Gustav III of Sweden
Gustav III ended fifty years of parliamentary government in Sweden with a bloodless coup at twenty-six, ruled as the model of the enlightened despot his correspondent Voltaire admired, founded the Academy and the opera, went to war with Russia to be a hero, and was shot in the back at a masked ball in his own opera house by a nobleman who thought him a tyrant. He was born in 1746, the son of Adolf Frederick and of Frederick the Great's sister, and grew up in the Age of Liberty, when the diet's two parties, the Hats and the Caps, governed and were paid by France and Russia to do it. He was in Paris being admired when his father died in 1771. On 19 August 1772 he put on his uniform, addressed the guards, and had the diet accept a new constitution that gave the king the executive, at the point of no bayonet anyone had to use. He then governed as the age prescribed. Torture was abolished, the currency restored, the press freed and then curbed, Jews admitted, a national dress designed by himself, the Royal Opera in 1782 and the Swedish Academy in 1786 with eighteen chairs on the French model, and plays of his own that the Academy politely praised. The nobility never forgave 1772. In 1788, with Russia at war with the Turks, he attacked it without the diet's consent, staging a Russian raid on the border to justify it. His officers mutinied in Finland, and he answered by calling the diet and, with the three lower estates against the nobles, forcing through the Act of Union and Security of 1789 that made him nearly absolute. The war ended in 1790 after the fleet's victory at Svensksund with nothing changed. He was planning a crusade against the French Revolution when, at the masquerade of 16 March 1792, a captain named Anckarström put a pistol to his back; he died thirteen days later at forty-six, having pardoned everyone but the conspirators. Verdi made an opera of it and the censors moved it to Boston.
- Lived: 1746 CE – 1792 CE
- Nationality: Swedish
- Roles: king, monarch
