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Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!
All Yuletide requests are out!
Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!
-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)
Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!
-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French
-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...
Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links
Yuletide related:
-it is sad that I can't watch opera quickly enough these days to have offered any of them, these requests are delightful!
-That is... sure a lot of prompts for MCS/Jingyan. But happily some that are not :D (I like MCS/Jingyan! But there are So Many Other characters!)
Frederician-specific:
-I am so excited someone requested Fritz/Voltaire, please someone write it!!
-I also really want someone to write that request for Poniatowski, although that is... definitely a niche request, even for this niche fandom. But he has memoirs?? apparently they are translated from Polish into French
-But while we are waiting/writing/etc., check out this crack commentfic where Heinrich and Franz Stefan are drinking together while Maria Theresia and Frederick the Great have their secret summit, which turns into a plot to marry the future Emperor Joseph to Fritz...
Master link to Frederick the Great posts and associated online links
Emotional isolation
1740 death of Suhm
1742 estrangement from Algarotti
1744 estrangement from Wilhelmine
1745 death of Keyserlingk
1745 death of Jordan
1746 death of Duhan
1746 reconciliation with Wilhelmine
1747 Algarotti returns
1751 death of Rothenburg (in Fritz's arms)
1753 partial estrangement from Algarotti
1753 estrangement from Voltaire
1757 estrangement from Fredersdorf
1757 death of Sophia Dorothea
1758 death of Fredersdorf
1758 death of brother Wilhelm*
1758 death of Wilhelmine
late 50s/early 60s gradual partial long-distance reconciliation with Voltaire begins
1764 death of Algarotti
1767 death of Heinrich (the beloved nephew, not the unbeloved brother)
1768 estrangement from D'Argens
1768 death of Eichel
1773 death of Quantz
1774 death of Fouqué
1775 death of Quintus Icilius
1778 death of Voltaire
1778 death of Earl of Marischal
1782 estrangement from Catt
1786 death of Fritz
* As
So when we talk about Fritz's emotional isolation, there are two aspects:
1) To what extent was he isolated?
2) To what extent was he isolated by choice?
And while the answer to both is "more than the average person," both aspects have been overestimated by contemporaries and posterity alike. A huge reason is that the more famous he was, the older he was, and the older he was, the more isolated he was. Even the isolation of his last years has been overstated, but it's definitely true.
And if you break down the ways that he ended up both increasingly isolated with time, and with a reputation for isolation, it comes down to these factors:
1) He disliked the majority of people and did not casually welcome anyone and everyone into his circle.
2) He kept at arm's length people that he was expected by society to at least make the effort to interact with: his wife, his brothers, etc.
3) He outlived his inner circle (especially the Rheinsberg circle).
4) He was reluctant to add new people to the inner circle later in life.
5) He cut people off when they offended him.
6) He inadvertently drove people away through being impossible to live with.
1 and 2) don't necessarily reflect either misanthropy a preference for being alone. He was more open about his likes and dislikes, but those two plus the length of the chronology above make it pretty clear that he was committed to quality over quantity. A lot of people who are surrounded by family and casual friends out of fear of loneliness and/or need for a social safety net are actually *emotionally* isolated. The whole "I make nice with my family, even though they're really awful for my mental health, because I have financial problems/health problems/etc." is sadly common.
3 and 4) are also pretty common. Even today, the whole "I used to make friends easily in my 20s, but now I'm in my 40s and it's hard" phenomenon is seen all over social media, along with advice column articles on ways to get around that. People who outlive their social circle often end up alone. The way most people have historically gotten around the isolation of old age is through large extended families. Some people are lucky enough for that to work out well in their old age, but a large number of people are either stuck in a nursing home because they don't have family to take care of them, or stuck in an unhappy family situation because they can't afford an alternative. (This also goes for younger disabled people, younger people with a sucky job market, etc.) Fritz had staff and doctors, and so he didn't need to depend on family.
5 and 6) are the big two "oh, Fritz" ones.. And what they tell you are not that Fritz didn't like people, or that he wanted to be alone, but that he lacked the skills of making a long-term relationship work. The reason the chronology of people he loved is so long was that he was pretty willing to let people into the inner circle. (And I could have made that list even longer, but I had to draw a line around the inner circle somewhere.)
The way it usually worked was that he made snap judgments whether to like someone. If you were in, you were in (for as long as it lasted). If you were out, you were out, and changing his first impression of you for the better was hard. And once you were in, you got a mixture of "Fritz lavishing affection on you and begging you to stick around (or come back)" with "Fritz being Fritz," which was not easy to live with but was not necessarily intentionally aimed at driving you away.
