The Svecoman movement or svecomania (; an adherent was a svekoman, , ) was a Suecophile or pro-Swedish nationalist movement in the 19th-century Grand Duchy of Finland. It took shape from about 1860 in opposition to the Fennoman movement, which held that Finnish should replace Swedish as the language of government, the courts, the schools and educated life. Against the Fennoman view that Finland was a single nation which happened to have a Swedish-speaking upper class, the Svecomans argued that the country contained two nationalities, one Finnish and one Swedish, and that the Swedish-speakers — some one seventh of the population, and by no means only the elite — were entitled to remain what they were.
The movement grew out of the student world of the Imperial Alexander University in Helsinki, around the philologist Axel Olof Freudenthal, and its supporters became known as "the Vikings" after one of their newspapers. Where earlier defenders of Swedish had spoken for a governing class, the Svecomans turned to the Swedish-speaking farmers and fishermen of the coast, whose dialects, place names and customs they set out to record and whose schooling they set out to fund. Out of these circles came the and its newspaper (1882), the popular-education society Svenska folkskolans vänner (1882) and the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland (1885).
Russian officials treated Swedish-mindedness as disloyalty. In Russian usage svekoman came to denote a political rather than a linguistic position, and from the 1890s the word was common in the imperial press as a term of abuse. When the four estates were replaced in 1906 by a parliament elected by universal suffrage, the Swedish Party reorganised itself as the Swedish People's Party. The Svecoman claim that the Swedish-speaking farmers and the Swedish-speaking educated class formed one people is the movement's lasting legacy. Its more radical descendants — and the demand for Swedish territorial self-government — belong to the years around Finnish independence in 1917 and had faded again by the 1920s.
Terminology The names svecomania and fennomania were both built on the suffix -mania, and the word svekoman came into general use around 1900 as a name for supporters of the Swedish nationality movement. Historians have gone on using both terms, though not universally: Max Engman avoided them because he did not share "the idea that nationalism was a disease or a derangement", and wrote of political actors instead as "Swedish-minded" (Swedish svensksinnad, Finnish ruotsinmielinen), matched by "Finnish-minded" for the other camp.
Background Finland had belonged to Sweden from the Middle Ages until the Finnish War of 1808–1809, when it was ceded to Russia and became an autonomous grand duchy within the Russian Empire. In a manifesto of June 1808 the emperor had promised that the population would keep its Swedish laws, including representation by estates, and he confirmed that undertaking at the Diet of Porvoo in March 1809. Swedish law and Swedish administration therefore stayed in force, and Swedish remained the language of government, the courts and higher education, although more than 85 per cent of the population spoke only Finnish. Swedish kept that dominant position until the beginning of the 20th century, even though only one seventh of the population had it as a first language.
Swedish-speakers were a minority, and they fell into two very different groups: the small educated class that ran the country, and a much larger farming and fishing population along the southern and western coasts. In 1880 they numbered 294,000, or 14.3 per cent of the population, a share that had been roughly stable for decades. For most of the century the two groups had little to do with one another. The upper class understood itself as the leadership of a Finnish nation and was willing in principle to give up Swedish for a laborious assimilation into the Finnish-speaking majority — and expected the Swedish-speaking countryside to follow it there. In practice the change came late: Swedish remained the home and working language of the administrative and academic elite until the 1880s, and the language of most higher education until the 1870s.
The Fennoman programme received its sharpest formulation from the philosopher Johan Vilhelm Snellman, whose thesis was "one nation, one language". It was given official effect by the that Emperor Alexander II — who ruled the country as its grand duke — issued in 1863, which laid down that Finnish was to be made equal to Swedish as a language of administration within twenty years, a deadline that was later extended. In the same year the emperor summoned the Diet of Finland for the first time in fifty-four years. From then on the Diet met regularly, and until the reform of 1906 it remained the arena of Finnish politics: four separate estates of nobility, clergy, burghers and peasants, chosen on a franchise that reached only a propertied minority.
Because the struggle was above all about the educated class and its language, the decisive institution was the grammar school that led to the university. That was where the future elite was trained, and it was the only route by which a thorough change of language could be brought about. As the Swedish-minded paper put it in 1874, whoever controlled the schools controlled the future.
Nor could Finland's Swedish-speakers look to Sweden for a way out. The Crimean War of 1853–1856, in which British and French squadrons attacked the Finnish coast and briefly occupied Åland, ended Finland's position as a Swedish irredenta: the Finns had shown themselves reasonably content under the emperor, and with the collapse of political Scandinavianism in 1864 the idea of a reunion with Sweden disappeared from the agenda of Swedish politics.
