The Story of War: Church and Propaganda in France and Sweden, 1610–1710, by Anna Maria Forssberg

Abstract

The most prominent theme in early modern Swedish historiography since the Second World War has been the construction of the ‘military state’, or the conscious building of institutions intended to extract resources for warfare. In recent decades, such work has taken a cultural turn and examined how the state legitimised its military demands. Building upon her published Swedish dissertation, Anna Maria Forssberg compares how the French and Swedish states used religious ceremonies, and particularly the French Te Deum and the Swedish days of thanksgiving, as propagandistic mechanisms to legitimate war. These propaganda mechanisms functioned by coupling the diffusion of selected information with ritualised celebration, fostering group solidarity around a shared narrative of the experience of war. The book has three parts, which treat information, ritual and narration, while moving roughly chronologically. Forssberg depicts churches, whether Swedish Lutheran or Gallican Catholic, as functioning in the manner of modern ministries of information, forming crucial parts of the two governments’ ‘information systems’. In Sweden, the church played the predominant role in diffusing the government’s message, alongside the Riksdag, local administration and the royal printer. In the more diverse print culture of France, the monarchy was less dependent on the church to diffuse its message, but drew heavily upon printed forms of propaganda, such as the Gazette de France, and on administrators, whether in Parlements or outside them.