As a counterexample to his total isolation after the Seven Years' War and an example of him actually knowing how to do the whole friendship thing, there was the Earl of Marischal. Fritz granted him some land on the Sanssouci grounds, paid for him to build a house there, and gave him a permanent place at the dinner table at Sanssouci. When the old Earl found it harder and harder to get up that steeply terraced hill, Fritz would make the trip down the hill and eat with him somewhere else. They were still good friends when Marischal died in 1778, yet another death that was hard on Fritz. Let's keep in mind also that if he hadn't driven anyone away or cut anyone off, he still outlived by many years all but one of the people he was estranged from. So from that list, it would have been basically him and Catt at the end.
In conclusion, on the one hand, obviously he was more isolated in 1786 than in 1736 (the "happiest years" being 1736-1740, at Rheinsberg). But too many people let that seduce them into a picture of either old or young Fritz being uniformly crabby and reluctant to let people get close. When in reality, he also had this emotionally open, even clingy, side that people tend to overlook in him after the age of about 18 or at best 28.
The saddest part about his increasing isolation is that he *cared*. His list is really long and mine is really short because my social interaction needs are really low. When I cut people off, I don't care, and when I outlive them, I don't care except in an abstract "death is bad" kind of way. Fritz latched onto people, hated being alone, grieved people intensely, and got really upset when he cut people off or they left him. He really needed better relationship skills than he had.
therapy for everyone
Re: Emotional isolation
Wilhelmine is interesting because it looks to me like she had (or was forced to get) mad people skills (which Voltaire noticed, haha) but she still had a crap life because she was a woman and women just often had crap lives, unless they were lucky enough to be Maria Theresia, I guess. (And even then, I still boggle at the 16 kids. Geesh.)
Re: Emotional isolation
that he really loved the people he loved in a very emotional way, and would probably have been a lot happier if he'd had better relationship skills.
Yes, yes, and yes. He let people get close to him with surprising ease (even when you take into account 18th century rhetorical conventions), and then he so often didn't know how to make himself or anyone else happy.
Wilhelmine: agreed. Sucks to be almost everybody, ugh. And MT may have had a less crap life than a lot of people, but she sure didn't have an *easy* one.
Re: Emotional isolation
Nope, especially once FS dies, because that's when everything takes a severe turn into dysfunctional. Not to Hohenzollern levels, but then as Tolstoi has observed every family is unhappy in their own unique way.
For starters, it's pretty clear MT went into a severe depression after Franz died, and while her era was well familiar with "melancholy", they didn't really have a good way for treating it. This in a private person would have been unfortunate enough for said private person, but she's relentlessly in the public eye, an active sovereign with access to near unlimited power to vent her grief with. So MT doesn't just cut herself off from things she's previously enjoyed, like attending balls (even after she could no longer actively participate in them like she could as a young woman), gambling (she never played the incredibly high risk stakes daughter MA and a lot of the nobility in all European countries played, but she did play cards as a form of socializing and was pretty good at it), going to concerts (or have them come to her), theatre plays, masques, wearing colorful clothing; instead, abruptly attending the Empress at court means you're in, even after the immediate mourning period for FS is over, severe dark clothing, no leisure fun activity other than listening to the occasional priest reciting the bible or religious texts. This is not what anyone signed up for as a courtier and none too surprisingly, the nobility either flocks towards Joseph (when he's there, since he's travelling a lot in those years) or one of his siblings still in Vienna. Which heightens MT's sense of post-FS emotional isolation and desertion, and makes her all the more determined not to give up power and throw herself into governing.
(Sidenote: it's a minor point, but due to the 18th century frankness of discussing bodily functions, we know she had her period until she was 56, i.e. she had it for years and years after her husband's death, and until the final two years of that every time with heavy bleedings; that she had a still fertile body even at this age and alone must have seemed like nature mocking her.)
Which creates the severely Albee-esque mother/son dynamic with Joseph who as opposed to his father does want to rule himself, has really different ideas about how a modern monarch should rule and thus starts a constant power struggle with his mother that lasts for fifteen years. (He did like to travel after her death, too, but one major reason why he did it so much when she was still alive was because it gave them a break from each other. At the same time, this isn't a situation like the ones all the Hannover Georges were in where the reigning monarch and whoever was the current Prince of Wales deeply despised each other. They did, for all their arguments, simultanously feel protective of each other (so noble schemer X making snide remarks at the respective other monarch's expense was shut down by both of them immediately and thus didn't happen often), and the can't live with/can't live witout dynamic that evolved really took its toll on everyone.
