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cahnCome 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)
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)
Re: The Ballad of Isabella and Maria Christina
Date: 2019-10-22 06:11 pm (UTC)Isabella actually sounds really fascinating -- I feel like a lot of what she's saying here is, while perhaps manipulative, actually true (e.g., what she says about MT) and the best way to familial and marital harmony under these circumstances -- I feel like it comes across as manipulative in large part because she actually thought about it and analyzed it for MC rather than just doing it. (Or maybe this is just me being spectrum-y again :P )
And if you'd told me about all this a month earlier I would have been inclined to spinoff Maria Theresian RPF and nominate her :P (Probably good that you didn't, you and mildred would probably have killed me)
ETA: And wait, I forgot to ask all my questions!
(Well, except for the part that by the time they did marry, her political value as heiress had increased so much that FS was no longer a truly beneficial candidate, but that's another story.)
WELL? :D
Incidentally, Franz Stefan's letter to his son Leopold when the later became Duke of Tuscany is quite revealing in what he learned during that time:
By the way, Franz Stefan is AWESOME. My question: so how was Leopold's marital life?
Re: The Ballad of Isabella and Maria Christina
Date: 2019-10-23 05:33 am (UTC)Leopold: *proceeds to have 16 kids by his wife and cheats on her the whole time*
It was otherwise according to gossip a harmonious marriage, though. His wife, Maria Luisa, was Spanish by birth but had grown up in Naples. They were happiest while Leopold was Grand Duke of Tuscany and they lived there. Maria Luisa supposedly was a private person not inclined to the public life (bad for a royal), but she did her duty with must-have public appearances. She also wasn't into politics at all and never disputed her husband, which is lucky, given his opinion on women disputing politics with men as voiced in that letter to Joseph about Joseph's circle of five.
(Joseph: You are aware I spent fifteen years arguing, err, ruling with Mom, aren't you, brother?
Leopold: Your point?)
Isabella actually sounds really fascinating -- I feel like a lot of what she's saying here is, while perhaps manipulative, actually true (e.g., what she says about MT) and the best way to familial and marital harmony under these circumstances -- I feel like it comes across as manipulative in large part because she actually thought about it and analyzed it for MC rather than just doing it.
Oh, absolutely, and Isabella comes across as one of the smartest people at court. Incidentally, you may have wondered why we have her letters but only one of MCs. We also have various essays by her (not just the "men suck" one). The reason is that when she died, MT ordered Isabella's waiting woman Erdödy to provide her not just with a lock of Isabella's hair as a memory (you probably know this was common) but to immediately collect all of Isabella's papers. (Said instructions are in German, not French, as MT is writing to a lower ranking person: "Und auff all die Schriften gebe wohl acht, das kein kleiner Zettel verlohren gehe" (and pay attention to get all the writings, don't miss even the shortest note); said papers, MT wrote, would later provide comfort to Joseph and an example to Isabella's little daughter and allow her to get to know her mother. She got the papers, and while indeed Isabella's theological writings were collected and printed in a small private edition by the court printer Trattner, methinks MT had at least an inkling there might be something in these papers Joseph shouldn't read. (And as much as she argued with her oldest son, she didn't want him to be hurt this way.) In any event, that's why by the time Joseph did read his late wife's papers, there was only one (harmless) letter by his sister included.
(Meawhile, MC of course kept all her letters by Isabella, and Albert inherited them from her after her death. He, in turn, had no problem publishing them, though edited (no arse-kissing intentions included, and just enough love declarations to still pass it off as "passionate romantic friendship", making it clear who Isabella's favourite person at court had been.)
