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Announcing Rheinsberg: Frederick the Great discussion post 10
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,![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D
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rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D
MacDonogh Reread II
When the late Field Marshal Grumbkow had written to the crown prince in old age complaining that he had not been addressed as 'your excellency', Frederick had pretended that he was perfectly confused when it came to titles: 'I accord count, marquis, duke, cousin, excellency, brother, etc., to anyone and everyone, without knowing whether I have got it right or not.'
I actually found this letter and it says what MacDonogh says it says!
Fritz refusing to keep a proper court:
What court there was revolved around poor, stuttering Elisabeth: 'it was to her that they went on the appointed times on the fixed days, ministers, generals, envoys and courtiers; it was to her that foreigners and the like made their presentations: the etiquette was entirely with her court'. It must have been stultifyingly dull. Nothing was said, because no one had anything to report. There was nothing much to eat either: one night the wife of Field Marshal Schmettau had to make do with one preserved cherry. The same source mentions a facetious Frenchman quipping later on in Frederick’s reign: 'There is a great gala at the queen’s today … for, as I crossed the Schloss [courtyard] I saw an old lamp lit on the grand staircase.'
SD's chamberlain:
The queen mother was compensated with a small court complete with marshal and chamberlain. The latter was a dullard called Morien. The marquis d'Argens apparently used to amuse himself by lending him the same book over and over again. He managed to get him to read it seven times in this manner. Finally Morien told him, 'Monsieur, I find it admirable. However, if I might be allowed to say, it seemed to me that the author repeated himself from time to time.'
I don't know, the guy sounds kinda witty to me, based on this one quote.
Fritz pays for Voltaire to visit:
"Your miser [i.e. Voltaire] will drink the dregs of his insatiable desire to make money; he is going to get 1300 thalers. His six-day appearance is going to cost me 550 thalers per diem. That is a lot to pay a lunatic; no court jester was ever paid such wages."
For comparison, Peter Keith gets 1200 talers a year at this point, and complains it's not enough to live on in Berlin.
Fritz invades Silesia:
[Maria Theresa] called Frederick the Heretic-king; other epithets were 'the enemy without faith or justice', 'the evil animal' and 'the monster'. Nor was she prepared to cede Silesia: 'Never, never, will the queen renounce an inch of all her hereditary lands, though she perish with all that remains to her. Rather the Turks before Vienna, rather cession of the Netherlands to France, rather any concession to Bavaria and Saxony, than renunciation of Silesia.' It was all music to Frederick's ears. He boasted to Algarotti that in Vienna, 'They say public prayers against me', and soon he would be taken for the Antichrist himself.
Note for
MacDonogh's dating on Fritz being King of Prussia is 1742:
a few months later the beleaguered emperor returned a few favours by changing him from king in Prussia to a more authentic king of Prussia.
Fritz tries to talk Voltaire into joining his court:
At the beginning of September, he went to Aachen to take the waters, hoping to see Voltaire there. His fellow hypochondriac tried to cry off again. In his then state he would be 'like an impotent man in the presence of his mistress', which would not do at all. He was too ill to submit to a cure, he wailed; but in the end he came. The poet lodged in the king’s apartment and they had a four-hour chat, two days running, during which Frederick again tried to convince him to move to Prussia.
If I can just find the source for that passage where Voltaire compares moving to Sanssouci to getting married to Fritz, our shipping will be complete!
Fritz's friends join him at Charlottenburg after the war:
Charlottenburg. His circle closed in around him. It contained some new members: the plump 'Chevalier Bernin' (Knobelsdorff) was now flanked by M. des Eguilles (the marquis d'Argens) and the 'Limping Satyr' (Pöllnitz), the permanent butt of his jokes as a result of his frequent changes of religion. Frederick kept Rothenburg informed of the cronies: 'Pöllnitz is ill; Fouqué is drinking tokay and losing at chess; Keyserlingk is drinking water and writing elegies to his beloved...'
MacDonogh's strong anti-sibling bias is showing:
There were family chores, not least two unmarried sisters, Ulrica and Amalia, who were enjoying what life Berlin and Potsdam had to offer and running up gambling debts. They even had the temerity to ask Frederick to pay them. History does not relate whether he did or not.
