Frederick the Great post links

[cahn]

More Frederick the Great (henceforth "Fritz") and surrounding spinoffs history! Clearly my purpose in life is now revealed: it is to encourage mildred_of_midgard and selenak to talk to me about Frederick the Great and associated/tangential European history. I am having such a great time here! Collating some links in this post:

* selenak's post on Frederick the Great as a TV show with associated fandom; a great place to start for the general history

* I have given up indexing all posts, here is the tag of discussion posts. Someday when I actually have time maybe I'll do a "best of."


Some links that have come up in the course of this discussion (and which I am putting here partially for my own benefit because in particular I haven't had time to watch the movies because still mainlining Nirvana in Fire):
Fritz' sister Wilhelmine's tell-all tabloidy memoirs (English translation); this is Part I; the text options have been imperfectly OCR'd so be aware of that (NOTE 11-6-19: THIS IS A BOWDLERIZED TEXT, I WILL COME BACK WITH A BETTER LINK)
Part II of Wilhelmine's memoirs (English translation)
A dramatization of Frederick the Great's story, English subtitles
Mein Name ist Bach, Movie of Frederick the Great and J.S. Bach, with subtitles Some discussion of the subtitles in the thread here (also scroll down)
2017 miniseries about Maria Theresia, with subtitles and better translation of one scene in comments

ETA:
Miniseries of Peter the Great, IN ENGLISH, apparently reasonably historically solid
ETA 10-22-19
Website with letters from and to Wilhelmine during her 1754/1755 journey through France and Italy, as well as a few letters about Wilhelmine, in the original French, in a German translation, and in facsimile
University of Trier site where the full works of Friedrich in the original French and German have been transcribed, digitized, and uploaded:
30 volumes of writings and personal correspondence
46 volumes of political correspondence
Fritz and Wilhelmine's correspondence (vol 27_1)
ETA 10-28-19
Der Thronfolger (German, no subtitles; explanation of action in the comment here)
ETA 11-6-19
Memoirs of Stanisław August Poniatowski, dual Polish and French translation
ETA 1-14-20
Our Royal Librarian Mildred has collated some documentation, including google translate versions of the Trier letters above (see the "Correspondence" folder)!

Comments

[mildred_of_midgard]

This is a delightful purpose in life and very timely (for me)! I'm so glad you're having a great time. I started out trying not to overload you with my fandom just because you were interested in Verdi, but now I have abandoned all shame and am hijacking your posts to hold all my thoughts as they occur to me, in exactly the same way I used tumblr in my Hunger Games fandom days (before I jumped ship because of the great Adult Content Fiasco). :-DDDD

If not for my health woes, I'd be refreshing myself on 18th century history and telling you more about non-Fritz people, but alas, between finances limiting Kindle purchases, inability to read library books (or even the contents of my own book shelves), and, lately, inability to concentrate at all, you're just going to be in my "talking about Fritz makes me feel better" fandom for now. ;) Keep bringing the questions!

I need this lecture on Katte to have English subtitles, dammit! Hilariously, I discovered from this documentary that my ability to comprehend spoken German, which has always been 0%, is distinctly better on the subject of Katte's execution than any other topic in the world, because I have Google-translated *so many* of the German sources, but obviously I still can't comprehend an hour-long lecture. :-( Basically, there are topical words and phrases I now recognize, but if it's not one of those, i.e. if it's new and therefore worth listening to, then I'm just a non-German speaker.

AKA when "Hinrichtung" becomes one of your only German lexical items. :P

Wilhelm II and those-fanboys-you-don't-want-to-be-in-your-fandom in German history

Being in a fandom with history-rewriting Nazis is the worst. Fuck out of my fandom, Fritz would have kicked your collective asses!