Re: Franz Stefan's status in the marriage market going down while MT's went up in their adolescence: per se, the Duchy of Lorraine was nothing to sneeze at. (I don't know whether you recall, but that's why Catherine de' Medici married her middle daughter, Claude, to the then Duke, and you don't get more ambitious for your kids than Catherine.) Nice big territory, used to be a kingdom in ye dark ages, even, and as mentioned several posts ago, Franz was the grandson of Liselotte and Philippe on his mother's side, thus had direct blood connections to both French royalty and various other German principalities. Its location between France and the German speaking territories gives it strategic value, too. So: as long as MT is just supposed to be an arch duchess and the future Emperor is her mythical to be had future brother, it's a suitable match, and having Lorraine as an ally can be useful for said future brother, especially given the then still raging Habsburg/Bourbon feud. (Remember, MT's dad lost the Habsburg claim to Spain to the French. Grudge, grudge, grudge. He still displayed the Spanish court of arms in Vienna, never mind the Bourbon ruling there.)
...but now the future brother refuses to show up. And Poland is an issue for the European powers already. (August makes a play for it, remember, it's an elective monarchy.) And MT's Dad really, really, REALLY needs everyone to come on board and pledge themselves to respect the Pragmatic Sanction after his death, or he'll be the last Habsburg ruler. While Lorraine provides nice revenues, it doesn't provide, say, a useful big army. Franz, recently back from his Grand Tour through Europe, is a nice guy to go hunting with (which MT's dad does a lot) and a hit with the ladies, but he doesn't have any military gifts, and he's not burning with ruling charisma, either. Why the hell should anyone vote for him as Emperor? Even the fact he's willing to give up his duchy as a prize for being allowed to marry MT also speaks against him: how will this guy be able to hold the Empire together? (Remember, Dad doesn't even consider it might be MT herself holding the Empire together.)
By the way, Franz Stefan is AWESOME.
This is as good a point as any to voice my opinions on the two 2017 MT biographies. The way shorter one is by Èlisabeth Balantier. It's informative and pacefully written, but has two big drawbacks, imo. One is that the author, as she mentions in the afterword, does not speak German; she thanks in said afterword someone for translating "the most important documents" for her. This is a problem because while MT's family correspondance (and correspondance with other royals and nobles) is mostly in French, her entire administrative correspondance is in German. (And by administrative I don't mean her secretary writing "her highness wishes you to do this and that" to some civil servant but MT herself writing (well, often dictating, but in first person and with a distinct style). And whoever translated for Balantier obviously already made a selection. This means she's missing out on MT's inner politics a lot.
The other problem is that Balantier doesn't consider source bias, or if she does quickly dismisses it. For example, she admits that the French ambassador reporting negatively about Franz Stefan in ye early years is influenced on France backing Karl Albrecht of Wittelsbach for Emperor and fearing a Lorraine man with Imperial power would just spell trouble. She also admits that some of the ambassador's claims, as for example MT being putty in her husband's hands, were subsequently proven to be ridiculously off base. But then she goes and gives us three pages of the French ambassador's gleeful "Franz Stefan is the worst!!!!" report, not for the last time. She adds other negative reports by other ambassadors about how he's idle and worthless later, without telling her readers that by "idle", they mean he's not governing and lets MT do it. That he's actually doing something other than hunting and partying is hidden in a brief footnote on Joseph inheriting 20 Millions Gulden cash as a private (not state) fortune by his father as the result of his father's successful business managements (which Joseph then used to fix the state debts. Siblings Leopold and MC were pissed off because, they argued, this being Dad's private fortune they deserved a share). There is nothing on FS's interest in the natural sciences at all. So if all I knew about Franz hailed from this biography, I'd be utterly bemused as to what MT ever saw in him, why she kept defending him during the early years of their marriage (when trying to prove himself militarily he joined the war against the Turks and lost, badly, causing even more tauntings back home along the lines of "can't sire sons AND sucks as as an officer, is there anything manly he can do?", why it was so important to her that he'd be crowned as Emperor in Frankfurt (whereas she refused to be crowned as Empress, considering this to be a pointless thing, she already had power), or why, when she was dying, she was wearing his old brown
bathrobedressing gown she'd kept.Luckily, though, I also have the other 2017 biography to through. This one is far more voluminous and by Barbara Stollberg-Rillinger. It's titled "Maria Theresia. The Empress in her time", and the title is program; she very much puts emphasis on the contemporary context MT is operating in. Of course, she also uses the ambassadorial reports as sources, but not as the only sources, and she mentions which country and ambassador had which interest and bias first. Most importantly, she provides such primary source stuff as the Franz Stefan letter to Leopold about marriage I quoted from, points out the unprecedent gender expectation reversal both MT and FS faced (and if her contemporaries finally decides she rose "above" womanhood, not striving to rule both the country and his family remained seen as shameful for a man), and also shows what FS did do (in modern terms, he was an entrepeneur - all that money hailed from the fact that he ordered the use of modern instead of antiquated agrarian methods in his estates, and established and ran silk and other textile manufacturing within the empire (so instead of importing textiles from non-Austria ruled Italy or France, suddenly there was a closer market). (He also was interested in the sciences and personally responsible for Gerard van Swieten, the founder of the Vienna School of Medicine, coming to Vienna, oh, and he founded the zoo in Schönbrunn.)
