Fennoman movement

The Fennoman movement or Fennomania was a Finnish nationalist movement in the 19th-century Grand Duchy of Finland, built on the fennophile currents of the 18th and early 19th centuries. Its aim was to raise the Finnish language and Finnish culture from the status of a peasant vernacular to that of a national language and a national culture, and ultimately to constitute Finland as a nation on a par with other European cultural nations. Its opponents, the Svecomans, defended the position of Swedish, and the confrontation between the two shaped the language strife that ran through the Grand Duchy's public life. Paradoxically, much of the movement's leadership was drawn from Swedish-speaking families. Johan Vilhelm Snellman, who gave political fennomania its most influential formulation in the newspaper Saima from 1844, argued that Swedish-speaking intellectuals such as himself had a duty to adopt the Finnish language and a Finnish national identity, and that Finnish was destined to replace Swedish as the language of education and administration; his thinking was given official form in the language rescript approved by Emperor Alexander II in 1863. Many Fennomans accordingly Fennicized their surnames, among them Yrjö Sakari Yrjö-Koskinen, born Georg Zacharias Forsman. The Finnish Party was founded in 1863 and became the movement's principal political organisation, dominated from the 1860s by the "Young Fennomans" (Finnish: jungfennomaanit) around Yrjö-Koskinen, whose insistence on strict adherence to their programme alienated both the older generation and, in the K.P.T. faction of the early 1880s, a socially radical student wing. In the 1890s the party divided into a conservative "Old Finnish" and a liberal "Young Finnish" wing, a rupture that under the Russian integration policy of 1899–1917 came increasingly to turn on loyalty to the emperor versus constitutional resistance. After independence in 1917 the intellectual legacy of fennomania was carried on in...