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

Die Dunkelgräfin is indeed a cool moniker, and as it happens turns up in a (very funny and charming) novel I've just read (alas in German, thus can't rec it to you two) where she hires a couple of German writers (Goethe, Schiller, Kleist, Achim von Armin and Bettina Brentano, as well as Alexander von Humboldt) to supposedly save the now adult former Dauphin from Napoleon's people getting their hands on him. (Spoiler: it's not the real Louis Charles.) (She's not Marie-Therese, either.) The whole thing is written as a Dumas-style caper with as many quotes from Goethe, Schiller et al. worked into it and I loved it, so if the novel ever gets translated, I'll rec it to you again. ("Das Erlkönig Manöver" by Robert Löhr.)

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.

Edited Date: 2019-11-19 08:32 am (UTC)

From:

cahn

:((((((((( <3

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

From:

selenak

It's a deserved classic. Of course the research is a bit dated. Also, it's worth bearing in mind that Stefan Zweig wrote this between two world wars, the first of which had made him a committed pacifist. He'd grown up in pre WWI Austria when in school the Habsburgs could do no wrong, and had seen where that type of history lesson led to, so he's somewhat iconoclastic/Habsburg-critisizing in response to that. All this being said, he was a master of the biographie romancee, and also of the German language; of course I don't know how good the translation is but he was a bestselling author the whole world over in his day. He was also very musical - he wrote the libretto for a late Richard Strauss opera, and when it was produced for the first time in 1933, his name wasn't mentioned anywhere, because Zweig was Jewish, and Hitler had arrived.

(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.

From:

cahn

I will keep all that in mind! Thank you for the notes :D

From:

mildred_of_midgard

It looks like it's also freely available for borrowing on archive.org, but you have to wait in line for the e-copy. Used paperback copies look like they start at about $4, so not bad either. Your call!

From:

cahn

Whoa, I didn't even know you could borrow books on archive.org! HMMMM.

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!)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Neither did I! But I went looking for it for you and discovered this.

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!

From:

cahn

I knoooow, isn't that weird?!

Oooooh, Catt's memoirs! I hope you can read it soon too :(

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Yeah, me too! I read volume 1 and enjoyed it. And today I was working on the place name wrangling for my map, and I got to the most super complicated years, which are *exactly* the two years volume 2 of Catt's memoirs covers, and Catt was super helpful in tracking down some really obscure place names. But I didn't get as far in my wrangling as I'd hoped, because I got distracted by reading the anecdotes he was recounting, haha. Looking forward to actually reading it properly! (Making really good progress on the wrangling now that I'm past the Seven Years' War, and hoping to have an actual map to show for it soon!)