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We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D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

[selenak]

And I think Fritz talks a lot about how hypochondriacal Voltaire is, so I think he has an impression of Voltaire as someone afraid of death. I'm not certain, but that may be relevant.

Oh absolutely. And Voltaire, with his insisting on being on death's door for decades, certainly was hypochondriacal as hell. But it's one of the interesting things about him: I'm sure he was as much afraid of death as the next non-suicidal person, and then some. And he certainly had no illusions about, say, being able to withstand torture, or anything like that. On the contrary, he was prone to cry out when his toes were tread on. BUT. He had no problem going up against the powerful - who could have squashed him easily - not just as a young man, when sharing the illusion of many young men that they're immortal, and all work out well - but throughout his long life. Intermittent stints in prison not withstanding. Yes, being a egomaniac presumably helped with that, but there are any number of egomaniacs who the first few times after being bruised decide to err on the side of caution. Especially those with a sound survival instinct, which he certainly otherwise had. And yet this man fights "J'Accuse" type of publicity campaigns till the very end when he's outraged about something. (That's utterly unrelated to him, one should add, given his readiness to keep up his grudges against good old Maupertuis.) (BTW, note to self: have discovered YouTube has a French movie on one of those late life cases, "Voltaire and Calas", must check out if the time allows.)

I mean, the whole story about his dying has all those facets. Going to Paris int he first place when he knew that he wasn't likely to come back alive (authorial vanity/pride, longing for that long ago left birthplace and city of cities), going to the trouble of bamboozling a priest (because he'd rather not be flung on the dungheap; you'd think a deist wouldn't care that much what happens to his dead body, but nope, Voltaire wants a proper burial) but avoiding actually taking communion; and then when the clergy comes back in greater numbers and armed with an ultimatum, throwing them out, which not only meant no absolution (whether or not he believed that meant anything at this point) but definitely meant no proper burial (as far as he could know, unless the nephews had promised him they'd make it happen regardless). Something else Fritz and Voltaire shared besides flaws and love of literature and satire was the ability to bend under pressure but maintain an inner core that could not be reached and carried them through the extremes.


Tangentially, I also recall a late letter in which Fritz, in reply to Voltaire's nth "I'm old and practically at death's door" says no, I'm old. You won't just survive us all, but amazingly you've managed to stay young through your mind. And there is something to it, in the sense that Voltaire managed to be himself right to the end, argumentative, witty, creative (he kept writing till his last months, too), simultanously very self centred and looking out for others. (He got the news about the success of his final campaign literally on his deathbed.) For all his earlier digs and fears, Fritz must have been glad about that.

Re: Henri de Catt Unplugged - I

[mildred_of_midgard]

Yeah, Voltaire had a strength of will to match Fritz's, which I'm not sure Fritz ever fully appreciated. Fritz, who prided himself on enduring the hardships of warfare and risking his life in the front lines, is likely to rate his physical courage over Voltaire's (not withstanding the vast parallels between them that you pointed out), and also to feel the need to feel superior about Voltaire's likelihood of panicking in the face of death.

They're always trying to one-up each other, and this may have to do with Voltaire belitting Fritz's military talents more than it has to do with Fritz having bent/broken under pressure when he was younger and become a military man in spite of all his initial resistance.

Which reminds me, who faced physical death calmly and courageously but recanted his atheism and received religious consolation at the end? Katte. Now, whether it was a performance or not, whether *Fritz* thought it was a performance or not, that might have something to do with his lifelong concern over whether his other friends are going to recant at the end.

For all his earlier digs and fears, Fritz must have been glad about that.

Agreed. Incidentally, it's possible that Fritz having a mass said for Voltaire (assuming MacDonogh is right about this) reflects mixed feelings. On the one hand, a final chance to unite with Voltaire in mocking the church, yay. On the other...remember when Fritz lost an argument with Guichard about the name Quintus Icilius, and then decided to nickname Guichard Quintus Icilius for the rest of his life? I can see Fritz having a, "I insisted X, I was wrong, but I'm king so I get the last word" moment when making sure Voltaire got a mass said for his soul after all.

Also, yeah, it is interesting that Voltaire cared what happened to his body. So did Fritz! For all his "I don't believe in an immortal soul, I lived as a philosopher," he was very specific about "and I want to be buried as a philosopher...at home, next to my dogs, definitely not in a church next to Dad with a lot of pomp and circumstance maybe I should have been nicer to my nephew, oops."