Frederick the Great, discussion post 5: or: Yuletide requests are out!

[cahn]

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

Comments

Re: Meanwhile, in Sweden

[cahn]

woooooow! Those indeed are earth-shattering reforms! OK, that's pretty cool, although he clearly paid for it a lot.

Heh, I suppose there would be scandal at that, given that Munck was careful to make public his role in all of this :) Whereas Joseph wasn't going to.... (I'm still amazed, from a prudish 21stC viewpoint, that he wrote a letter about it!)

MA was an evil nymphomaniac and hence not able to get pregnant

I... don't... think sex and pregnancy work the way you think they do, revolutionaries....

Austrian siblings

[selenak]

Whereas Joseph wasn't going to.... (I'm still amazed, from a prudish 21stC viewpoint, that he wrote a letter about it!)

Well, to his brother, who was going to keep it confidential. He probably needed to vent, since going by reports like the Duc de Croy's he was on his best behavior in public and diplomatic and nice all the time.

Speaking of Joseph, Leopold and Marie Antoinette, the nineteenth century noble who first published both the MT-MA correspondance(censored, not just for sex; MA and MT frankly discuss stuff like having one's period, which was a no go for the 19th century readership) and as a follow up the correspondance between MA and both her imperial brothers, has this to say in his introduction preface:

(Joseph) was despite or because of the large age difference between him and his youngest sister the brother closest to her. It isn‘t a rare situation for young girls to attach themselves to their older brothers with a warmth of feeling which can only be explained by an unique mingling of sisterly love and childish veneration. This emotion grows especially vivid if the father isn‘t alive anymore, and subsequently the oldest brother takes his place as the head of the family. From Antoinette‘s tenth year onwards, this was the case with Joseph. As the oldest male family member and his father‘s successor on the imperial throne, as co-ruler with their mother and finally through his unusual mental superiority the fourteen years older brother was bound to impress his youngest sister, all the more so because his personal amiability, his vivid concern for her and his warm interest in her fate won her complete love and loyalty. She gave him a position in her life near her mothers. Consequently, he had the right not to hold back with his scolding as well if his youngest sister‘s behavior seemed to him to deserve it. This can be seen from her letters to Rosenberg and the confessions they contain.

His concern for Marie Antoinette is even more recognizable in the warnings he left her in written form upon departing Versailles. As serious and terse as some of his admonishments sounded, Marie Antoinette didn‘t let any touchiness influence her conviction that these admonishments sprang from the purest well of fraternal love. Until the end of his days, she showed this brother she loved as much as she venerated him a consistent and unshakeable loyalty.

Much less affectionate was the relationship that existed between the Queen of France and her brother Leopold. The very circumstance that Antoinette was only ten years old when Leopold succeeded his father in governing Tuscany and thus left Vienna, and that she never saw him agan had to influence how it developed. Moreover, she doesn‘t appear to have corresponded with him at all until the moment when he succeeded in the government of the Empire after Joseph‘s death. Leopold's remark that while he had a sister, Austria did not and thus could not be expected to interfere in France could not have encouraged her. Still, it cannot be said that Leopold was lacking sympathy for her fate entirely, which at the very moment when she was starting her correspondance with him was taking its fatal turn. HIs first letter with which he informs her of Joseph‘s death and the letters he writes to her when receiving the unfortunately wrong news that the royal family‘s escape from France bear witness to this.

Re: Austrian siblings

[cahn]

Ha, fair enough. ...this made me realize that part of my issue seems to be possibly gender-related? Like, it would be totally in character for me to write something like that to my sister (if we had another sibling that I was called in to help with their sex life *shudder*) but it's kind of hard for me to imagine most of the guys I know doing something like that, heh. Then again, perhaps my imagination is just not good enough!

Awwww, that is a really sweet note about Joseph and MA. (And I don't disagree with it.)