Incidentally, the estimation of MT herself is basically identical in both biographies (both in her virtues and flaws), though where Balantier, say, just provides the traditional legend of MT making her appeal to the Hungarian Assembly with baby Joseph in her arms, Barbara Stollberg-Rillinger points out baby Joseph didn't arrive in Hungary until a few weeks after that appeal; she's very determined not to let herself be seduced by the drama which as she ruefully admits in the foreword is powerful ("Young beautiful woman comes to the throne beset by enemies, finds arch nemesis in the most ruthless and most brilliant big bad her era could have provided for her") and to remain aware both MT and Fritz were really good at propaganda, not to mention that later historians each had their agenda as well.
Re: The Ballad of Isabella and Maria Christina
Date: 2019-10-23 09:33 pm (UTC)Oh, sigh, this is like practically every biographer I've read in the last couple years, on any subject. This is why I treat them all as glorified novels. I'm glad your other one is better about this!
Tangent: I had a linguistics prof who once told me that Turkish has this particle that has epistemological meaning: you can attach it to any sentence and it means "So I've heard; could be wrong." He was saying we should borrow it into English. Well, I've often agreed, and never have I so badly wanted this particle since I started discussing history. "My only source on this is a biography; take with a pinchful of salt."
the author, as she mentions in the afterword, does not speak German
I...whuh...buh...how?? How do you write a biography of MT without knowing German? I wouldn't even *begin* to write a bio of Fritz before learning both German and French, and honest-to-god I'd wait until I learned to deal with 18th century handwriting so I could look at unpublished material. I barely consider myself qualified to share forcefully-expressed-but-often-unfounded opinions about Fritz with two other people in Dreamwidth!
Languages in the order in which I am motivated these days to learn or relearn or learn them properly:
1. Ancient Greek, my all-time favorite language.
2 and 3: Italian and Latin. Italian would be easier; Latin has more stuff I want to read.
4 and 5: French and German. French would be easier; German has more stuff I want to read.
And 4 and 5 are only so high because Fritz. Once I'm back out of Fritz fandom, Ancient Near Eastern languages (Akkadian, Hebrew, Sumerian) will beat them out again.
Re: The Ballad of Isabella and Maria Christina
Date: 2019-10-24 05:04 pm (UTC)Haha, yeah, I was wondering this too! Is this bio in French? I can't seem to find it anywhere -- although now that I know the other one is coming out in English, and given that it doesn't seem nearly as accurate, I wasn't spending a whole lot of time on google-fu.
