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We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D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

[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."