Yuletide tags are out: Frederician version

[cahn]

Come join us in this crazy Frederick the Great fandom and learn more about all these crazy associated people, like the star-crossed and heartbreaking romance between Maria Theresia's daughter Maria Christina and her daughter-in-law Isabella, wow.

OK, so, there are FOURTEEN characters nominated:
Anna Karolina Orzelska (Frederician RPF)
Elisabeth Christine von Preußen | Elisabeth Christine Queen of Prussia (Frederician RPF)
Francesco Algarotti (Frederician RPF)
François-Marie Arouet | Voltaire (Frederician RPF)
Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great (Frederician RPF)
Hans Hermann Von Katte (Frederician RPF)
Joseph II Holy Roman Emperor (Frederician RPF)
Maria Theresia | Maria Theresa of Austria (Frederician RPF)
Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf (Frederician RPF)
Peter Karl Christoph von Keith (Frederician RPF)
Sophia Dorothea of Hanover (Frederician RPF)
Stanisław August Poniatowski (Frederician RPF)
Wilhelmine von Preußen | Wilhelmine of Prussia (1709-1758) (Frederician RPF)
Yekatarina II Alekseyevna | Catherine the Great of Russia (Frederician RPF)

This means some fourth person kindly nominated Algarotti and -- I think? -- Stanislaw August Poniatowski! YAY! Thank you fourth person! Come be our friend! :D Yuletide is so great!

I am definitely requesting Maria Theresia, Wilhelmine, and Fritz (Put them in a room together. Shake. How big is the explosion?), and thinking about Elisabeth Christine, but maybe not this year.

I am also declaring this post another Frederician post, as the last one was getting out of hand. I think I'll still use that one as the overall index to these, though, to keep all the links in one place.

(seriously, every time I think the wild stories are done there is ANOTHER one)

Comments

Re: Random facts

[selenak]

Franz Stefan outlived Isabella, in fact, but if they had significant interactions, the biographies don‘t mention it.

Re: the Isabella/Joseph marriage, you also have to consider: in a total of three years marriage, she had one surviving child, two miscarriages, and a fourth pregnancy during which she contracted smallbox, had yet another miscarriage and died, painfully. 19th century biographies: „She appeared melancholy.“. Yeah, no kidding. I‘d be screaming from the rooftops, never mind sexual orientation.

I have a big soft spot for Joseph, too, but he and Isabella illustrate the big difference gender and the resulting power imbalance made. When Joseph finds himself in a marriage with a partner he does not want to be married to, for whom, in fact, he feels physical revulsion (i.e.his second wife), he avoids the woman in question. He can do that, because he‘s a) a man, and b) the co-ruling Emperor. And when after her death his mother wants him to marry a third time, he can point blank refuse. MT isn‘t happy, but as it‘s the aftermath of FS‘s death and Leopold has already produced male Habsburgs of the next generation, this is not a fight she keeps fighting. Both these actions would not have been possible for a woman, including MT herself when young. If FS had died during his ill-fated attempt at military heroics early in their marriage, with „just“ one or two daughters there, she‘d have had to marry again, no matter her grief. And she would have had to have sex with whoever the choice would have been.

So, in a fairer world Isabella wouldn‘t have had to marry Joseph to begin with, or at least could have told him that he might have fallen in love with her post-wedding (pre-wedding, before they met, he was nervous and really sceptical about marriage, which comes not just with being an 18 years old but an 18 years old Fritz fanboy) but she didn‘t love him), but she didn‘t feel anything of the sort for him, instead of having to fake love and joy. In the world they actually lived in, the odds were completely staked against Isabella, and like I said - I‘d have screamed from the rooftops.