I think if I had time to learn a language, German would be first on the list -- I know French well enough to get by, I know Italian not quite well enough to get by but well enough for listening to opera, but I don't even know German well enough for opera, much less digging through history fandom canon :P Though if I had gobs and gobs of time, I'd like someday to learn Italian well enough to read Dante :D
Re: The Ballad of Isabella and Maria Christina
Date: 2019-10-28 09:43 pm (UTC)It would also be nice just to have access to some of the untranslated documentary sources from Renaissance Florence. And to be able to write more convincing fic set there. What? :P
Isabella and Stollberg-Rilinger
Date: 2019-10-24 05:01 pm (UTC)Wooooow. It does seem like the natural inference. Now I'm wondering what MT thought as she read all of Isabella's papers. And I really want MT-Isabella fic, because it sounds like Isabella might not have been quite as opaque as she might have thought she was when dealing with MT, who of course was also an extremely smart and perceptive person (Joseph being smart but... maybe not quite as perceptive in a lot of ways), and who had the advantage of years of experience by the time Isabella showed up.
Thank you for your opinions on the biographies! I did some digging around and found that the Stollberg-Rilinger is supposed to be published in English translation by Princeton University Press in 2019, yay! (I know, academic publishing, this means that it might be anytime in the next five years with the clock starting in 2019, but hey, at least someone is probably working on it even as we speak!) I am so getting this when it comes out :D
I also found this from her website: "There is no current scientific biography of [Friedrich Wilhelm I]; the last one is from 1941 and covers only the youth years until the accession of the throne. I believe that it could be interesting in a new way today to turn to a ruler who played the role of elitist despiser and cultivated a bizarre outsider habit." (Google translate of the German.) Huh! I'm gonna say I'm not interested in buying that book, but an interesting project.
Re: Isabella and Stollberg-Rilinger
Date: 2019-10-26 05:30 pm (UTC)ETA: forgot to say - have found a collection of letters from MT to a former lady in waiting and life time confidant (Sophie, who married unusually late - 39 - and who together with her husband was actually hostess to Leopold‘s wedding in Innsbruck so experienced the whole thing live, so to speak) - and in the foreword the editor mentions that most high ranking people asked for their correspondance to be destroyed, which is why it‘s rare we have such a lot (though not all) of the MT letters to Sophie. But, wait for it, only a single one by Sophie to MT. (Obvious parallels are obvious.) (The one Sophie letter survived because it‘s written on the back of one of MT‘s.) It‘s also interesting that she‘s vous-ing Sophie in the French texts but using „Du“ in the few German intermissions.
Still, going back to Isabella, I doubt MT suspected a sexual relationship as such - not least because 18th century understanding of sexuality as far as I recall basically didn‘t acknowledge f/f - it was only sex if penetration was involved, so women literally couldn‘t have sex with each other; presumably it counted as a kind of masturbation? Anyway. However, between MC being MT‘s favourite kid and her liking Isabella a lot, I do think she noticed the person Isabella loved best, in whatever sense, was MC, and private letters were bound to bring this up, this being an age where declarations of devotion were the norm, not the exception.
Re: Isabella and Stollberg-Rilinger
Date: 2019-10-28 04:32 pm (UTC)*nods* Sure, I was actually not thinking so much that MT would suspect specifically a sexual relationship between Isabella and MC as that (as I think you were saying in your previous comment) MT might well have picked up that Isabella wasn't nearly as in love with Joseph as Joseph thought she was, even though I imagine Isabella was probably trying to project to everyone (except MC), particularly Joseph's parents, that she was in love with him -- and that this might have come out in letters to MC. And maybe in general MT may have picked up on Isabella's savviness in a way Joseph doesn't seem to have. (And in a fic sense, it seems to me this would be a fascinating dynamic to explore between the two of them -- especially in light of what Isabella said about MT herself in her letter.)
(Although that would also be interesting if MC wrote letters with similar content to Isabella's censored letters! What would MT think of that!)
Re: The Ballad of Isabella and Maria Christina
Date: 2019-10-23 09:22 am (UTC)Except that Leopold got a stomach flu and couldn't get rid of it all the way from Vienna to Innsbruck. He spent his wedding literally trying not to shit himself. Everyone disliked the commissioned opera (not by Mozart, don't worry). It started to rain, which drenched the fireworks. It was hell.