ETA: Also, have you noticed that we just passed 400 comments on the 3 posts combined? :P

[primeideal]

Every time I see your posts I'm reminded that technically Frederick is the first character namedropped in "Godel, Escher, Bach" (obviously in the Bach context). Don't have anything to add to that but glad you're enjoying :)

Royal obsessions

[mildred_of_midgard]

We may have mentioned that FW was obsessed with collecting tall soldiers, but I don't think we've conveyed all the batshit anecdotes that went with his bizarre fetish. I haven't investigated the historical accuracy of all these anecdotes, some happened and some may be apocryphal, but he was obsessed enough that all of them have been attributed to him by someone thinking, "Yup, yup, old FW would totally have done that."

So he had this regiment called the Potsdam Giants, for which the only qualification was being tall. The taller you were, the better you got paid. It was pretty much FW's goal to have every tall man in Europe in his regiment, voluntarily or involuntarily.

One of the kidnapping stories goes something like this: some tall guy in some country that wasn't Prussia got tricked into lying down inside a chest in a store/workshop/something to settle a bet on how wide the chest was. Bang! went the lid, and the guy was shipped off to Potsdam inside the chest. (I've also heard that he arrived DOA because of lack of airholes, not sure if any of this is true.)

Other things FW's been accused of that I personally always put a mental question mark next to, until I find good evidence:1) Putting soldiers on the rack to make them even taller. 2) Eugenics, breeding tall men on tall women and having his agents keep an eye on any babies born in the realm that looked like they might become especially tall.

FW would have the giants paraded through his bedroom when he was sick, to make him feel better. He's supposed to have said that he was indifferent to the beauty of women, but tall soldiers were his weakness. ("But Ima get rid of all my son's boyfriends, because eww gay.")

Given the King's emotional attachment to them, the Potsdam Giants were way too precious to ever be risked in combat. They were strictly ornamental, to be paraded around for the King's visual enjoyment. This was good, as they were not especially good at fighting just because they were tall. In fact, there are stories that they were one of the less competent regiments. Some of them were likely tall as part of genetic conditions that came with other health problems.

Fritz thought this entire thing was ridiculous, a frivolous, pointless expense, and the moment he inherited he redistributed the giants into other regiments and stopped paying them just for being tall.

Now, how tall was FW, you might ask? Not tall. I've seen numbers ranging from 5'2" to 5'5". For Fritz, I've seen anywhere from 5'2" to 5'7". I'm sure none of this is helped by the lack of standardization of units. Napoleon himself got a reputation for being super short by dint of being 5'2" in French units, which is 5'6" in English units, and for hanging around tall soldiers that made him look shorter by comparison. So who even knows. But neither father nor son was anywhere near 6 feet tall, which I believe was the cut-off for the Potsdam Giants.

Soooo...FW was def compensating for his height, and possibly also very repressed sexual urges. Fritz: "Save money, admit your preferences. :-D "

Now, Fritz had his own costly royal obsession, which FW considered a frivolous, pointless expense, but with which we are much more in sympathy.

Namely, music. I know we've mentioned Fritz's flute-playing, art-patronizing, libretto-writing, musical-performance-dictating inclinations. But I'm not sure we've conveyed the level of obsession here. From the moment he took up flute playing in his teens until in old age he became physically incapable of it*, he played it every single day, barring the occasional acute episode of health that prevented him.

* My sources say it was when his teeth fell out. But I googled that, and everyone says it's possible to relearn to play the flute without teeth? I feel like either you can't get the same results, or else maybe his asthma played a role, because if it had been possible for him to keep playing, he would have. He was devastated when he had to put it away forever. He said he'd lost his best friend. :-(

Every day, he woke up at some ridiculous hour of Dark o'clock and started practicing the flute, did a bunch of paperwork, practiced some more, did more work of various kinds throughout the day, and dedicated the evening to listening to music and frequently performing chamber music for a small and select audience. He took his flute on campaign and practiced just as regularly in war as at peace.

