But highly commendable and worthy of admiration as the young King’s action was in these and many other respects, the defects of his character soon appeared, and gave his enemies an opportunity to undermine his work and his popularity. He lacked steadiness and firmness of purpose. He wanted to see and enjoy immediately the beneficent results of his reforms. Many of them were therefore abandoned before they had had time for full development; many very costly undertakings were discontinued because the King had either changed his mind or was tired of waiting. And then, he was extravagant in his personal expenses and in arranging grand court entertainments fashioned on the brilliant festivities of the French court at Versailles, which remained his model in all matters of court etiquette and royal display. Like Frederick the Great, to whom Gustavus the Third bears in many respects a striking resemblance, although he lacked the great Prussian’s military genius and wise frugality, he was fond of French literature and art, and made strenuous efforts to give them a supreme place in the educational institutions of the kingdom. The national genius of the Swedish people and language were consequently relegated to a secondary place. To make up for the unpopularity and protests which these efforts caused among the people, he devised a national costume for all the inhabitants; but in this attempt he failed entirely. The costume he had devised was copied from an ancient Spanish one, and utterly unsuitable for a northern country of short summers and severe winters. The King’s ordinances introducing these Spanish garments were openly disobeyed and laughed at. People began to look on him as a dreamer, and lost their respect for him.
But that which more than anything else hurt his popularity was the way in which he treated the liquor question. The mass of the Swedish people were strongly addicted to the excessive use of intoxicating liquors. The vice had assumed such proportions that measures of reform were urgently called for. But, with the usual impracticability of temperance reformers, Gustavus managed the matter so unskilfully that, instead of correcting the abuse, he made himself highly unpopular and aroused the most stubborn resistance to his reform policy. He had issued an edict prohibiting the manufacture and use of distilled liquors, but he found it impossible to enforce the edict: the peasants and farmers, who had been distilling their own whiskey, simply ignored it, while in a number of cities where distilleries were maintained for the manufacture and sale of the liquor, regular battles were fought between the police trying to suppress them, and the inhabitants enraged at the attempt to close them. Gustavus then repealed the edict and introduced a new system, which he hoped would at once diminish the vice of drunkenness and replenish his treasury, which was in a chronic state of exhaustion. He made the right of manufacturing and selling alcoholic liquors a crown monopoly, and established agencies for the sale of these liquors in all large and small cities and towns of the kingdom. But the peasants were not satisfied with this arrangement either. The whiskey they were to buy at the agencies was much dearer than their own home-distilled beverage; moreover, the towns and cities, at that time only thinly scattered over Sweden, were often so remote from the farms, and the roads leading to them were often in such an impassable condition that the purchase of whiskey was a difficult matter for the rural population. The clandestine and illicit manufacture of the beverage was carried on therefore as it had been before. But the very name of the King became odious to the people. They contemptuously called him “a crank, a visionary and a poet.” Writing poetry, in which Gustavus excelled, was in their eyes a symptom of folly and madness.