cahn | 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...

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From:

selenak

d MT may have had a less crap life than a lot of people, but she sure didn't have an *easy* one

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.

From:

cahn

Oh noooooo. :( What I'm getting out of all of this is that not only did everyone have PTSD, but even when things were relatively good (in the sense that MT seems to not have had parental dysfunction passed on like Fritz did), the whole absolute power thing really twisted everyone up :( (Well, okay, that and the lack of therapy. But at least if it weren't for the absolute power thing, it would only have been her that was messed up.)

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!)

From:

selenak

Yes; my paternal grandmother reacted very similarly when my grandfather died, she withdrew from her friends, stopped doing so many things she'd enjoyed doing together with my grandfather - they'd been in a bowling club together, they'd travelled a lot, they had had favourite restaurants etc - , and then felt her friends were deserting her when after a while, they didn't try anymore to coax her back. But the social conditions around her were widely different.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Okay, so you know the Fritz as crime boss AU? The author writes a mash-up of 18th and 19th century characters in the series in question. One is Shaka Zulu. From the author's notes, I got this anecdote, which is in Wikipedia with a source of some modern historian that idk whether to trust, so grain of salt, but here you go:

"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?