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[cahn]

This is totally too good to keep to myself: on my "I showed my family opera clips" post, mildred_of_midgard and selenak are talking about Frederick the Great (by way of Don Carlo, of course) and it is like this amazing virtuoso spontaneous thing and whoa

Things I knew about Frederick the Great before a year ago: he was king of... Prussia??

Additional things I knew about Frederick the Great before the last couple of days: selenak informed me last year that he and his dad may well have been at least somewhat the inspiration for Schiller's Don Carlos, and everything that goes with that: his dad (Friedrich Wilhelm, henceforth FW) was majorly awful, he had a boyfriend (Katte) who was horribly killed by his dad

Only a partial list of the additional things I now know about Frederick the Great (henceforth "Fritz") and associated historical figures due to mildred and selenak:
-Fritz and Katte's escape plan (which resulted in Katte's execution) was... really, really boneheaded. As boneheaded as opera plots! :P
-Katte was in the process of destroying 1,500 letters when he got caught (! puts all those letters in Don Carlos into perspective) (ETA: but also see mildred's comment below)
-Fritz wrote opera libretti and so did his sister
-Fritz decided to use himself as an experimental test subject to see if it was entirely possible to do without sleep via the application of coffee WITH PEPPERCORNS AND MUSTARD
-Fritz wrote a poem about orgasm that also reads as if he's never actually, like, had sex (although that was not in this post, it was in the comments to this one)
-FW apparently beat up George II when they were kids
-I am totally not even going to try to summarize the discussion about FW's "rationalized sadism" and sexual hangups and the reeeeeally bizarre Dresden interlude (go down a couple of comments for the really insane stuff)
-Fritz' sister Wilhemina wrote tell-all memoirs about her totally insane family which I am SUPER going to read now, watch this space

Also, there is apparently some subplot involving Russian fanboys that introduces an entirely new cast of people which I am dying to find out about

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

Other anecdotes of note.

Fritz was an anti-anti-vaxxer. Vaccination per se hadn't been invented yet, but inoculation via variolation had, and Fritz was *all for it*, and got super mad at it getting banned in France, the same way we get mad at anti-vaxxers today. So mixed in with all the deaths, he saved some lives.

Plus the lives that he failed to take because the criminal code became less harsh (still very harsh by modern standards) in most respects under his rule.

One thing he takes a lot of modern heat for is leaving the death penalty for "sodomy" while probably committing more than his share of sodomy, and even if not technically committing it in practice, definitely all for it in theory. However, I would be super curious about whether enforcement changed at all under Friedrich II, in either direction. (Sodomy law is one of those things where enforcement has varied widely across place and time. If you read up on Renaissance Florence, for example, it's amaaaaazing.) There has to be some queer history paper or book out there where someone's looked into this.

Another fun, out-there anecdote that you can add to your peppercorns and orgasm list: he and Wilhelmine once wrote letters to each other, each pretending to be their dog writing to the other one's dog, because of course they did. The letters are a little on the misanthropic side, all "The more people I meet, the more I love my dog," but they're also adorable and more than a little weird. You can read the context and English translations of the letters here.

Would not be at all surprised if this ever happened in real life. "I'm a very busy king, total workaholic, no time to sleep, important stuff to do, don't bother me!" *closes door* "Whoooo's a good giiiirl?" Would not be surprised if it happened more than once.

[mildred_of_midgard]

OMG, forgot to tell THIS anecdote.

In addition to homosexuality being a capital offense, so was bestiality. There are at least two accounts of Friedrich refusing to enforce this sentence against someone who'd had sex with a four-legged animal. In one case, it was a member of the cavalry who'd had sex with his horse. Fritz's punishment was to put him in the infantry, which, as it was both a demotion (the cavalry being the more prestigious of the two) and got him away from horses, I consider quite a neat little solution.

On the other occasion, Friedrich wrote, and you're going to love this, "In this country, there is freedom of conscience and penis."

Now, the plural of anecdote is not data, but I HOPE, and I expect, that it was a lot easier to get away with homosexual intercourse under his reign than previous reigns. Still would have been infinitely better for all, e.g. people after he died, to lift the death penalty, but I accept that reformers run into problems getting their reforms accepted. And I would still love to see the data on prosecutions.

But anyway. CONSCIENCE AND PENIS. Yes, Fritz, I'm sure your subjects loved religion and sex being placed side-by-side like this. Go you!

[cahn]

"In this country, there is freedom of conscience and penis."

LOL OMG FRITZ

[mildred_of_midgard]

RIGHT?! Most on-brand thing he ever said. "I am an extremely enlightened monarch! As well as an extremely gay one!"

Sadly, our source on this is Voltaire, which, Voltaire + things stated or implied about Fritz and sex =/= reliable journalism, so unless there's another source corroborating this anecdote, I find it suspect, but, you know, I totally believe it anyway. :P If he didn't literally say it in those words, I feel the message was received regardless.

[cahn]

ahahahaha :D I will take it with a grain of salt, then, although clearly I need to read more Voltaire :P

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oddly (or perhaps not oddly), the biography I was reading this in cites this as a true fact with no reference to the fact that estranged!Voltaire is not the most reliable source on Fritz. That said, I'm finding that the majority of history I read has the same MO: just state things from the primary sources without critically evaluating them. Leaving you frustrated if you have any familiarity with the sources at all, or even have just read other books that selectively cited different material from the sources.

REGARDLESS. I can imagine Fritz reading this and thinking, "Damn, I missed my chance! That's a great line, can't believe I didn't think of it. It's not too late, is it? Quick, someone go fuck a donkey or a horse so I can pardon you with freedom of the penis." (He always admired Voltaire's way with words, all his life, even when he was busy denigrating him as a person and having him arrested and stuff. When Old Fritz was rapidly approaching his deathbed and having his favorite authors read to him in the evenings to distract him from the pain, in the last month of his life, our sources record that the very last piece of literature read to him was something by Voltaire. Ultimate frenemies. <3)

[cahn]

Argh, I hate that. I am totally happy with quoting Voltaire on this, I just want to know that it's Voltaire I'm quoting, not Fritz himself, you know?

[mildred_of_midgard]

I know. So many times we think we're quoting someone, and we forget or don't realize we're quoting someone else attributing something to them.

And I mean, maybe we do have Fritz directly on that (I would be over the moon if we did), but given that my only source quotes Voltaire, I'm thinking we don't.

While I'm here, I reported in another comment that Voltaire published his memoirs anonymously and denied publishing them, leading to an authorship controversy, but all I can find when googling is that they were published posthumously. So I must be thinking of something else (one of his many other controversies, I'm sure). So take everything I say with a grain of salt too, since I'm frequently working from memory. ;)