Mannerheim becomes regent of Finland

A British chronology of the war records under 11 December 1918 that General Carl Gustaf Mannerheim was elected regent of Finland. Finnish accounts give the following day. On 12 December the Finnish parliament, the Eduskunta, entrusted him with supreme power in the state in succession to Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, who had held it since May. Sources differ on the date of Svinhufvud’s resignation: some Finnish accounts give 10 December, others, including the Finnish biographical dictionary, 12 December. Mannerheim was not even in the country at the time. He was elected in his absence, while he was still abroad after talks in London and Paris.

The end of the German orientation

The change at the head of the state was a consequence of Germany’s defeat. After the Whites’ victory in the civil war, Finland had tied itself to the Reich. Svinhufvud and the monarchist Senate of Juho Paasikivi hoped that a German guarantee would secure independence against Russia, and on 9 October a rump parliament, from which almost the whole of the left had disappeared, elected Prince Frederick Charles of Hesse, Wilhelm II’s brother-in-law, to the throne of the Kingdom of Finland. The prince delayed his answer, and when news of the revolution in Germany reached Helsinki on 9 November, the Finnish leaders lost faith in the project. The victorious Entente had no intention of recognising a state ruled by a German prince and by men associated with Berlin. Britain and the United States had still not recognised Finland’s independence, and France, according to Finnish accounts, had withdrawn its recognition in October in protest against the election of a king.

On 27 November Paasikivi’s Senate resigned. A new government was formed by Lauri Ingman, and the senators, now renamed ministers, came from both the monarchist and the republican camps. The foreign affairs portfolio went to Carl Enckell, a politician well disposed towards the Entente. Svinhufvud, who was associated with the German orientation and the monarchy project, had to go. According to the Finnish historian Seppo Tiihonen, as early as 17 November he sent Mannerheim a telegram in which the government asked the general to take up the office of regent, and Mannerheim agreed.

A man to talk to the Entente

Mannerheim was the natural candidate. In the spring he had commanded the Whites, but at the end of May he resigned as commander-in-chief, because he would not accept the subordination of the Finnish army to German officers, and left for Sweden. In Stockholm he kept up contacts with Entente diplomats, and in the autumn the government sent him to Britain and France. From 12 November to 10 December he held talks in London and Paris with, among others, Robert Cecil, the French foreign minister Stéphen Pichon and Arthur Balfour. He was told plainly that the condition for recognising Finland’s independence was Frederick Charles’s renunciation of the crown. The Allies also demanded that Finland get rid of its German military advisers: on 6 December, at their insistence, the German Colonel von Redern stepped down as chief of staff of the Finnish army.

Ingman wrote the prince a personal letter in which, in the interest of Finland, he asked him to renounce the throne. In a letter dated 14 December Frederick Charles “released Finland” from its choice. According to some historians the letter may have been written only a few days later, and the Finnish newspapers published its contents on 27 December. The project of a German monarchy in Finland finally collapsed.

Regent

The new regent, a monarchist by conviction, exercised power with the breadth that the monarchists had envisaged for the future king. He saw his role above all in foreign policy: he was to win Finland recognition from the victorious powers and bread for the starving country. He returned to Helsinki in the second half of December, according to the memoirs of General Rüdiger von der Goltz a few days after the last German troops had sailed. From 30 December he was also commander-in-chief of the Finnish army.

Mannerheim’s regency lasted a little over seven months. In the spring of 1919 Britain and the United States recognised Finland’s independence. The republicans won the elections of March 1919, and on 17 July Mannerheim, albeit reluctantly, ratified the republican constitution. In the first presidential election, held by parliament on 25 July 1919, he was clearly defeated by Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg and withdrew from politics.