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: Algarotti

[cahn]

Well... I've heard of Rousseau (possibly even had to read a little of him in high school?) and I hadn't heard of Algarotti until now :P Of course, some of this has to do with, well, the US being a Thing, which is hardly Algarotti's fault :)

I think that at least Candide is more read than Casanova's memoirs? If only because of Bernstein :) Though I can't argue that Casanova's name is better known than anyone else's!

Re: Algarotti

[mildred_of_midgard]

Oh, but that's what I'm saying! NO ONE's heard of Algarotti any more. He went from celebrity status in the 18th century to "Posterity: Algarotti who?" in like a hundred years.

Seriously, I had never heard of Algarotti except in the Fritz context--and that was minimal enough that, while I must have read about him 20 years ago, I did not remember him at all from that period, and had to relearn who he was from scratch this time around. The dissertation I summarized (written in 2010) is the closest thing to a bio that's been written about him in any language since 1913, and the only one ever in English, and it states that the only other biography about him was written in 1770. There've been a few monographs on his works, and he gets occasional (usually unimpressed) entries in biographical dictionaries. And that's it for Mr. Used to Really Be Someone.

Poor Algarotti. Maybe if he'd been better at job-hunting...or Fritz had been a better boss.

The dissertation's final chapter is on how the mighty have fallen, and it turns out some of it has to do with Algarotti being a polymath instead of a specialist (I sympathize; if I were a specialist, I'd be a lot more famous now too), but much of it has to do with the period when Italian nationalism took off. You see, Algarotti the cosmopolitan wasn't considered sufficiently patriotic, always living abroad, working for foreign monarchs, getting art out of Italy and into foreign collections, and ick, that spying on the King of Sardinia for Old Fritz.

Re: Algarotti

[cahn]

Yeah, I sympathize with the polymath stuff too :P Huh, interesting about Italian nationalism, I could see how that might do a number on his reputation. Interesting though that a dissertation about sales techniques has to end with "...and these techniques worked for a while but then completely fell apart once he was dead."

Re: Algarotti

[mildred_of_midgard]

On the other hand, invade Silesia and you'll be famous FOREVER!

"...and these techniques worked for a while but then completely fell apart once he was dead."

Yep, sometimes fate screws you over. Especially when a major standard for fame is: "How much did you aggrandize your country?" Fritz: lots. Algarotti: not so much.