Origins: Freudenthal and the Vikings
The beginning of Swedish nationalism in Finland is usually dated to debates in Nylands Nation — the student society for men from the province of Nyland — in 1859–1860, when Axel Olof Freudenthal (1836–1911) argued almost alone that educated young men should not help to Finnicise the Swedish-speaking population of their own province. The group that formed around him gathered around the newspapers — founded in 1861 and taken over by Freudenthal's supporters in 1869 — and Wikingen (1870–1874). The group was nicknamed "the Vikings" or "the Viking party". It drew on academic circles in Nyland with close ties to the landowning peasantry and to the burghers of the towns. Like the early Fennomans, the Vikings recruited chiefly among students, and they set themselves deliberately against the aristocratic outlook of the senior civil servants.
For Freudenthal and those who followed him, language was the primary test of nationality, and Finland therefore contained two nationalities, a Finnish and a Swedish one. The senior officials, by contrast, recognised only one Finnish nationality, whose upper class happened to speak Swedish. In keeping with the racial science of the period the two nationalities were also described as separate races, and the movement's scholarship emphasised what was archaic and Germanic, tying the Swedes of Finland to ancient western, Nordic and Swedish roots.
In the school question this produced a distinct position. Where the Fennomans wanted the language of a school to follow the language of its district — in practice a demand for Finnish — Wikingen insisted that it should follow the mother tongue of the pupils themselves, if necessary through parallel classes, and opposed bilingual schools altogether. The argument was framed as a right of the individual pupil, which was at the same time a shrewd defence of the small and exposed Swedish-speaking minorities of the interior.
Freudenthal was not the first to notice the Swedish-speaking countryside: Otto Höijer, Anders Svedberg and Fredrik Cygnaeus had all written in 1858–1860 about the educated class's neglect of it and contempt for it. What was new was the political conclusion drawn from it, since the rural population was now treated as the core of a nationality and tied directly to the Swedish-speaking elite. Students travelled into the Swedish-speaking districts of Nyland and Ostrobothnia to collect dialects, place names, songs and customs. Freudenthal founded a society for the study of Finland's Swedish dialects in 1874, wrote the first descriptions of the dialects of Närpes and Vörå, and from 1878 held the university's first chair of Swedish language and literature. The same taste for a Nordic past shaped the movement's self-image. On Freudenthal's proposal Nylands Nation began collecting money for a house of its own. It was inaugurated in 1883, built in a freely conceived Old Norse style and containing a "chieftain's hall". Finnish-minded critics called the project separatist and isolationist.
Rural and cultural Swedishness
Swedish-mindedness was never a single doctrine. Historians distinguish two strands. "Rural Swedishness" (), associated with Freudenthal, emphasised a Finland-Swedish people rooted in the Swedish-speaking countryside. "Cultural Swedishness" (), associated with the professor of aesthetics Carl Gustaf Estlander, emphasised instead the Swedish inheritance in Finland's social institutions, culture and literature — a heritage shared across the language boundary, and in that view a reason for the whole country to keep Swedish rather than a reason to constitute a separate people.
Organisations and the Swedish Party
Both strands took part in building the institutions of Swedish Finland. When Estlander set out to found a Swedish counterpart to the Finnish Literature Society of 1831 he went to Freudenthal and to the newspaperman Axel Lille, which has been read as a sign that he wanted the broadest possible base for the plan; the Society of Swedish Literature in Finland was founded on Runeberg Day, 5 February 1885. The Vikings' interest in popular education produced Svenska folkskolans vänner ("Friends of the Swedish Elementary School") in 1882, which funded Swedish-language schools and folk high schools, answering similar Fennoman efforts on the Finnish side.
The Swedish Party grew directly out of the Viking group, and in 1882 Axel Lille founded Nya Pressen as its organ. During the 1880s the party dominated the noble and burgher estates of the Diet, while the Finnish Party rested on the two socially more homogeneous estates of the clergy and the peasantry. Swedish-mindedness was not the only course open to the Swedish-speaking elite: through the 1860s and 1870s the liberals dominated it, and as late as 1880 Leo Mechelin dismissed Freudenthal's followers as "a small faction of Swedish zealots" and denied that the liberals had any special tie to the Swedish-speaking countryside. The liberal alternative nevertheless faded, and the Swedish Party was strengthened, and at the same time diluted, when many liberals joined it: they came not because they considered themselves members of a Swedish nationality, but because they wanted to preserve Finland's Swedish cultural form and its links westwards.
For a long time the party had no programme, no chairman, no field organisation and no party discipline, and the first general Swedish party meeting was held only in 1896. Its 741 participants came overwhelmingly from Helsinki and the rest of Nyland, and overwhelmingly from the educated class; only 69 were farmers or workers. The meeting nonetheless produced the first large political confrontation between the Swedish-speaking educated class and the countryside, whose speakers complained of advancing Finnicisation and of the gulf between the classes, and it prepared the ground for the change into a popular party in 1906.
Russification