About halfway through Blanning, so it's time for another update. Less by way of quotes and more comments here, especially since cahn is thinking of reading it.
There's a good chapter full of information on the artistic and musical sphere. I'm not the least bit qualified to comment on the music parts, either to spot errors or to spot the interesting parts. But it's the chapter I excerpted heavily from for our "Counterpoint" collaboration, so I highly recommend reading it and letting us know what is interesting or obviously wrong. :)
The section on politics leading up to the Diplomatic Revolution is...interesting. By which I mean certain parts match Fritzian propaganda pretty closely. Which is surprising, from a guy who's pretty damn critical of Fritz's expansionism, foreign policy, tactics, strategy, treatment of civilians, treatment of allies, treatment of friends, treatment of family, treatment of subjects, treatment of employees, inadequate military or political intelligence*, misogyny, anti-Semitism, various hypocrisies, tastes in art, literature, and music, and tendency to hold forth on subjects about which he knows nothing. And probably a bunch of other things I'm forgetting.
* By intelligence I mean "gathering of information about what other people are up to," not "brainpower."
Blanning's not "Fritz never loved anyone except maybe Fredersdorf" deconstructionist guy, certainly, and he has some positive things to say and gives credit where credit is due. I would say he's more demythologizing than deconstructionist. Of all biographers I've seen or that selenak has reported on, Blanning is probably closest to our salon in terms of both positive and negative opinions. (I'm a little bit more forgiving of Fritz's desire not to attend parties with a wife he was forced to marry in the first place.)
But he's bad about facts, as we've seen, and rereading him, I've spotted a few things that made me raise my eyebrows about the early 1750s.
1) Elizabeth of Russia doesn't control foreign policy, Prussophobe Count Bestushev does (and he controls her completely), and the reason she hates Fritz is that Bestushev makes sure she hears all the misogynistic things Fritz says and none of the good stuff about Fritz.
2) Madame de Pompadour may or may not have any input into foreign policy, as opposed to just being popularly believed to be influential in this domain. (I didn't realize there was any question about this, but Blanning says it's highly debated, and I used to believe that the partition of Poland was totally Fritz's idea, so...maybe? French politics is not something I have any deep knowledge on.)
3) MT totally addresses Pompadour as both "my sister" and "my cousin"! Because Preuss says so! (Blanning has about 50 citations of Arneth in his book, but apparently he missed the memo about this claim being disproved.)
All of these would be totally unremarkable in a "Fritz is the greatest!" bio, but they jumped out at me in Blanning's "Fritz is SO overrated, Heinrich was WAY more awesome" bio. He actually presents (3) in a positive light, evidence that MT was a much better politician than Fritz, but...if it's not true, it's not true.
Oh, he states as fact that Elizabeth married Razumovsky morganatically and had children by him. Like I've said elsewhere, I'm not up on the latest research and where the communis opinio stands on this issue. Not highlighting it as at all questionable jumps out at me, but maybe unfairly. Blanning also describes Razumovsky as an intellectual weakling but a "Hercules of Cythera," citation being the Prussian envoy. I would like a less biased source, Blanning?
Now for some quotes. Take everything with a grain of salt!
Apparently Europe has no clue about Russia in the 17th century:
It was not so long ago that Louis XIV had addressed a letter to Tsar Michael unaware that he had been dead for twelve years.
That would be 1657, per Wikipedia. Citation for this is Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 1961. Considering Blanning is the guy who trustingly cites Norman Davies for the "she wept and took" MT quote, this citation doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. But MacDonogh's uncited "There stands one who will avenge me" turned out to be legit, so these things can go either way!
Fritz's prognostication skills are even weaker than usual:
By the beginning of January 1741 Frederick had reached the Silesian capital, Breslau; by 17 January he could claim in a letter to Algarotti that the entire province was his. Only the fortresses of Glogau, Glatz, Neisse and Brieg remained in Austrian hands. The whole affair, he boasted, had cost the lives of just twenty soldiers and two officers.