And then, once the wedding day was finally over (Imperial weddings took eons), the news arrived that Joseph's first father-in-law, Isabella's father the Duke of Parma, had died. Cue necessity for the Imperial family to get their mourning suits out. So much for the farce part, but it gets worse.
Still the same week, it's now Sunday, everyone prays for Isabella's late Dad at mass. Franz Stefan isn't feeling so well. He couldn't sleep the previous night. MT suggests a bi tof blood letting since she's worried. He declines and says to get one with the (still related to the week long Leopold wedding festivities) shows; he watches a comedy by Goldoni and a Ballet by Gluck, and is on the way upstairs together with Joseph and some courtiers when he has a stroke. Joseph catches him in time and prevents him from falling; they get him on a servant's bed in the antechamber and call doctors and priests. But he's dead not even ten minutes later.
Now bear in mind that for us, a quick death is something enviable. For a Catholic monarch in the 18th century, it's horrible. It means they haven't had time to confess, get shriven, face their maker. This is not a good death. It means purgatory, and might mean hell. Which is why MT, who has heard exclamations and much uproar, naturally is on her way to her husband but kept away from him on Joseph's orders. By no means is she to know Franzl had a stroke and died unprepared. She's lied to that he's just feeling bad again, the doctors are taking care of it. Joseph tells her (some of) the truth later, after he's pressured the priest to say there were some signs of life left when he arrived so he could provide the last unction for Franz Stephan and FS died shriven. So by the time MT gets told by Joseph that her husband is gone, and she can see him, he's been dead for hours.
And MT never, ever, gets over it. Even ten years later, she writes to a confidant: "I spend the years, the months, the weeks, the days in the same stupor, the same bitterness as with the first day, and often I am glad the days that pass are over so I'm one day closer to my ending. (...) I know myself no more, for I live like an animal, without a soul and reason. I forget things. I get up at five, I go to bed late, and I'm not doing anything that truly counts. I do not even think."
These quotes are from a letter written in French to a former lady in waiting. After her death, people found handwritten notes in her prayer book, these in German and with excentric spelling (no capital letters) and a litany of numbers: "emperor franciscus my husband has lived 56 years eight months ten days, has died on August 18th 1765 on half bast ten in the evenig. Has lived 680 months, 2958 weeks, 20778 days, 496992 hours. My happy marriage lasted 29 years, six months, six days, and at the same hour I gave him my hand, also on a Sunday, he was taken from me. In sum 29 years, 335 months, 1540 weeks, 10781 days, 258744 hours."
(This, like Joseph's letter about his daughter, breaks my heart.)
Re: The Ballad of Isabella and Maria Christina
Date: 2019-10-23 02:20 pm (UTC)Re: The Ballad of Isabella and Maria Christina
Date: 2019-10-24 05:07 pm (UTC):( Did MT believe that he had been shriven, at least?
Re: The Ballad of Isabella and Maria Christina
Date: 2019-10-26 05:25 pm (UTC)...on the other hand, she did say that it‘s a comfort to her FS went to mass that day (it being Sunday) and took communion. Which could be read as meaning just that, or could mean she‘s somewhat suspicious of the „there were still life signs“ story but tells herself that there wasn‘t much sinning happening between morning, when FS had communion, and evening, when he died, so he still was in a good spiritual state.
Re: The Ballad of Isabella and Maria Christina
Date: 2019-10-28 04:21 pm (UTC)Re: The Ballad of Isabella and Maria Christina
Date: 2019-10-28 04:39 pm (UTC)On the evening of the third day, November 29th shortly before 9 pm, she got up from the chair she was insisting to sit on and made a few steps to the Chaiselongue by herself, said "See, what bad weather for such a long journey" to Joseph (it was raining outside), took another three breaths and died.