Oddities of History: How Napoleonic Marshal became King of Sweden and Norway

It turns out that kings become not only the right of succession to the throne or as a result of a successful marriage. There is one amazing example in history when a foreign citizen became a king of a country, a completely stranger who did not even know the language of the state, which he successfully managed for 26 years. Moreover, he was a king on completely legal grounds, his son and subsequent descendants inherited the throne, and the dynasty founded by him still rules in Sweden. We are talking about a French marshal named Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte, who went down in history as King Charles XIV Johan.

At the beginning of the XIX century, the territory of Sweden and Norway was part of a single union state, formally led by King Charles XIII, and in fact controlled by the aristocracy. All the monarchs of Europe were horrified by the revolutionary anti-monarchist events in France and considered it their duty to confront the Napoleonic army. Swedish soldiers in the Prussian military units also took part in the battles with the French, but these battles were lost. As a result of the defeat, about 1,000 Swedish soldiers were captured by the army under the command of Bernadotte, on whose orders the prisoners were treated very humanely, which was not characteristic of that time.

Today, this may seem incredible, but for the nineteenth-century Europe, such turns in the political life of states were quite common. Due to the fact that the marshal was universally respected and was kind to captured Swedish soldiers, the Swedish parliament invited him as heir to the throne. This step was also taken for foreign policy reasons, since the Scandinavian state wanted to improve its relations with powerful and warlike France. The current king Charles XIII, who has no official heirs, simply adopted the French marshal, and after his death, in 1818, he ascended the throne on completely legal grounds.

Under such strange circumstances, a man who did not have a drop of royal blood and did not even belong to a noble family ended up on the Swedish-Norwegian throne. After the coronation, Bernadotte became known as Charles XIV, but did not learn Swedish until the end of his days, communicating with his subjects in his native French. Despite the Scandinavian throne, he remained a Frenchman: he did not understand Swedish cuisine, preferring omelettes and crispy baguettes, and also loved spending time in the suburban residence of Rosenendal, built specifically for him in the style of French Empire.