Talk:Kingdom of Finland (1918)

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Saying "the Parliament of Finland, the Finnish Parliament"is redundant and unnecessarily endian. Edited appropriately. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Allthenamesarealreadytaken (talk • contribs) 05:01, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

The flag with the blue cross became official in June 1918 and replaced the "Lion Flag" used until then. So, the "Lion Flag" was already obsolete by the time the King was proclaimed by the Finnish Parliament. The picture of the flag should be changed accordingly. Monegasque 21:06, 19 September 2007 (UTC)

Not a "state"

I have removed the "former country" template because because there was never a Kingdom of Finland. The Finnish Wikipedia article title "Suomen kuningaskuntahanke", "The Kingdom of Finland attempt" is a better title. The monarchist constitution was never established, and king as only king-elect. Sure, there was no republican constitution at that point, but the king had no de jure or de facto power, unlike the regent of Finland, who was Pehr Evind Svinhufvud.

• Finland declares independence: December 6, 1917
• Independence recognized: January 4, 1918 (Finland ruled by a regent, not king)
• Monarch elected: October 9, 1918 (several months later)
• Throne renounced: December 14, 1918

It is thus erroneus to call this a separate state or the successor state to Grand Duchy of Finland. It was just a short-lived attempt at best. --Pudeo' 22:42, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

Though I must say, this article is redirected from many country lists and other similar topics. It is unfortunate that this really does not fit those purposes. Finland from December 1917 to present should be referred to Finland, and before that to Grand Duchy of Finland. --Pudeo' 22:48, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

I agree that Kingdom of Finland is rather misleading, but wouldn't the king have had de jure power, based on the laws retained from the Swedish times and used as base of the Tsars position? --LPfi (talk) 11:52, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

It depends on which legal construction you would use. The decision to elect a king was based on the following premises:

• The Finnish throne was vacant. (Dubious, as there was a Romanov pretender.)
• Finland was an independent state. (Again, this was contested by White Russians, although not by Bolsheviks.)
• The Constitutional Acts of 1772 and 1789 required the election of a new king. (Dubious, as the Parliament which had declared Finland independent had, in the same declaration, declared Finland a republic. Unanimously, because the two competing versions of the declaration both considered Finland a republic.)
• The Parliament assembled in the Diet was capable of acting and using a simple majority for royal election. (About 80 of 200 members were absent and unable to return to their seats and no new election had been called for.)

So, if you accept these four premises, the Finnish King would have had a de jure position. However, if you contest any of these, you would say that Friedrich Karl von Hessen had been illegally elected and his power rested on a minor part of Finnish society. --MPorciusCato (talk) 18:49, 12 October 2009 (UTC)

story of the name Väinö

• Some sources have him as "Väinö I"

In the parliamentary resolution which chose him to the kingship, he is mentioned as 'Fredrik Kaarle'.

In drafted documents (never 'signed' to effect), I think in foreign ministry, there were designations for the royal titulary. There he was named as King Kaarle. (Fredrik was possibly to be dropped, as it was and is somewhat alien to the Finnish language; whereas Kaarle is usual enough in Finnish

Väinämöinen is one of chief figures in the Kalevala, the epic of the 'nation'. Reconstrued (from chieftain) as sorta king.... However, there exists no contemporary (= historical) attestation of that Väinämöinen. National romantics in latter half of the 1800s had made several boys to be named Väinö, as a revitalization of 'ethnic' Finnish names (the name had NOT been in any use for centuries). There were therefore many Väinös floating around in 1918. (Most of them were young at that time, it was not long enough of that fashioability, to have many elderly men in 1918 with that name) But, I think, people in 1910s still more or less knew that it was an 'concocted' or 'invented' -at most, reconstrued- name, something which people were not at all using some decades (a generation) earlier.

At the time of the short-lived monarchy (autumn 1918), a republican satirist (Nuorteva, 'Olli') in his newspaper column made fun of the monarchy and there (as far as can be determined, the first ever time) pushed the satirical naming, 'Väinö I', to him. It looks to me that particularly some later republican propaganda perpetuated (-tendentiously-) that name 'Väinö I', and in that way, it has become something like an urban legend about the matter of the regnal name - believed by gullible people.

What is certain, is that no document of the government at the time ever mentions that 'Väinö' name for him. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.181.239.182 (talk) 00:08, 3 October 2009 (UTC)

I was probably the first to introduce the name Väinö I into this article, but I had only the word of my history teacher on that. He might have picked it up somewhere and pass it along as true. Only fennomania back in the day was such that it would have been a fitting regnal name, instead of Charles (which would have been the English name). And Väinö isn't such a rare name as you posit. Nor is Kaleva, my second name is Kaleva (admittedly because of Urho Kaleva Kekkonen). Any fennomaniac would have understood the importance of names, but I do think the royalist section would have preferred Charles/Carl/Kaarle. However, Väinämöinen and the diminutive Väinö are not interchangable. Urho wasn't a popular name until the fennomania of the 19th century. Rich people would have named their sons Victor or Erik instead.

91.152.238.199 (talk) 19:13, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

German urging?

"At the urging of the German Empire, Finland declared independence..." gives the impression that independence was a German idea. However, Finnish activists had been preparing for an armed struggle for independence ever since the Czar instituted a program of weakening Finnish autonomy from 1905 onwards. Measures taken included sending young men in secret to receive military training (in Germany, because it was at war with Russia) and smuggling in arms. Germany naturally looked to profit from any local armed struggle in a Russian dominion, but by the time Finland declared independence the czarist and following Menshevik governments had been overthrown and the Lenin government was trying to end the war on the Eastern Front. Finnish independence would thus no longer have been a top priority for the Germans in December 1917, even though they did send a division to assist the Finnish "White" forces in the ensuing civil war in the spring of 1918 (in which the remaining Russian troops took no active part).--Death Bredon (talk) 17:31, 28 September 2010 (UTC)

The Grand Duchy was not the direct predecessor

People keep reinserting to the info-box the false information that the direct predecessor were the Grand Duchy of Finland. That is simply not true: the direct predecessor was the Republic of Finland, as independence had been declared in December 1917, ten months before the election of the king, and that declaration of independence had referred to Finland as a republic. Thus both the predecessor and the successor was the Republic of Finland. On another notion, it can be debated should there even be an info-box, considering that the country never actually functioned as a kingdom, as the king-elect was never crowned nor did he even arrive in Finland. The title of regent is valtionhoitaja in Finnish and in Finnish usage that title can be used both in a monarchy and in a republic. The Finnish article is much more detailed and it has chosen to leave out the info-box. The Finnish article isn't even titled "Kingdom of Finland", instead it is titled "Finnish kingdom project" (Suomen kuningaskuntahanke), which stresses that the monarchy remained an unattainable attempt. --89.27.36.41 (talk) 06:13, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Not a state / former state, just a movement / attempt

I'm going to agree with the poster from 2009; this article incorrectly portrays this as a state that briefly existed, rather than a failed attempt to establish a monarchy. That's certainly how Finnish Wikipedia is portraying it, at least. For example, from one of the (weakish?) sources currently in the article, it says "which they sought to establish a monarchical form of government". Sought, not succeeded. Additionally, it was the same parliament that would establish republican rules in 1919, albeit after an election, so it's not like there was a fundamental change in government structure like a coup; there was continuity from 1918-1919. Finland was a proto-republic in 1918 (that happened to consider adding a monarchy) and was still a republic in 1919. Any objection to reformatting and possibly moving the article title to reflect this? SnowFire (talk) 17:41, 5 June 2020 (UTC)