Announcing Rheinsberg: Frederick the Great discussion post 10

[cahn]

So for anyone who is reading this and would like to learn more about Frederick the Great and his contemporaries, but who doesn't want to wade through 500k (600k?) words worth of comments and an increasingly sprawling comment section:

We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D

Comments

Re: Fritz Tells All: The Austrian Dossier (Seckendorff I)

[mildred_of_midgard]

He doesn't want Saxony, or anyone else, hedging their bets on AW instead of him, and certainly not share that money with Heinrich and Ferdinand once they get older

This is an excellent point. Especially since, as you said elsewhere, Fritz was having to quash rumors about AW even into the late 1730s.

...and H & F just kicked him under the table. I totally maintain that happened.

Enjoy the kicking while you can, boys! Only a few more years till he becomes king.

keep them far away from any business of the state

Yeah, Fritz's MO is consistently: "Spot a threat a mile away, take pre-emptive action." When it comes to fight-or-flight, he's locked in "fight" mode, and his threat-detector is so oversensitive it picks up on false positive after false positive. And that's why European powers making defensive alliances could count on him to invade at some point.

See, I'd have put as "Wanted: One Sugar Daddy". :) Well, granted, Voltaire would never have been that. He was supporting a lot of social causes in his life time with the lots of money he gathered, including schools for Swiss peasants, but I really doubt he'd have given his royal Prussian pen pal a single dime at that point. So "erastes" it is.

You know, you just went through my exact thought process. :D Obviously, Fritz wants money so bad he'll go through people like Seckendorff and EC. The only part of "Wanted: One Sugar Daddy" I would quibble with is the word "one". "Wanted: As many sugar daddies as possible." ;) But Voltaire's never going to give him money, so I have to assume the Socrates/Alcibiades thing comes out of a craving for an erastes, preferably but not necessarily one with access to ready money they're wiling to make available to Fritz.

Clearly. Though I agree with you it's likely a mixture of motives, i.e. that and Fritz as ever looking for leverage and money.

Indeed. Though I threw the erastes possibility out there for the sake of gossipy sensationalism and in answer to your question of whether he and Manteuffel had sex, what I think was most likely going on was primarily self-interest. I'm sure he would have loved another Suhm, but I don't think realizing that wasn't what he had slowed him down one bit in his quest for leverage and money.

I'm still cackling about the multiple use of golden Socrates heads on canes and Socrates/Alcibiades analogies in 1736, though.

We're all still cackling about that. Hey, when you hit on a winning formula, why hold back? :D