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We now have a community, rheinsberg, that has quite a lot of the interesting historical content (and more coming regularly), organized nicely with lots of lovely tags so if there's any subject you are interested in it is easy to find :D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

[mildred_of_midgard]

I don't think putting Voltaire in a birdcage after dinner is a viable solution...

He can keep Pöllnitz company. :P

But yes, that "can't live with you, can't live without you" is touching. Also, Fritz is kind of used to people leaving and coming back after the war is over, and of course he's also used to Voltaire specifically coming and going. So it doesn't really surprise me that he didn't know what we know, that they were never going to see each other again, despite having a quarter of a century in which to do so.

It does, and I'm tentatively revising my opinion on Fritz' propensity for slut-shaming as being at least partially based on Henri de Catt's unreliable memoirs.

Same. I'm having to tentatively revise a lot of things.

But it does seem like not having to worry about commandments about adultery or original sin and so forth helped Fritz out in this account. I'll share a quote to this effect soon, in my Lavisse write-up.

By the way, let me tweak Google Translate's "He found that men were unjust towards women; that we allowed ourselves to be disturbed and that we did not suffer from them" that I quoted above. He's saying that men permit themselves to stray from the straight-and-narrow but don't allow (suffer) women to.

(Mind you, there are still the "three whorse of Europe" quotes which don't come from de Catt.

Where do they come from, out of curiosity?

But yes, Fritz is definitely a huge misogynist, but in keeping with him being a fascinating mixed bag of good and bad, he has some surprisingly liberal ideas about women.

On the one hand, women are inferior, smell bad (Fritz, no one can even approach you without sneezing, and also, how have your nasal passages not been incapacitated already? I defy you to convince me that you can smell anything), shouldn't be allowed to be in charge of anything (unless it suits him), should never rule over men, etc., etc., *but*, they should be educated as a matter of course in a way that they're not currently, should be free to have affairs if their husbands are cheating on them, and in general can be allowed to have love affairs as long as they're conducted discreetly and motivated by passion. And it's not totally their fault that they're obsessed with looks and love affairs. (He doesn't seem to get that in a world where men have all the power, a woman's ability to attract a man become a means of survival, he seems to think it's just frivolity in the absence of being able to think about philosophy and literature, and he doesn't want women benefiting from their affairs *cough*, but okay. It's a start.)

Fair For Its Day, as TV Tropes would say.

Marries the sister in law of AW's private secretary, don't forget. Who suddenly finds himself singled out by Fritz together with only one other as the sole two decent people around AW who weren't "evil advisors" councelling him against Big Bro in the memoirs, without any basis of this in the diaries whatsoever.

Of course! Who else would he marry but the sister of a really upstanding guy who was one of Fritz's favorite people?