The temerity! In a few years, Ulrica's even going to have the temerity to ask him to pay her dowry! Can you believe it? "Optimism" is more the word I would use.
At the same time, the Austrians were clamouring for compensation and Frederick instructed Podewils to see them off. Money was for the arts alone. In a language worthy of his father, he wrote: 'Le roi de Prusse ne paie rien.'"
Well, as Voltaire said in his memoirs, "Like as Louis XII would not revenge the affronts of the Duke d'Orleans, neither would the King of Prussia remember the debts of the Prince Royal."
Mind you, if we're talking language worthy of his father, another biographer says that FW once replied to a request from one of his subjects with "I don't shit money."
Voltaire shows up in 1743:
Although he was as smitten as ever, Frederick was suspicious that he had not been asked for the usual travel expenses and correctly surmised that Voltaire was spying on him. He was therefore hesitant about discussing matters of state with his friend. Voltaire bought off his employers with letters stressing his intimate relationship with the Prussian king, who spent four hours a day closeted in Voltaire’s apartment, where he amply revealed his foreign political 'intentions'.
At least one biographer's figured out who was smitten!
Not content with making a pass at the French ambassador's cook (she fought him off!), he was now making cow eyes at Frederick's sister Ulrica. They acted together, and in their congress Voltaire forgot his place. He wrote her some verses as a birthday present, telling her that he had dreamed of her.
MacDonogh, as we know, claims that Fritz was disapproving, but I turned up that article on how Fritz was actually playing along, and having read the poems, I agree. He seems much more concerned that Voltaire isn't giving him, Fritz, his undivided attention than that he's hitting on Fritz's sister. Now I just want the story of the cook fighting Voltaire off!
Our favorite "can't live with you, can't live without you" ship:
Theirs was a puzzling relationship. There was a permanent friction between them, and Voltaire never ceased to cause problems for the king by his indiscretions, yet they seemed to nourish one another. Despite the bad blood over Ulrica and Voltaire's ham-fisted espionage, Frederick was soon writing to him offering him all sorts of blandishments to take up residence in Berlin.
Fritz and law:
From 31 May 1746, Prussia opted out of imperial justice with the scrapping of the appeals to Vienna. This liberated it from the constraints imposed by German law. Already in 1738 Frederick William had asked Cocceji to draw up a complete legal code. After the demise of the appellate jurisdiction, Frederick asked him again. The results were the Codex Fridericianus Pomeranicus and the Codex Fridericianus Marchius of 1747 to 1748. Appeals went to the king. Voltaire cites the case of a man who had enjoyed a love affair with a she donkey, which was a capital offence. Frederick minuted that the sentence was annulled: 'in his lands one could enjoy freedom of both conscience and penis'. A similar tale is told of the cavalry trooper who was found to have sodomised his horse. Frederick again refused to enact the punishment deemed due in the circumstances: 'The man is a pig', he wrote. 'Transfer him to the infantry.'"
Either all copies of Voltaire's memoirs I have are bowdlerized, or MacDonogh is being creative again. All my copies, French and English, say is that the crime was of an infamous nature, no mention of donkeys.
It's possible, though, since he also mentions the marriage analogy being in the memoirs, and he may just have a copy that I don't.
On the other hand, bowdlerizing Voltaire's memoirs has got to be like bowdlerizing Lehndorff's diaries: surely there's nothing left by the time you're done!
Fritz and MT:
He knew that business remained unsettled between him and Maria Theresa even despite the guarantees of his ownership of Silesia meted out at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle, but he never descended to personal insult, beyond speculating on who might wear the trousers in that ménage.
Hmm. You seem to be missing out on the vast amounts of personal insult Fritz descended to, MacDonogh. But good job whitewashing.
This one is interesting because Gundling was FW's court jester/fool:
Maupertuis, freed from Austrian captivity (they had, in fact, treated him with respect), was pestering Frederick for his patent as president of the Academy [of Sciences]: 'that position first made honourable by Leibniz, and rendered ridiculous by Gundling … will be for me, Sire, what you want it to be'.
That's FW for you, always taking the sciences seriously.
