![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
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
Marie Antoinette's children
Speaking of disputes about her children, here's a story.
During the Revolution, they were imprisoned along with their parents. Then they were separated from their parents on the grounds that Louis and MA were unfit parents--Louis had to testify to the extremely improbable charge of being sexually molested by MA, just as an excuse for his jailers to separate them. Louis, as the heir to the now defunct crown, was given to some appropriately low-ranked member of society for a good revolutionary upbringing in prison. Then Louis and MA were killed, and the kids continued to be kept very secluded in prison. Louis XVII was 7 years old when this happened.
The accounts of young Louis's treatment by later royalist sources (including his sister, who was separated from him much of the time and is not a reliable eyewitness), describe abuse that far surpasses anything Fritz ever went through. I kind of have to hope accounts have been greatly exaggerated by propaganda. Then he died of illness in prison at age 10.
Or did he? Naturally, people turned up in later years claiming to be him, claiming that he was smuggled out. The strongest piece of evidence was an eyewitness who saw Louis XVII in prison (his doctor, I think?) and said that the boy refused to talk and showed little signs of understanding what was said to him, or any signs of being the same boy as the dauphin. Conspiracy theories ensued, including one where his protectors smuggled him out and substituted an uneducated deaf mute child, who conveniently couldn't write or say anything that might reveal the deception. Then the incredibly sickly deaf mute died, while the real Louis was living in exile.
Today, in the 21st century, there are still people claiming to be descended from one of the 19th century pretenders. (There are still at least two people living today claiming to be descended from Charles Edward Stuart/Bonnie Prince Charlie. Predictably, one who wants to be recognized as king and probably isn't descended, and one who wants nothing to do with royalty and probably is.)
Well, we can argue about textual evidence and probabilities all day and not get anywhere. A DNA test would be awesome! But burying a 10-year old deposed monarch in royal style was not a priority of the French revolutionaries (I say this ironically--they went to a great deal of trouble to make sure it didn't happen). So while we think we might know where he's buried, it's with very low confidence, and a test of a body found there wouldn't prove anything.
But, before he was buried, his heart was removed by a royalist sympathizer and stored in a container. (Preserving and displaying the hearts of monarchs separately was a long-standing tradition.) It passed through many hands, not always recognized for what it was, and disappeared completely at one point and was thought lost forever.
Meanwhile, in the mid 20th century, one family was still trying to prove their claim to the throne via the pretender. (Omg, guys, calm down.) In the 1990s, trying to get them to shut up, someone did a DNA test of the hair and arm bone of that guy (now long dead, of course), hair in some lockets belonging to Maria Theresia, which were thought to be locks of hair of her children, hair thought to belong to Marie Antoinette, and hair from living relatives of MA. They decided he *probably* wasn't Louis XVII, but it was hard to disprove with confidence, because the DNA was so degraded and contaminated because of the passage of time (pretenders also don't get the most pristine burials).
Then, circa 2000, a historian contacted the DNA guy and said, "Hey, I spent my life trying to track down Louis XVII's heart, and I know where to find it!"
Believe it or not, the heart had actually made it, through a very roundabout route, to Saint-Denis. For those of you just joining (or maybe you know this from historical fiction), that's where all the French monarchs were buried. The heart wasn't prominently displayed, nobody knew it was there any more, but there it was, hidden on a bottom shelf behind a crucifix in a glass container.
DNA guy got permission to cut off a small piece for the test, and boom! Perfect match. What we have here is the heart of the Dauphin, meaning the kid who couldn't talk to the doctor but seemed to appreciate the guy being nice to him, was the son of Louis and MA, was the same kid who died at age 10.
Before the DNA test, there was a ceremony to re-inter the remainder of the heart. The presiding priest said, "I do not know whose heart this is, but it is certainly symbolic of children anywhere in the world who have suffered. This represents the suffering of all little children caught up in war and revolution."
Which is very true--even if nine-tenths of what we hear about the sufferings of Louis XVII was propaganda, what we know for certain would be enough to traumatize any young child into not talking.
Of course, the descendants from the pretender are still contesting the results of the test, but they have even fewer people taking them seriously these days.
Older sister Marie-Thérèse, by the way, did not die in prison, and was the only one of MA and Louis's children to make it to adulthood. She spent her life in and out of exile, in sync with the fluctuations between monarchical and republican dominance in France. Wikipedia tells me there was also a dispute about whether a certain shadowy figure known as the "Dark Countess", who never spoke in public, might actually have been Marie-Thérèse. The theory is that MT was too traumatized to live a normal life and had traded places with another woman, allowing her to assume her identity, but DNA tests a few years ago proved that the Dark Countess was not the daughter of Marie Antoinette either. We still don't know who she was, but definitely not Marie-Thérèse. Cool name, though!
