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You MIGHT HAVE THOUGHT you were looking at a minuet, wrote Paul Hazard. Princes bow to the Philosophers, the Philosophers return the bow.1 The relationship is nonetheless a complex and ambiguous one, as a consideration of Gustav III of Sweden (1771-1792), traditionally included among eighteenth-century enlightened despots, will show. Gustav was born in 1746, when the monarch in Sweden was a crowned figurehead under the constitution of 1720 and the all-powerful Estates were bedeviled by the rivalry of Hats and Caps. His father, King Adolf Fredrik, was a man of modest pretensions. His mother, the intelligent and ambitious Lovisa Ulrika, sister of Frederick the Great of Prussia, was keenly interested in the scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic trends of the day and was in particular an admirer of Voltaire, whom she had known in Potsdam.2 In his fourth year, Gustav had appointed to him as governor Count Carl Gustav Tessin, who employed an informal, relaxed pedagogy, deriving largely from Locke. The queen, much concerned with the education of her first-born, wrote her mother in Berlin in 1752 that he was making great progress through instruction that stressed reasoning rather than mechanical memorization. Tessin had been at the Versailles of Louis XIV and had later served as ambassador to Paris. He imbued his pupil with the classical ideals of seventeenth-century France and the precepts of Fenelon's Te'maque. Gustav's inspiring tutor in history was meanwhile Olof von Dalin, known somewhat extravagantly at the time as the Voltaire
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