Fritz's friends starting to die off en masse:
At the time, he had longed for Rheinsberg and his friends, but Frederick's world had since been made poorer and sadder for the loss of such companions as Keyserlingk, Jordan and Duhan. Jordan's portrait was hung up in his cabinet, and Thiébault tells the story of one of his friends — it is hard to say which — whose coffin was taken into Frederick's apartment, after which it was only with some difficulty that his servants convinced him to relinquish it, for the body had begun to stink.
Another case where I tracked down the citations in the Thiébault memoirs and both passages seem entirely unrelated. One I recognized the pagination off the top of my head (lol), because, of course, it's the Katte episode; the other turned out to be Trenck. I'm starting to think his copies have vastly different pagination than mine, but maybe I'm being too charitable. On the other hand, he's definitely got different paginations on the Oeuvres than I do on Trier. I can often find his quotes, but only by ignoring the page numbers (which are also not letter numbers, in case you're wondering).
Fritz on friendship:
Despite his impossibility on close acquaintance, Frederick felt he could not go on without friends. He took issue with d'Argens' contention in his Nouveaux mémoires that a Carthusian might be happy, despite his solitude. 'I should like to say affirmatively that he is not. A man who cultivates the [arts] and sciences and who lives without friends is a lone wolf. In a word, the way I see it, friendship is indispensable to our happiness.'
Fritz, just because you can't do it, doesn't mean no one can. What is it with you not liking it when people react to things differently from you, and also when they react to things the same way as you? Oh, right, emotional stuntedness.
The Palladion:
Readings of Le Palladion surely raised a few laughs at Frederick’s petits soupers. One or two of his friends must have been indiscreet. Soon there was talk in Paris and Versailles, where the French king voiced a singular desire to lay his hands on a copy. Wheedling the poem out of Frederick became a diplomatic priority. A year later Valory wrote that he wanted to read Frederick's description of his exploits with the Pandurs for himself. Frederick was not prepared to let it go: 'how the theologians, politicians and purists would scream'. When Valory pushed, Frederick sent him his Histoire de Brandebourg instead.
Frederick had given Darget a rough ride in verse: sodomised by so many Jesuit fathers. Perhaps for that reason he wrote him a poem too: 'A Darget, apologie des rois'. In it he admitted that the life of a king’s secretary was not always a happy one. Based on Boileau's Epitre XI, A mon jardinier, it is one of Frederick’s most successful poems.
Tous les jours, par cahier, tu mets ses vers au net,
Et quand tu les lui rends, Dieu sait le bruit qu’il fait:
D’un sévère examen le pointilleux scrupule
S'étend par chaque point et sur chaque virgule;
Là sont les e muets qui devraient être ouverts
Ou c'est un mot de moins qui fait clocher un vers;
Puis, en recopiant cet immortel ouvrage,
Tu donnes son auteur au diable à chaque page.
Every day you put whole books of his verse to rights,
God knows, a thankless task which leads to frequent fights:
The meticulous pedant he alights on a
Misplaced colon or full stop, or a missing comma;
Here is a silent e, which should be stressed
And there’s a missing word which leaves the line a mess;
Then as you copy out the immortal autograph,
You damn its author with every paragraph.
I don't have enough data to express an opinion, but Blanning tells me Darget considered this an inadequate apology. If so, one can hardly blame him!
Also, Fritz, yeah, I'm sure the silent e's are why he's so upset. I really hope he *wasn't* your boyfriend, as Blanning thinks.
Re: MacDonogh Reread II
No, but I think ballerinas and soprano singers will make more. ;) Mind you, that kind of statement makes the "squeezed orange" quote sound authentic, and also fits with father FW's attitude towards intellectuals, see below. Not that Voltairei can't bite back, and then some, but I think this is where the "can't live with" part of the ship comes in.