Re: Marie Antoinette's children
That is amaaaaazing historical forensics (or detective work, or whatever, what do yo ueven call that??) I love it when historical puzzles are solved by SCIENCE.
But also: :(((((((((
Re: Marie Antoinette's children
But yes, I knew the sad story of the children. The moment where Hèbert brings up the sexual molestation/incest charge at MA's trial, twice, is one of the most famous and infamous at the same time, because of how she defies it. The Moniteur as well as other papers reported on the trial in great detail, so we don't have to rely on people's memories. The first time Hèbert raises the charge, she ignores him and replies to the other accusations. Then:
A jury member: »Citizen President, I ask you to point out to the accused that she has not yet replied to the facts Citizen Hèbert mentioned regarding the events between her and her son."
The President asked the relevant question.
Accused: "If I had not replied, it was because nature revolts against such an accusation made to a mother." Here the accused seemed to be upset in the highest degree. "I call on all mothers who are present in this room."
This caused a mighty commotion among female members of the audience. The President hastily proceeded to the next question.
Bear in mind MA was well and truly hated. She was basically blamed for everything that had gone wrong in France for the last century, and Hèbert, who'd made the accusation, had written pornographic calumnies about her in his journal "Père Duchesne" for years; he hadn't been the only one. There wasn't a depravity she hadn't been accused of at this point, and most were believed by the population at large. Those women had come to her trial to gloat at her downfall, not to support her. And yet.
Stefan Zweig in his MA biography from the 1930s which is titled "Story of an avarage character" points out to the great and tragic paradox of her life; that she - who if the revolution had not happened would have simply been an avarage Ancien Regime princess, no more or less extravagant than the lot of them, neither particularly smart nor stupid, in the last few years of it from 1789 onwards turned into displaying extraordinary strength and spirit. The same woman who couldn't go through a briefing from Mercy (the Austrian ambassador) without a yawning and back in Vienna had been bored by language lessons, who didn't take any of Joseph's admonishments in that memo letter he left her after leaving France seriously, learnt a complicated cyphre system so she could correspond with supporters while under increasing close watch; she, not poor Louis her husband, was the one who negotiated, corresponded etc. with everyone. She showed great courage from the moment Versailles was stormed and the people yelled for her to get out on the balcony alone ("no children, no children", because it was assumed she'd bring them to soften everyone's hearts) onwards, and in her final year of life, when she was subjected to non stop verbal abuse and wasn't even allowed to have a cell without two (male) guards present all the time, she didn't crumble once, and even was able to comfort her sister-in-law Elisabeth who'd been locked up with her.
"When will you grow into your own" (the sentence has also been translated as "when will you become yourself?" her exasparated mother MT had once written to her, and one of the many tragedies of MA's life was hat she did not become this final self even the revolutionaries were forced to have grudging respect for until it was too late.
Re: Marie Antoinette's children
But yay, this bio is available in English! Not at my library, alas, but my family has been wondering what to get me for Christmas, and I've just put it on my wishlist :D
Re: Marie Antoinette's children
(His day ended in exile, in Brazil during WWII, where he committed suicide, shortly after finishing his memoirs of his youth in pre-WWI Vienna, Die Welt von Gestern, "The World of Yesterday".)
My own first Zweig work was his Joseph Fouché biography, a great example of how you can write the biography of someone you despise and yet make it absolutely fascinating. Most of the other people he wrote about he liked, including MA,but Fouché, he was both revolted and fascinated by, and it shows.
Re: Marie Antoinette's children
Re: Marie Antoinette's children
Re: Marie Antoinette's children
My library doesn't have it in text, though it does have it in videocassette?? which is really weird to me. (This is of course not at all helpful to me, as I don't have a VHS player and even if I did, I have all this stuff queued up to watch!)
Re: Marie Antoinette's children
Much to my delight, yesterday I also accidentally stumbled across volume 2 of Catt's memoirs online, which I *had not* been able to find despite extensive looking. Funnily enough, I was trying to track down an 18th century place name for somewhere in Poland, and Catt came up. So I have downloaded that and have it on my to-read list, when I can read things again, ugh. (It's kind of horrible to have gone from "can't read physical books" to "can't read books" but at least I'm hopeful that has an easier fix.)
V. H. S???? Wow. Okay, library!
Re: Marie Antoinette's children
Oooooh, Catt's memoirs! I hope you can read it soon too :(
Re: Marie Antoinette's children