Peter Andreas Heiberg was a Danish

Danish language

Danish is a North Germanic language spoken by around six million people, principally in the country of Denmark. It is also spoken by 50,000 Germans of Danish ethnicity in the northern parts of Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where it holds the status of minority language...

 author and philologist

Philology

Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...

. He was born in Vordingborg

Vordingborg

Vordingborg is a municipality in Region Sjælland on the southeast coast of the island of Zealand in south Denmark. The municipality includes the island of Masnedø, and covers an area of 621 km². It has a total population of 46,600...

, Denmark

Denmark

Denmark is a Scandinavian country in Northern Europe. The countries of Denmark and Greenland, as well as the Faroe Islands, constitute the Kingdom of Denmark . It is the southernmost of the Nordic countries, southwest of Sweden and south of Norway, and bordered to the south by Germany. Denmark...

. The Heiberg ancestry can be traced back to Norway

Norway

Norway , officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic unitary constitutional monarchy whose territory comprises the western portion of the Scandinavian Peninsula, Jan Mayen, and the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard and Bouvet Island. Norway has a total area of and a population of about 4.9 million...

, and has produced a long line of priests, headmasters and other learned men. Peter Andreas Heibergs father was the Norwegian-born headmaster of the grammar school

Grammar school

A grammar school is one of several different types of school in the history of education in the United Kingdom and some other English-speaking countries, originally a school teaching classical languages but more recently an academically-oriented secondary school.The original purpose of mediaeval...

 in Vordingborg, Ludvig Heiberg, while his mother was Inger Margrethe, daughter of the vicar at the manor of Vemmetofte Peder Heiberg, a relative of Ludvig Heiberg, and Inger Hørning, who came from a family of wealthy Danish merchants.

His father died when Heiberg was just two years old, and his mother moved with the children to live with her father at Vemmetofte near the town of Faxe

Faxe

Faxe or Fakse is a town in Denmark in Region Sjælland on the island of Zealand.Before the Danish Kommunalreformen , Fakse was also a municipality...

 in Zealand. This was to be Heiberg's home until he went to grammar school, from which he graduated in 1774. In 1777 he took the greater philological exam, and in 1779 he left Copenhagen

Copenhagen

Copenhagen is the capital and largest city of Denmark, with an urban population of 1,199,224 and a metropolitan population of 1,930,260 . With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region...

, presumably due to gambling debts. He then went to Sweden

Sweden

Sweden , officially the Kingdom of Sweden , is a Nordic country on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. Sweden borders with Norway and Finland and is connected to Denmark by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund....

 to join the Swedish military forces. One and a half years later, his family bought him out of his military service, and after a short stay in Uppsala

Uppsala

- Economy :Today Uppsala is well established in medical research and recognized for its leading position in biotechnology.*Abbott Medical Optics *GE Healthcare*Pfizer *Phadia, an offshoot of Pharmacia*Fresenius*Q-Med...

, he went to Bergen

Bergen

Bergen is the second largest city in Norway with a population of as of , . Bergen is the administrative centre of Hordaland county. Greater Bergen or Bergen Metropolitan Area as defined by Statistics Norway, has a population of as of , ....

, where he stayed with his uncle for three years. In Bergen Heiberg met several writers who inspired him to start writing himself. After his return to Copenhagen, he used his linguistic skills to get a job as an interpreter. Heiberg also translated a publication by the French writer Jean-Charles Laveaux, which was highly critical towards the upper class

Upper class

In social science, the "upper class" is the group of people at the top of a social hierarchy. Members of an upper class may have great power over the allocation of resources and governmental policy in their area.- Historical meaning :...

, this was likely the reason why Heiberg chose to publish the translated version anonymously

Anonymity

Anonymity is derived from the Greek word ἀνωνυμία, anonymia, meaning "without a name" or "namelessness". In colloquial use, anonymity typically refers to the state of an individual's personal identity, or personally identifiable information, being publicly unknown.There are many reasons why a...

. In 1790, Heiberg marries the 16 year old Thomasine Buntzen

Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd

Baroness Thomasine Christine Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd was a Danish author, born in Copenhagen. Her maiden name was Buntzen....

 with whom he has the son Johan Ludvig

Johan Ludvig Heiberg (poet)

Johan Ludvig Heiberg , Danish poet and critic, son of the political writer Peter Andreas Heiberg , and of the novelist, afterwards the Baroness Gyllembourg-Ehrensvärd, was born in Copenhagen....

.

Many of Heiberg's role models were French and usually marked by the ideals of the enlightenment age

Age of Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment was an elite cultural movement of intellectuals in 18th century Europe that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. It promoted intellectual interchange and opposed intolerance and abuses in church and state...

.

His début novel Rigsdalersedlens Hændelser (1789) critically describes merchants, the nobility and the German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 influence on Denmark. This novel highly angered the Danish upper class, but Heiberg kept writing similarly critical songs, articles, essays and plays. This led to Heiberg being banished

Exile

Exile means to be away from one's home , while either being explicitly refused permission to return and/or being threatened with imprisonment or death upon return...

 on Christmas eve

Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve refers to the evening or entire day preceding Christmas Day, a widely celebrated festival commemorating the birth of Jesus of Nazareth that takes place on December 25...

, 1799. He had previously been given many warnings and fines for his works full of criticism of the government, but following the new harsher censorship laws by the ruler crownprince Frederick

Frederick VI of Denmark

Frederick VI reigned as King of Denmark , and as king of Norway .-Regent of Denmark:Frederick's parents were King Christian VII and Caroline Matilda of Wales...

 in September 1799 he was accused and sentenced retroactively to banishment. Thereafter, Heiberg settled in Paris

Paris

Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...

where he lived until his death in 1841.

Sources

• Henning Fenger, The Heibergs, Twayne Publishers, 1971.
• Biography on pp. 741-42 in Mark Goldie & Robert Wokler (eds.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, Cambridge University Press, 2006. ISBN 978-0-521-37422-4.