(Footnote: I don‘t think Isabella would ever have confided into either FS or MT, not just because her own parents had been an example of everything bad a marriage could be, but because the whole point of Isabella being Joseph‘s wife ultimately was to produce an heir for the Habsburg dynasty (and to further the new Habsburg/Bourbon reconciliation). If not as Joseph’s wife, say, in the unlikely case of an anulment, there would have been no justification for her being there (i.e. with the yet unmarried MC) at all. Now if Joseph had been awful to her, or had avoided her (she wishes) the way he would his second wife, then she could have complained to his parents. But since he was being attentive and worshipping the ground she walked on, there was nothing she could have said that to an 18th century mentality would have justified a complaint.

In this context, it‘s worth noting that an older Joseph did go to the trouble during his visit to France to not just have that sex advice talk with Louis and the not listened to warning about the state of France to both Louis and Marie Antoinette, but he also when his sister first confided into him, and spelled out not just the excruciating details but basically depressedly went „maybe it‘s me, maybe I‘m just not hot enough or good enough“; he did try to cheer her up, build up her spirits and soothe her feelings by praising how elegant and beautiful a princess and hostess she was, and awkwardly told her that if she weren‘t his sister, her existence would totally convince him to change his mind about never marrying again. He was able to recognize unhappiness then, and that MA‘s problem wasn‘t just that she and Louis hadn‘t been able to have a child (though that was a big one for both political and personal reasons, obviously).

(Mind you, the next sister Joseph visited on that particular journey had worse. That was Marie Carolina who‘d married the King of Naples. I am still at the conference, but when I‘m back home I must quote you from Joseph‘s letters to MT about this fellow‘s sheer ghastliness. (None of them had met him previously, the marriage had been made via negotiations and proxy.) He was into cruel pranks and exposing his penis in society, among other things. BTW, if you‘ve ever read a novel or watched a film featuring the Nelson/Lady Hamilton tale, that was the court of Naples Sir William Hamilton was the British Ambassador at, and the Queen of Naples Emma befriended. Anyway, the reason I mention it is that an older, more mature Joseph - possibly due to his five ladyfriends, possibly simply due to more experience - does display a bit of a clue of how unfair life can be for a royal woman, and who knows whether or not he‘d have figured out how Isabella really felt and/or would have least tried to make everything a bit more bearable for her. But not at age 18 - 21 he wasn‘t. Without any bad intentions on his part, he was instead what she resented most about her life.)

The awfulness of being a royal woman

[cahn]

in a total of three years marriage, she had one surviving child, two miscarriages, and a fourth pregnancy during which she contracted smallbox, had yet another miscarriage and died, painfully.

:( Man, just from this part I'd be screaming from the rooftops (never mind melancholy) even if I did love my husband. Like you say, never mind sexual orientation, although that adds yet another layer of suck. I didn't realize the timeframe at all, for starters. (being a non-royal, 21st-century female, I am used to reproductive things taking a very long time, which in principle I know doesn't apply to these people at all, but in practice I forget I'm making all these assumptions.)

I don‘t think Isabella would ever have confided into either FS or MT

Oh, sure -- it doesn't make any sense with her personality, at least as far as I understand it, as she would have known it wouldn't make a lick of difference, at least positively. I could imagine that if she'd brought up any kind of complaint, MT might commiserate with the pregnancy thing, and maybe even the sex thing, but would almost certainly be all "but that being said, you have to suck it up, like I did/do," so, from Isabella's standpoint, what would even be the point?

awkwardly told her that if she weren‘t his sister, her existence would totally convince him to change his mind about never marrying again.

Aww, Joseph. I think I mostly like him because he's such an awkward nerd, which I think is funny because I glommed on to Isabella immediately because she seems so smart. matriarchy AU where Isabella gets to rule! It's good that he got a bit of a clue later on, although too late to be of any use to Isabella, which on one hand is super awful for her, and on the other hand it's hard to blame him at age 18. :(

Re: The awfulness of being a royal woman

[selenak]

Time frame: yep, that doesn't naturally occur to us, living (thankfully) in a very different society. And how young everyone was. Isabella and Joseph were both 18 (six months apart), MC aka Mimi was 17. (Yes, she and Joseph were born not even a year apart.) (During the first Silesian War. As I said: MT must have had a consitution of iron.)