Final death toll will be in the hundreds of thousands. Blanning uses the very appropriate word "hubris".
This is why I think he would have gone to war without the childhood abuse; the glorification of conquest just has too long and too pervasive a history for someone as ambitious as Fritz, in the environment he grew up in, to resist:
he wrote to Voltaire to describe the privations of campaigning, adding that he would gladly pass them on to someone else “if that phantom called glory did not appear to me so often. In truth, it is a great lunacy, but a lunacy that is very difficult to shed once one is infatuated with it.” Two months later he confessed to his friend Charles-Étienne Jordan: “I love war for the glory.” Even when he wrote his history of the war for public consumption, he acknowledged more than once that the pursuit of glory had been a prime aim.
All FW had to do was glorify military pursuits and hand his army over to Fritz, and I think Fritz would have done the rest. There was no need to go trying to break his will. All you got out of that was an ill-informed anti-German tirade, FW. :P
In a rare moment of defending rather than attacking Fritz, Blanning challenges the traditional view by claiming that it wasn't personal cowardice but poor judgment that led Fritz to leave the field at Mollwitz:
All accounts agree that Frederick himself showed great personal courage in trying to rescue the situation, so much so in fact that his second-in-command, Schwerin, feared for his life and pleaded with him to leave the battlefield for a place of safety. Whether his consent amounted to a flight, as the Austrians— and their historians— claimed afterwards, is doubtful.
I haven't read "all accounts," but given his earlier and later behavior, I actually buy it. Fritz is just too much of a terrier. Just like his escape attempt was more a fight than a flight, I think getting talked into leaving Mollwitz very much went against the grain.
Vaguely misogynistic remark about MT not in Catt, this one from his Histoire de mon temps, which I'm reproducing without checking for context or accuracy:
“An ambitious and vindictive enemy, who was the more dangerous because she was a woman, headlong in her opinions, and implacable… devoured by ambition.”
We still don't envy ambassadors:
So close did Frederick keep his cards to his chest that foreign diplomats could find nothing beyond gossip and idle speculation to send back to their courts. The Austrian ambassador lamented in 1749 that not even the notional foreign minister, Podewils, had any idea as to what his master’s intentions were. Frederick himself was reported to have said that, if he discovered that his own skin knew what he was going to do, he would have it peeled off and thrown away. A royal interview was not only pointless, it also exposed the unwelcome guest to Frederick’s notoriously acid tongue. According to the French envoy, the Duc de Guînes, very few of his intimidated colleagues were brave enough even to ask for an audience at Potsdam.
Fritz has opinions and isn't shy about expressing them:
Although so often described as a Francophile, Frederick in fact had a generally low opinion of contemporary French culture. During the golden age of the mid-seventeenth century, he believed, French writers, led by Corneille and Racine, had produced dramatic works of unsurpassable quality, but since then their star had waned. Dismissing their music as “puerile,” he told Graun to stop composing overtures in the French style. Modern Italian music was mellifluous when sung properly but essentially “stupid.” What Frederick demanded was music in the Italian style but written by Germans. Ascribed to him was the dictum: “The French only know how to write drama and the Italians only know how to sing; the Germans alone understand how to write music.”
Neat little detail if true:
According to the soprano Elizabeth Mara, when the weather was cold, soldiers were drafted into the theater to warm up the auditorium with their body heat.
Fritz is a troll:
More frivolously, the new gallery also gave him the opportunity to indulge his contempt for Christianity, by juxtaposing Carlo Maratta’s Madonna with Guido Reni’s Toilet of Venus. (He played the same sort of trick in the Potsdam Town Palace, where Correggio’s The Repentant Mary Magdalene was placed among a group of erotic fête galante pictures, including Watteau’s Cythera.)
I feel like one of these explanations dates to a different century than the other:
On the eastern side was Mercury, a classical statue inherited from Frederick’s sister Wilhelmine. He was chosen perhaps because he was the god of commerce (among other things) and so implied that the Prussian economy was in good shape, or more likely because he was a beautiful naked youth awaiting the attention of Mars opposite. On Frederick’s death, his heir had the statue removed and it has never returned.