Simultanously, there were massive Habsburg sibling problems. All the other daughters really REALLY resented Mimi being the favorite who got to choose her own man (well, if you were Carolina stuck with Ferdinand of Naples, wouldn't you?), and without FS as a balancing parent, they couldn't possibly show this directly to MT who was always also the monarch on whose favor everyone was depending on. So it came out in passive aggressive actions and inner sibling fighting instead. Moreover, Joseph's decision to use the entire private millions he'd inherited from FS to balance the state budget caused massive anger especially from Leopold (who pointed out he should be allowed to use at least some of this for Tuscany, his model dukedom,if we were talking state budget only) and Mimi (see earlier "what happened to Marie Christina" post), but to a lesser degree also from the others. Leopold also, again somewhat understandably and not so secretly thought that either MT should have retired or Joseph should have made his "do you want me to resign?" threat real because this co-ruling/cancelling each other out was getting nowhere fast, and he could do a much better job as single ruler than either of them at this point. Which is why you have from one of his last Vienna visits during MT's life time that extraordinarily spiteful secret memorandum outburst on the lines of "Mom's a half senile bitch, Joseph is an overbearing lecturing asshole, I hate them!!!!"
(However, otoh, Leopold: is actually Joseph's primary correspondant among his siblings. When Joseph during his endless travelling stops by in Tuscany, he doesn't just make the polite brief visit, no, he stays around long enough to invent games to play with Leopold's numerous little children, and Leopold, who is very aware how Joseph felt about his own dead daughter, lets him. And even the "I don't get you and your five ladies whom you let argue politics with you, didn't you get enough of that when Mom was alive?" letter is actually written in more of a concerned than in a mocking mode.)
Now MT in her final years didn't have the excellent memory she'd relied upon most of her life anymore, she did forget things, which she noticed herself and remarked on in letters to her ex-lady in waiting and friend Sophie, but she was entirely compos mentis, and of course she noticed that her children were at odds with each other in addition to her being so often at odds with her oldest son. It heightened her unhappiness and depression, but she couldn't find a way out of it (which at this point probably only a retirement on her part could have been, and even that would only have solved some of the problems). If you get around to reading the biography, Cahn, you might want to stop linearly after FS dies and only check out individual events thereafter, because it's really sad to read about.
Re: Emotional isolation
Now I really want one of those multigenerational sagas that people used to write twenty years ago (do people do that anymore?) based on MT but set in the present day where MT can get therapy and also her kids can do things that don't require them to be beholden to her. :(
actually while I'm making out a wishlist, maybe FS can live longer too(Just checked due to this post, and bio still not out in English. Someday!)
Re: Emotional isolation
Re: Emotional isolation
"After the death of his mother Nandi...Shaka ordered that no crops should be planted during the following year of mourning, no milk (the basis of the Zulu diet at the time) was to be used, and any woman who became pregnant was to be killed along with her husband. At least 7,000 people who were deemed to be insufficiently grief-stricken were executed, although the killing was not restricted to humans: cows were slaughtered so that their calves would know what losing a mother felt like."
Predictably, he was assassinated less than a year after this.
How's that for PTSD and absolute power?
Re: Emotional isolation
Re: Emotional isolation
My daughter is probably going to end up similarly to you in terms of something of indifference to people bonding, and as far as I know she's had loving relationships, and this is something she was born with. (I like to think it wasn't my parenting!) My son seems to have much more people bonding needs and skills.
Re: Emotional isolation
What I got out my early childhood was the idea that I don't need to please other people (and that saved me when I got a bit older and my parents started signalling that they weren't pleased with me). Fritz did not get that message in his early childhood, not from either of his parents.
I have a more well-thought-out rationale, but it's late and I have a long backlog of comments to work through. ;)
Re: Emotional isolation
Me: *learns how to slither out of situations, and worries some about pleasing people until I turn 30 or so (at which point I get too busy to care) but other than that doesn't really get all that good at pleasing people or at bonding*
Sister: *worries about pleasing people to an almost pathological degree and is only starting to hesitantly get over it with years of therapy*
I mean, there is definitely a case to be made that my sister and I had different early childhood experiences; I had a personality that was
really unlike Fritzvery conflict-adverse and also I was very good at many things my parents valued (academics, music, competitions), which meant I had less conflict with them. And also I'm certain our mom was less stressed out with one child than with two (now having lived that). But on the other hand I think a large part of what seems to have happened with the two of us is that I didn't need parental validation the same way that she did/does.