After all this practice, I gather he was considered a quite proficient flute player. At any rate, people seem to have higher praise for his flute playing than his sonatas, concertos, symphonies, and the like, which seem to be considered good by amateur standards but far from anything to write home about. I'm not qualified to comment, but you can find performances of some of his compositions on YouTube and judge for yourself, if you care.

Dad, of course, thought flute playing was effeminate and that his son should only be interested in tall soldiers. So he forbade the whole endeavor. Meaning Fritz had to practice in secret. There's one lovely famous story that I think I've mentioned, where Quantz was giving Fritz a private lesson, and Katte was standing guard outside to give them warning as soon as the King approached. Katte and Quantz ended up hiding in a closet together while the King looked for evidence his son had been up to something. (This is why I raised an eyebrow at Mein Name ist Bach to see Quantz acting like he thought comparing Bach père to Fritz's father was bound to give Fritz warm and fuzzies toward Bach.)

At Rheinsberg, Fritz had to get his friends outside into a wood or a cave to practice music where no one could hear them. And once he became king, he recruited all the musicians he could get and never let them leave. (I feel like these facts are related, which is one example of what I meant by him reacting even more to chronic trauma than to Katte's execution.)

Throughout his life, Fritz chose many of his closest companions based on their musical inclinations. He and Wilhelmine used to play together, him on the flute and her on her lute. (As noted, she was a talented musician herself, and, as far as I can gather, the superior composer of the siblings--probably helped by the fact that her time wasn't divided with military campaigns and administrative micromanaging. You can also find some of her work on YouTube.)

One of the things Fritz bonded with Katte over was that they both played the flute. And Fredersdorf (one of the "six I have loved most") was a professional musician for the army, and he used to play the flute for Fritz during his imprisonment at Küstrin. In fact, Fritz's sympathetic jailers were so concerned about the treatment he was receiving that they told FW that they were afraid he would literally lose his mind under the abuse strict regimen he was put under to rehabilitate him after Katte's execution, and reluctantly FW gave them permission to lighten conditions a bit. And the number one way you keep Fritz sane in prison is by letting him have some flute music.

Side obsession: Fritz was a huge bookworm, as we've mentioned, and he kept having to accumulate secret libraries and hide them from Dad, who kept getting rid of them. During the escape attempt, one of Katte's responsibilities, along with "communicate with foreign envoys," "try to get an asylum offer," "acquire funding," and "take care of the Prince's valuables," was "get the secret library out of the country." Cause there's no point in fleeing for your life if you're not also bringing your books. MAN AFTER MY OWN HEART.

Epic rap battles of history

[mildred_of_midgard]

Okay, so this isn't a musical recommendation, but it *is* historical education via entertainment, so...

Apparently there is some YouTube series called Epic Rap Battles of History where actors portraying famous historical figures face off against each other and try to one up each other by recounting their accomplishments and putting the other person's down. It's basically a flyting.

And in one episode, Ivan the Terrible faces off against 3 of my faves: Alexander the Great, Frederick the Great, and Catherine the Great. Here's the 4-minute video of the battles, and what was of far more interest to me, the wiki article with the exegesis.

Most hilarious line IMO: "Oblique attack tactics ain't exactly straight." I realize it's just wordplay on a very recent meaning of the word "straight" and has no basis in psychological fact, but I've seen the line rendered "Oblique attack tactics(,) ain't exactly straight," and the ambiguity is just brilliant.

[mildred_of_midgard]

Aha! In "Pulvis et Umbra", I wrote, "The engineers were still trying to figure out the fountain at the bottom of the hill." This was based on something I had read about the development of Sanssouci, namely that Friedrich wanted a fountain spurting water into the air, but that it was a tricky problem before the 19th century and depended a lot on local topography, and engineers didn't figure out how to make it work at Sanssouci until the 19th century. (I like that they were still trying!)

You can see the product of their success in the picture I took when I was there. Oh, and this one, viewed from the top of the hill.

