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We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D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

Voltaire and his niece

[cahn]

In the last post mildred_of_midgard wrote:

So this came up in conversation in another corner of the Fritz fandom (mob-boss-fic-writing fan) the day before you posted it, and we were wondering: how shocking or normal was it that Voltaire was having an affair with his niece? Was this something that like, royals could get away with because royals were expected to do a certain amount of inbreeding, or was it like, "Well, it's technically consanguinity, but they're not getting married, and who cares, anyway?"?

Well, all I have to go on is Zinsser, who doesn't give a cite for this, but she definitely does think it would have been shocking. She says, "The poet had naively assumed that he could keep his secret from Du Chatelet and from the public, and thus avoid the inevitable ridicule and condemnation the incestuous affair would invite."

But then she goes on to say "no one discovered the illicit liaison until the 1950s, when an enterprising dealer offered at auction some of Voltaire's own love notes," and I thought either you or selenak had said that it was known earlier than that?

Re: Voltaire and his niece

[selenak]

Nope, see my reply here, which also details the 1950s letters discovery:

https://cahn.dreamwidth.org/166556.html?thread=1767324#cmt1767324

Re: Voltaire and his niece

[cahn]

Ah, thank you! This was the comment I was imperfectly remembering. (somehow I had thought that someone had used them when they were privately owned... but that's clearly not what the comment says.)

Also, you say in that comment, "I'm not sure what it says about Voltaire's taste that his three most long term relationships were a) Émilie (yay!), b) Fritz (um), and c) his niece (well)."

...and... yeah. Quoted for truth :P

Re: Voltaire and his niece

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yeah, this line jumped out at me too. :D "Brother" Voltaire the honorary Hohenzollern indeed.

Re: Voltaire and his niece

[selenak]

Like I said - who else among Fritz' boyfriends is that much like them? I totally understand why he's Wilhelmine's problematic fave.