And now for the MT daughter who had it worst in terms of husbands. Now, even young Mozart was shocked when he visited Naples, and if you shock Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart of the scatological jokes and sex talk, well. Carolina was the sister closest to Marie Antoinette in age and emotionally, and when she heard about MA getting married, she wrote to their shared governess: "When I imagine that her fate could be the same as mine, I want to write entire volumes to her about this, and I wish she finds a confidant like me in her new home, for without one, I shall be frank, it drives you to despair, and you endure true martyrdom. (...) I know what it is like, and I pity those who have yet to experience it. (...) If my faith hadn't told me to think of God, I'd have killed myself."

(Luckily for MA, Louis wasn't a bad fellow. Lethargy and sexual ignorance was the worst you could accuse him off, and he was a loyal husband even when people everwhere made her their go-to-hate-person to blame for all that was wrong in France. Not coincidentally, I think, MA refused all escape plans for herself alone, come the revolution, and insisted he had to be saved as well.)

So when Joseph did his "check on my sisters abroad" tour, and came to Naples, this resulted in an absolutely scathing letter about this particular brother-in-law. Starting with his exterior: according to Joseph, Ferdinand was revoltingly ugly to look at, with a shrill voice. He kicked and punched people around (literally), when he was feeling nice pinched and tickled the ladies at court at random, was into pranks involving throwing living mice at ladies and marmelade at courtiers, lived with lots of animals shitting all over the place in his palaces, made people watch him when he relieved himself, wanted to make Joseph the witness when he, Ferdinand, was fingering Joseph's sister Carolina, didn't read, did barely know how to write, couldn't list the ten commandments, had no problem lying, stealing, and having people killed. An utter incomprehension of morality rather than deliberate menace, tough, and a childlike mind.

(Why yes, Naples had a revolution in its future, too. One that was bloodily repressed by Horatio Nelson because Emma asked him to, who in turn wanted to save her friend the Queen. This being after Caroline's sister MA had already been executed, you can imagine what Caroline feared. But the beating down of the revolution was still so brutal that even the anti-revolution-minded British public got queasy and held it against Nelson for a while until more anti Napoleon heroics on his part ensued.)

His sister, otoh, Joseph described only in positive terms, virtuous, smart and modest and while not able to love her husband for obvious reasons, having developed more compassion than loathing for him.

Anyway, since talking to his brother-in-law was pointless in this case and annulment was out (they already had had kids, plus the Naples marriage had had strategic reasons), Joseph basically reccommended that his sister should get rid of Tannucci, the most powerful minister in Naples who profitted from the King's infantile mind leaving a power vaccuum, familiarize herself with all the details and basically take over government herself.

One more bit of trivia: Carolina was accused to have had a lesbian relationship with Emma, Lady Hamilton, though this might just have been the British press having a go at Emma who'd become the go to hate person for them, the one dragging national hero Nelson down, etc. It might also have been a reflection of a popular accusation the French Revolutionaries had flung at her sister (Marie Antoinette had been accused of having slept with at least two of her ladies in waiting in addition to having male lovers). But it's still worth noting three of MT's daughters were rumored to have had female love interests.

A footnote on Joseph and younger sisters who weren't Mimi: he had stood in for Marie Antoinette's various official godparents and had carried her when she was baptized (remember, she was the last but one of MT's children), and he always felt a bit extra protective of her. When MT had died, MA wrote to him: "Crushed by the most dreadful misfortune, I cannot stop crying as I write you. Oh, my brother, oh, my friend! You only are now left to me in a country which is, which will always be, dear to me! Take care of yourself, watch over yourself (…) Adieu, I no longer see what I write. Remember we are friends, allies; love me."

In the end, she outlived Joseph, but she and Louis were already under house arrest by the time Joseph died, and he'd been involved in early rescue plots. Leopold, otoh, was more reluctant about this. (That MA kept trying to contact her Austrian family encouraging them to invade was one of the things condemning her to death in the end, though the terreur being what it was, it probably would have happened regardless.