Well, what I didn't realize was that "engineers" included the great Euler! His Wikipedia page has this quote from Friedrich in a letter to Voltaire: "I wanted to have a water jet in my garden: Euler calculated the force of the wheels necessary to raise the water to a reservoir, from where it should fall back through channels, finally spurting out in Sanssouci. My mill was carried out geometrically and could not raise a mouthful of water closer than fifty paces to the reservoir. Vanity of vanities! Vanity of geometry!"

Engineering is hard, let's go shopping stick to math.

Likewise, in one of my comments on these posts, I mentioned the bit about the time the dogs started barking because there was a WOMAN in the room, but I had forgotten *which* woman, and never did know her life story. Fleshing out all these details is fun!

[mildred_of_midgard]

Canon check, please, selenak?

This is Fritz writing to Fredersdorf 2 days after the plundering of the Prussian camp and baggage train after Soor, an event in which all my sources agree that his dogs were captured by the enemy and later returned. (I know Eichel and Lesser survived and were returned too; not sure about the other two humans mentioned below, but I think so.)

"Meine ganze Equipage zum Teufel^a, Annemarie ist todt gehauen, der Champion muss auch todt sein; Eichel, Müller, der Dechiffreur und Lesser sind noch nicht ausgefunden."

Footnote by the editor: "a. Der König hat in dem Briefe nicht an Biche gedacht, von welcher er in einem späteren, ungedruckten Briefe an seinen Bruder Wilhelm sagt : « Nadasdy m'apris, le 30 septembre 1745, ma levrette anglaise qui s'appelle Biche, que mon laquais Claus conduisait. »"

My interpretation: Annemarie is a dog whose body has been found by the Prussians. Champion is a dog whose body has not turned up. Fritz is assuming all his dogs have shared Annemarie's fate. Biche, who we all know is one of Fritz's all-time favorite dogs and buried next to him at Sanssouci, isn't mentioned because Fritz is not talking about the death that hurts the most, just like with Katte. Later, definitely Biche and probably Champion are returned, at which point Fritz is hugely relieved and can talk about Biche again.

Reasonable interpretation?

MT marriage AU, cont'd

[mildred_of_midgard]

(Putting this in a new thread because selenak is right, the existing one was near unreadable.)

I had totally forgotten this happened, but while rereading parts of the Küstrin episode in MacDonogh's bio for the umpteenth time, I ran across this passage of great relevance to our interests, check it out:

Frederick was looking for solutions that might bring him back his liberty. On 11 April 1731 he hit on the idea of standing down as crown prince in favour of his brother William, and putting himself forward as a candidate for the Empire. To this end he suggested that one of the two Habsburg archduchesses might be made over to him for a wife. The letter was also signed by a group of men who were forming themselves into the prince’s new council: his marshal, Wolden, Natzmer and Rohwedel. Grumbkow was alarmed by this new suggestion from Frederick: ‘an archduchess would never marry a prince who wasn’t completely Catholic’. He sent the letter back to Hille and told him to burn it in the presence of the prince.

Both Seckendorff and the king none the less heard about the idea, the latter probably after Seckendorff sent word to Prince Eugene in Vienna, who was verging on senility and wanted Frederick William to tell him which archduchess he had in mind. Prince Eugene described the project as ‘peculiar’. Frederick William was even less impressed, and he was hurt by the thought that his son might consider converting to Catholicism.

For those of you who are new to this fandom and may or may not have the chronology memorized, keep in mind, Katte was executed Nov 6, 1730. This is only 6 months later. FW's "rehabilitation" regime is going full strength trying to break his son's will. Fritz must have been *desperate*.

Sanssouci

[mildred_of_midgard]

I, er, so, continuing with the theme of me being completely obsessed with Sanssouci and Fritz's burial choices...having written two fics on the subject, I have now proceeded to create what is probably the closest to fanart my inartistic self will ever come.