This one is interesting because Gundling was FW's court jester/fool
Not precisely. He was certainly treated by FW as one. But the poor man was actually a scholar. He was the one who introduced systematic source research to German scholarship; he started out as a top historian before FW humiliated him into treating him court-jesterly, and started years and years of abuse. English wiki has some, but check out German wiki for more of it. He tried to escape twice, was brought back and ended up drinking himself to death. And even then FW did not relent: Gundling died in Potsdam in 1731 from the effects of his stomach ulcers. At the instigation of the king, he was buried in an unworthy ceremony, even blasphemous in the judgment of some of his contemporaries. For years he had had to spend the nights in his room next to a wine barrel that had been transformed into a coffin. In this container his body, grotesquely costumed, was first exhibited in public. The writer David Faßmann, his greatest enemy at the court, gave the sermon on the corpse – the responsible evangelical clergy had refused to take part in the spectacle. Eight tailors then carried the barrel to the city limits (according to other sources the barrel was pulled by pigs), from there it went in the cattle cart to Bornstedt near Potsdam. Gundling was buried in a tomb of the village church there. Later, Frederick William I tried to dispel the suspicion that he had disregarded principles of religion by official depictions of the case. The rebellious clergy were strictly interrogated, but ultimately not punished.
Jacob-von-Gundling-Straße in Potsdam is named after him.
So if I were Maupertuis, I'd probably have been way more sceptical before agreeing to work for any son of FW's.
The temerity! In a few years, Ulrica's even going to have the temerity to ask him to pay her dowry! Can you believe it? "Optimism" is more the word I would use.
No kidding. Why am I not surprised McDonogh has it in for the sibs? Incidentally, if he'd checked Ulrike's letters, then he could not have claimed that:
MacDonogh, as we know, claims that Fritz was disapproving, but I turned up that article on how Fritz was actually playing along, and having read the poems, I agree.
Me too, because I did read that letter in addition to the poems. An Ulrike who writes to Fritz, apropos that poem:
M. de Voltaire will not regret having started a correspondence with me, when he receives the charming reply in verse for which I cannot thank your majesty enough. If he could believe that I was its author, though, his heart would fail him most dreadfully; but he has too much discernment not to know which Apollo inspired me. It is a consolation for the Marquise that I would not always dare to have recourse to this god, since only thus she is sure of keeping her reign.
Is clearly not writing in a situation where Fritz disapproves, but one where he eagerly used the chance to write love poetry to Voltaire. Pity Edmond de Rostand lived after Voltaire, because "Cyrano de Bergerac" comes to mind. *veg*
He knew that business remained unsettled between him and Maria Theresa even despite the guarantees of his ownership of Silesia meted out at the Conference of Aix-la-Chapelle, but he never descended to personal insult, beyond speculating on who might wear the trousers in that ménage.
Hmm. You seem to be missing out on the vast amounts of personal insult Fritz descended to, MacDonogh. But good job whitewashing.
I'm speechless. How it is possible for anyone doing the slightest bit of research to miss all the insults he slung at her before her death is beyond me.
I don't have enough data to express an opinion, but Blanning tells me Darget considered this an inadequate apology. If so, one can hardly blame him!
Quite! No wonder he eventually quit.
Re: MacDonogh Reread II
You can predict how his take on AW and Heinrich goes.
I had to laugh yesterday at how Fritz "never managed to cure Heinrich of his bile," to which I found myself replying, "Well, no, if you look at the things Fritz tried, those are not usually the things that cure people of bile, it's true."
because "Cyrano de Bergerac" comes to mind. *veg*
Cyrano came to my mind too!
But Cyrano could write good French poetryGundling: Yikes. Yikes yikes yikes. I can see, though, why all my sources just said "jester/fool"; Wikipedia tells me scholarship on him has gone back and forth in terms of how it presents him.
"In February 1714, he was required to deliver a lecture to assembled guests offering arguments for and against the existence of ghosts, while being made to drink heavily."
Now, where have we heard that before?
It's amazing because the Spartans were supposed to have forced helots to get drunk to discourage their citizens-in-training from excessive alcohol, but FW likes drinking himself and likes making other people get drunk.
If Catt's
novelmemoirs can be trusted, all those accounts of Fritz tormenting people, usually Guichard, with pranks (the word we're looking for here is "abuse") make him seem like a very watered-down version of his father. As usual.When I was telling mob boss fic author recently about how George I, FW, and Fritz dealt with people trying to flee with their lovers, and how Fritz only locked people up briefly and didn't kill anyone over it, she said, "Bless his damaged little heart?" and that felt very appropriate. He didn't treat Guichard as badly as FW treated Gundling! It's an improvement!
