NORWAY HAD GONE from being a possession of the Danish king to holding a new subordinate role under the Swedish king, but a political vacuum had arisen as Danish authorities no longer exercised power in Norway and a Swedish presence had not yet been established. In this situation Norway refused to accept the terms of the Kiel Treaty. The Danish king had relinquished his claim to Norway for all time and sovereignty had reverted to the Norwegian people. The 17 May Constitution was created with all convenient speed. This is how it happened:

The Viceroy of Norway since 1813, the young Crown Prince Christian Frederik, heir to the Danish throne, wrote these lines in his diary when he received the news from Kiel: ‘I should leave the Norwegian nation without even trying to defend it? Never…no, not as long as I live.’ Denmark declared war on Sweden 3 September 1813, Norwegian units were in position on the Swedish border, the navy was alerted and in January 1814 the army was fully mobilized. Then sixty leading citizens in the city of Trondheim supported the independence mood and suggested that a congress ought to assemble ‘to create the foundation for the future constitution of the kingdom’. The Viceroy gathered a group of twenty-one distinguished men at Eidsvoll 16/17 February 1814, referred to as the meeting of notables. It was a revolutionary act. The Prince's declaration after the meeting confirmed that the Norwegian people had been released from their oath to King Frederik VI in Kiel, had regained the full rights of a free and independent people to decide their own constitution and would accordingly assert and defend its independence and autonomy. The sovereignty principle was enshrined in the North-American constitution of 1787 and in the French revolutionary constitutions after 1789. John Locke had introduced the concept of the rights of man, Jean Jacques Rousseau the sovereignty of the people and Charles de Montesquieu the separation of powers (legislative, executive and judicial). These principles were known in Norway, but the dramatic transition from a constitution built on royal sovereignty to one built on the people's sovereignty, from total rule to total democracy, had not been discussed and prepared in Norway.