I.e., I discovered that Google sent someone to get lovely tourist-free images of the Sanssouci grounds on a clear day at sunrise before the park was open, so you can walk around the grounds without leaving your computer, and that's how I spent a good chunk of my evening.

Since you've both read "Pulvis et Umbra" and are now experts on the Antinous statue, I share with you this slideshow of captioned screenshots I compiled from Google street view, which, in full screen presentation mode, gives you pretty good visuals for that fic. You can see what's meant by things like "in the line of sight from my library."

Easter egg: the Antinous statue is extremely dark in these pictures (here's a link to a better picture, of the original), but you can just make out that it's facing the library window and raising both its arms. In "Pulvis et Umbra", I snuck in "a bronze statue of a naked young man, arms held aloft" in our introduction to the piece, followed by "Katte's hands were giving him no such problems. He raised both and waved easily to Friedrich" in Fritz's dream/near death experience.

If you look at the slideshow, you can visualize what I'm imagining: Fritz walks to his window, looks out, and sees Katte standing where the statue is, in a roughly similar pose. The dream also inserts a river in between the window and the statue/grave, which is, of course, less accurate and more symbolic. ;)

Thanks, Google!

I may or may not also have "driven" around the ruins of Kostrzyn today, I mean different parts than I usually drive around, WHAT? :P

On a less morbid note, I am intrigued by the staircases on the terraces. I didn't notice it while I was actually walking down them (walking up, I was sprinting all out because I was way late for my timed entry ticket to the palace, because I spent too long on the grounds), and it may simply be my own architectural ignorance and this may be way more common than I think, but this view looking up the hill reminded me of another staircase I climbed once...Michelangelo's famous one at the Laurentian Library. Fritz's isn't tripartite, of course, nor a close copy, but it's got that flowing effect, and the last three steps are rounded and overflow the horizontal boundaries in a way that seems very reminiscent of the most striking part in the center of Michelangelo's.

I know Fritz was obsessed with Italian architecture, paid people to go there looking for inspiration, picked Algarotti's brain, repeatedly used the Pantheon dome for inspiration in his commissioned structures, including here at Sanssouci, and so...I'm wondering if this is another instance of a specific inspiration. I can't find a link between the two staircases by googling, but given just how *famous* that Laurentian staircase is, and given Fritz's predilections, I'm going to hypothesize that there's a link, until and unless someone tells me that that staircase design was totally a rococo thing and was everywhere to be seen, no Renaissance inspiration needed.

Until then, "If you're afraid to go to Italy and risk your heart, you can always bring Italy to you (if your dad left you enough money)."

Man, I need to go back to Sanssouci now that I know stuff. Meanwhile, thanks, Google!

ETA: Oh, hopefully all the links work and you have permission to view them, but let me know if not.

Random facts

[mildred_of_midgard]

Have a couple of physical Fritz books I badly want to read/reread, but can't, so instead I'm opening up to a random page once or twice a day and reading one page, which is about what I can do without aggravating my back.

Anyway, I thought yesterday evening's and this morning's fun facts were worth sharing here.

1) Book 1 says mail in the 19th century was mostly cash-on-delivery, meaning the recipient paid. When soldiers got mail, it put them in a really tight spot, because they had so little pay, and yet being stuck in the horrible conditions of a campaign for long periods meant you were really desperate to get those letters. And so you'd often end up selling things you couldn't afford to do without (or were required to have as part of army life and would be punished for not having) in order to get your hands on those letters.

Well, my book says Fritz set up free postal service for his soldiers in the Silesian wars to deal with this problem.

This is consistent with other things I've read about Fritz's army, which is that on the one hand, Prussian discipline was notoriously *brutal*, so desertion was a huge problem he and his officers had to contend with, but on the other hand, he had a lot of soldiers defecting to his side, in part because working conditions were better in many respects than in his opponents' armies. E.g. Fritz was able to keep his supply lines intact and provide much more reliable food, so you were much less likely to go hungry in his army. And getting your mail must have been good for morale.