Therapy for everyone.
So if I were Maupertuis, I'd probably have been way more sceptical before agreeing to work for any son of FW's.
In Maupertuis' defense, Fritz had a good deal of firsthand experience of Gundling's treatment at FW's hands, from being an intellectual himself. He was far from your dream boss, and Wolff was a wise man, but I can see why you would go into it expecting the exact opposite of Gundling's treatment.
How it is possible for anyone doing the slightest bit of research to miss all the insults he slung at her before her death is beyond me.
I was fifteen and I knew he'd had it in for her, and women, personally.
It's weird because MacDonogh is highly critical of Fritz--he's no Preuss--but that doesn't stop him from individual acts of whitewashing. He also just buys into a lot of the longstanding myths, like not wearing anything but a uniform after 1740, except once a year at his mother's birthday or when visiting EC, but to be fair, the reason those are longstanding myths is that everyone bought into them for a long time.
The Fritz/MT relationship, though, there's no excuse for that.
Oh, you know that quote about MT hating whores and having more than one talent? That's from Catt. I can see we're going to have to read the diary.
Re: MacDonogh Reread II
So very true. But clearly, we're taking the wrong approach her. Fritz the ever chill and ever patient was being a model big brother, repeatedly steering Heinrich away from the wrong boyfriends, marrying him to a beauty and giving exemplary grief counselling to ensure Heinrich would not succumb to depression. He also makes certain Heinrich stays away from dangerous jobs, like King of Poland, and includes him in family gatherings when nephews come to visit. He is the very model of a Hohenzollern therapist!
Speaking of models: the FW and Gundling tale has made it to the screen as the only historical movie in which FW plays a prominent role that has nothing to do with his son whatsoever, Der König und sein Narr. (Haven't seen it, but the script is by one of the foremost GDR writers of the day, Ulrich Plenzdorf, and it has Götz George as FW.) Since chronology is character: I see Gundling died in April 1731, which means his abuse and Fritz' abuse did overlap. Since Gundling's started in 1713, that makes 28 years of it, which was Fritz' age when FW died. Now I would like to think that young Fritz might have felt some empathy for the poor guy, but I fear he probably saw him only as a ridiculous figure as well, and as a member of his father's hated tobbaco round, not as a fellow victim.
Anyway, depending on how much of FW's treatment of Gundling was known outside of Prussia: no wonder Émilie thought Voltaire shouldn't set foot in the country as long as FW was still alive!
Re: MacDonogh Reread II
*chokes*
He is the very model of a Hohenzollern therapist!
...I totally lost it here.
Re: MacDonogh Reread II
This one is interesting because Gundling was FW's court jester/fool
Not precisely. He was certainly treated by FW as one.
Wow. I feel like I keep asking you guys for stories showing FW in the best possible light, and as soon as I start feeling the slightest iota of sympathy, I hear something like this and my sympathy goes into negative amounts.
Hmm. You seem to be missing out on the vast amounts of personal insult Fritz descended to, MacDonogh. But good job whitewashing.
I'm speechless. How it is possible for anyone doing the slightest bit of research to miss all the insults he slung at her before her death is beyond me.
Soooo... but now that I'm behind and catching up on comments after New Developments... how much of the personal insult was from Catt's memoirs? I think one of you said the "three whores" comment was not from there...
Re: MacDonogh Reread II
You know the place
You get a mild bug for a few days, and in that time Catt's diary gets translated and summarized and his memoirs deconstructed, leading us to re-evaluate Fritz's entire personality, we discover we've been using the wrong memoirs altogether for Thiebault, we turn up other Seckendorff's amaaaazing secret diary, and Mitchell's memoirs turn up with a mention of Katte. And that's just the high points!
ETA: Oh, man, I just checked my word count log, and in the last week, we've churned out 55K words in the comments (not counting Rheinsberg posts). You'd think we'd lose steam after the initial burst, but in December we went from ~100K per month to 200K, and so far, we've sustained that pace for two consecutive months and are still going strong!
I hear something like this and my sympathy goes into negative amounts.
It was SO MUCH worse than I realized, omg.