 had married the British Crown Prince (future Edward VII).