2) A quote both memorable and pathetic from Book 2.

Infant/toddler Fritz (who was the inbred scion of a family in which illnesses galloped and who only had 18th century medicine to treat him) was sickly, which greatly displeased FW (who had already buried his first 2 or 3 infant sons, I forget, and was desperate for an heir). Quote:

"His father often stormed into the nursery or had the child brought to him to examine as if he were some sort of backward worm."

This was before bb!Fritz could freaking talk! This was before he was pissing off FW by reading French and writing poetry!

Man, I'd always had it presented to me as FW leaving bb!Fritz to the women and ignoring him until he was about to turn 6, which was when the abuse started. No such luck, apparently.

3) Book 2 says when Fritz was fourteen (the actual quote is "in many ways a very weary fourteen," which strikes me as heart-breakingly accurate), the French envoy to Berlin fucking hated FW and for years had been trying to get transferred back home. Meanwhile, he convinced the French court that they needed to build up a party around Fritz and try to stage a coup. Fritz was *all over* this and used to tell the French envoy literally everything he knew about what his dad was up to. He was, in other words, spying on FW for the French.

At one point, French envoy dude wrote a report back home stating that he thought FW was on the verge of being declared insane and unfit to rule and being locked up in a fortress. My book says there's some evidence SD and Fritz thought so too, "which certainly would have been an exciting prospect for the harassed heir."

AU! AU! AU!

Maria Theresia Trivia

[selenak]

Must dash again, as new work has unexpectedly appeared on the horizon, but here are some early results from my MT biography reading. Will repost them on a new post if you like, but in the meantime, enjoy:

So, random Maria Theresia related trivia and background stuff, with an eye to parallels and differences to certain Prussian siblings, or just because I found it interesting:

- like most royals and nobles in her century, her actual raising was done by nurses, governesses and later teachers; she had a respectful though distant relationship to both her parents, whereas she adored her nanny, Frau von Fuchs, whom she called "Mami" (which, yes, means Mom in German) and at times referred to as Füchsin, in a pun on her name (which means fox). As with Wilhelmine's Fräulein von Sonsfeld (aka "Sonsine"), "Mami" remained with MT for the rest of her life. MT had her buried in the Habsburg crypt, the sole non-Habsburg to be so. IF MT, the occasional temper outburst throughout her life, depression in old age and bigotry in same not withstanding, was emotionally balanced most of the time, this woman clearly deserves the credit.

- it's worth noting that neither MT (of course not, because ruler, but also because 18th century) nor Wilhelmine raised their daughters, either. When Friederike, Wilhelmine's daughter, is about to make her illfated marriage to Karl Eugen of Württemberg, Wilhelmine writers she's sad "because I have just begun to know her, and we were starting to get close". MT saw her kids four times a week on avarage during their childhood and early adolescence, which was regarded as sensationally much by the court. (In addition, she sat in on Joseph's school lessons and examinations every two months, but then he was the future emperor.)

- speaking of the Habsburg crypt - the famous "Kapuzinergruft" - , the tomb MT had comissioned for Franz Stefan and herself takes a common trope - the dead couple lying next to each other - and gives it a twist: both figures are turned towards each other, not towards heaven, and are looking at each other:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/30/Wien_-_Kapuzinergruft%2C_Maria-Theresia-Gruft_%281%29.JPG/1024px-Wien_-_Kapuzinergruft%2C_Maria-Theresia-Gruft_%281%29.JPG

- the intimacy in this depiction also echoes another exception: MT and Franz Stefan shared a bedroom. The usual practice were separate bedrooms, sex ensued in one of them, and afterwards the husband (usually) buggered off, no pun intended. MT and Franz Stefan did have separate bedrooms but also a shared bedroom in between, which they used most of the time when both present. MT's advice (by letter) to her daughter Marie Antoinette was to share a bedroom and a bed with her husband as well, not just for sex but to sleep in together. This, she wrote, was one of the few ways to be truly alone together and outside of everyone's view, and it also created familiarity and a relationship. To her disappointment, Marie Antoinette didn't listen (or young Louis truly wouldn't go for it, which was Antoinette's explanation, because her mother could hardly blame her for obeying her husband); the French court, of course, found the mere idea of actually sleeping (as in sleep, not sex) together terribly degoutant and ridiculous.

- while we're talking sex, on the downside, one of MT's characteristics alienating both her contemporaries and posterity about her was that she tried to police everyone else's sex lives in a way not seen since Octavian/Augustus made adultery a crime in ancient Rome. (This had not been the case previously, when her father ruled, who otherwise had been more formal and old fashioned than her , more about this later. The Vienna MT grew up in was in fact famous for its sexual license. And would be again, because Joseph got rid of these laws as soon as she was dead.) Extramarital sex was strictly illegal, the police were encouraged to spy on offenders. This, of course, did not stop anyone. Contemporaries and biographers weren't slow to speculate the reason for this were less her religion and more projected resentment for Franz Stefan cheating on her which she couldn't direct at him. It's worth noting, though, that she honored his wishes regarding the most prominent of his mistresses after his death and gave her a pension (of the same amount as requested) instead of mistreating or just cutting the woman off. Her anti-extramarital-sex laws got worse after his death, though.

- on the other hand, MT also made an interesting exception for illegitimate mothers. This was because she could quickly see that if a woman was severely punished for unlicensed sex, and getting pregnant was the most glaring proof this had happened, it lead to either abortion or infanticide of newborn babies. So midwives and priests were indeed encouraged by law to keep the confidence of pregnant unmarried mothers and help them instead of reporting them.

- less successful was her attempt to end prostitution by putting prostitutes into work houses instead. The idea had been to give them "honest work" so they wouldn't starve once their job was illegal, but predictably (from our pov), this ended up with the women being terribly exploited as cheap labour. Joseph, all credit to him, during his many tours through his empire as a young co-ruler inspected enough of these places to come back with horrified reports and absolutely and passionately insisted the practice had to stop. This was one of the few times he won an argument with his mother.

- back to young MT: her first year or so in office when first Fritz and then everyone else invaded resulted in a lot of quite obscene caricatures, usually printed in the Netherlands, depicting a young woman getting stripped by a couple of men tearing her clothes from her (in national costumes indicating who represented which nation) , as more or less an overt gang rape, with verses to match. This was not done in sympathy for MT, mind, but as part of the general "well, it's a woman on the throne, she clearly needs to be fucked in every sense" feeling. However, once MT had persuaded the Hungarians to accept her as their Queen and fight for her, the fortunes of war changed to the point that Bavaria was counterinvaded which robbed her rival - the Wittelsbach Emperor - of his home base and later allowed her to blackmail his son Maximilian into not trying to succeed his father and instead voting for Franz Stefan as Emperor- the metaphor in caricatures was turned around; now MT (fully dressed) was depicted stealing the Wittelsbach Emperor's pants and wearing them.

- amazingly enough, her closest royal friend and pen pal was Maximilian's sister Antonia of Bavaria, later married to August the Strong's son and thus ruling Saxony, which put Antonia in a relatively good position for reporting on Fritz (a next door neighbour in terms of how close Saxony and Prussia were)

- even more amazingly, Franz Stefan, who'd met Fritz while doing his two year Grand Tour through Europe (he was present on Fritz' official engagement party, for example, not that this was a joyful occasion to our antihero), had actually be charmed by him (though when Fritz wrote his "dear FS, I'm totally respecting your (and your girl's) right on the Austrian heartlands and will vote for you as Emperor if you hand over Silesia, which by the time you're getting this letter I'm actually invading" message, he was horrified and told the Prussian ambassador so) and later periodically made attempts to persuade MT to maybe consider a reconciliation with Prussia over a French alliance (not least because he had an ongoing grudge against the French for first accepting his duchy Lorraine as a bribe to accept the Pragmatic Sanction, which meant he married MT essentially as a beggar, and then invading anyway), which were all met with a resounding "No, Franzl, NO".

- MT really was a hardcore worker, getting up around 4 am, 5 at the latest, while going to bed around 11 pm (going to bed here means removing herself from public sight, as we know these times from ambassadors reporting to their various masters; who knows whether she actually slept). As mentioned elsewhere, civil servants asking for more vacation time were met by an unsympathetic reminder she was up and about two days after childbirth, so what were they moaning about?

- this being said, she didn't just shrug off those births. After child No. 10, she wrote to Antonia - Marie Antoinette's godmother, btw - that she'd be grateful if that was it, because it pregnancy and birth was draining, she was getting fat and short of breath, and enough was enough (the dynasty was secure). As to why man-of-the-world Franz Stefan didn't have sex with her in a way that did not lead to more procreation and thus children 11 - 16? Neither of them ever said anything, but you can always speculate that it was for religious reasons on her part. After all, this is the woman who insisted on performing all the kneeling on a Good Friday when seven months pregnant, when every priest would have happily absolved her (not least because the health of the monarch and her unborn child were not a private matter).

- she had a keen sense of the performative part of being a monarch, all the more so because she needed to prove herself, a female ruler on the throne being unprecedented in the German speaking territories, and she was good in turning what was regarded as a weakness at the start - her being a wife and mother (if women per se were "the weaker vessel", you can imagine what a pregnant woman was at an age where a lot of them died in childbirth, not to mention that the traditional role of a wife obeying her husband directly conflicted with the idea of her as her husband's social superior) - as a strength: when she made her appeal to the Hungarian parliament, she emphasized her motherhood (though she did not, as legend would have it, newborn Joseph in her arms, Madonna fashion, during the appeal itself; she did have him brought to Hungary, though, since her finally having given birth to a son was a big plus in her favour) and turned into a "you brave and knightly men surely will protect me" thing, all flowing robes, tears in eyes and feminitity written all over her. (It worked.) Otoh, when the actual Hungarian coronation ceremony demanded for her to be on a horse (astride, male fashion), raising a sword (a real, heavy one) and turning thus, sword raised, with the horse in four directions, she did that, too. (MT turned out to be a good equestrarian in general and used the famous riding hall in Vienna for an all female big event in which solely women performed daring riding stunts not long after. Even the French, at the time still hoping their Bavarian ally would make it, were grudgingly impressed by the sheer spectacle.)

- but then, she had already started performing as a child (singing and dancing) at court events. (This was not unusual in the 18th century for royalty. No one had forgotten Le Roi Soleil and his ballet dancing. The nineteenth century had every different ideas about royal dignity, of course (more in line with FW's), but the first depiction we have of child Marie Antoinette is ballet dancing at a court event together with her sisters as well.)

- on the other end of the scale, MT's father Karl had been the ruler during whose lifetime the Habsburgs lost Spain to the Bourbons. After the last Spanish Habsburg (the famously inbred Charles) had died, the Austrian Habsburgs totally expected to inherit, but Louis XIV had other ideas (and put his grandson on the throne). Karl for a while held Northern Spain, though, and he was the Habsburg to bring Spanish Court Etiquette to the Austrian court. This meant, among other things, that anyone being presented to the Emperor or the Empress had to kneel down three times before approaching them, and then they had to kiss their hand. The other German princes resented that a lot. MT cut it down to one time kneeling down and one time hand kissing, and Joseph dispensed with the kneeling altogether. (His nephew Franz II, the reactionary, reintroduced it.) I'm still mulling whether or not MT would have been likely to demand it from Wilhelmine on her Bayreuth visit or whether she'd have been diplomatic and skipped it (knowing how much especially the Protestant German Princes resented it). She'd definitely demand it from Fritz on the fictional summit, though!