What, thanks to selenak's write-up, we know to be an oversimplification of the history of the Antinous statue:
It was only after his death that the statue was renamed The Praying Boy and hastily removed to a museum.
He does think it might have been a Katte tribute, though, so props for that.
1734 is the Siege of Phillipsburg, when Fritz met Eugene, famous general and famous open-secret homosexual, whom he admired. Also, other Seckendorff is a gossipy sensationalist:
Christoph Ludwig von Seckendorf wrote in his secret diary for 1734 that Frederick was imitating Eugene’s laconic manner. He also recorded the following conversation: “The Prince of Anhalt-Dessau: ‘Does Your Highness still get an erection?’ Prince Eugene, taking a pinch of snuff: ‘No, I do not get an erection.’
Fritz ships my ship:
The same homoerotic theme could also be found in the two most important paintings commissioned for the New Palace nearby. The first was Pompeo Batoni’s The Family of Darius, which depicts another celebrated pair of male lovers, Alexander the Great and Hephaestion...In Batoni’s version, the intimacy of the relationship between the two men is emphasized by Hephaestion placing his hand on Alexander’s wrist. Commissioned in 1763, it was not delivered until 1775, but such was the importance Frederick attached to it that the allocated space was kept vacant. This was in the Blue Antechamber, which led to Frederick’s apartments.
Supposedly FW used the word "sodomite" of Fritz, but no citation given. Just me finding the wording amusing here:
Louis XV may have thought that the invasion of Silesia was the act of a lunatic, but Frederick had shown that when madness succeeds, it has to be renamed audacity. Of all those who wanted to see Frederick back where he belonged, in the asylum, Maria Theresa was the most implacable.
I don't even know what to make of the "sleaze" line. Like, whose perspective is that? Not Blanning's, surely. Kaunitz? Fritz? Contemporary French opinion?
In 1750 Kaunitz was sent off to Versailles as Austrian ambassador. There he found a once dominant power whose feet of clay were beginning to crumble. The Peace of Aachen, which handed back all the conquests in India and the Low Countries, had been greeted by French public opinion with consternation and anger: “bête comme la paix” (as stupid as the peace) became a popular simile. As it was believed that the chief minister de facto was the royal mistress, Madame de Pompadour, sleaze was added to incompetence. Just how much influence on policy (as opposed to patronage) she actually exercised has been much debated. In any event, she was a useful whipping girl for all who opposed the apparent incoherence and indecision of royal policy.
Blanning links to this painting of the tobacco parliament, which I hadn't known about. The description underneath the painting is pretty interesting as well.
Note that it's 1737, and Fritz is glad to be well away from the hated tobacco parliament. According to Asprey, Fritz commented that year to Grumbkow that a fitting epitaph for him would be "Here lies one who lived for a year." He moved into Rheinsberg in mid 1736.
I had meant to include this in the last write-up, when I talked about the sensationalist love triangle, but I missed it because it was in an end note. Anyway, Blanning shares our views on gossipy sensationalism and attitudes toward it:
A recent study of Algarotti and Frederick by Norbert Schmitz blithely ignores all the evidence relating to Algarotti’s bisexuality, referring to Hervey only once and then only as a “friend” of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Schmitz also primly observes: “The voyeuristic looking under the bedcovers of prominent people belongs to the province of the tabloid press”
And yet *nobody* seems to hesitate when talking about, say, the mistresses of Charles II.
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Blanning 3
Date: 2020-02-29 06:34 pm (UTC)There's a good chapter full of information on the artistic and musical sphere. I'm not the least bit qualified to comment on the music parts, either to spot errors or to spot the interesting parts. But it's the chapter I excerpted heavily from for our "Counterpoint" collaboration, so I highly recommend reading it and letting us know what is interesting or obviously wrong. :)
The section on politics leading up to the Diplomatic Revolution is...interesting. By which I mean certain parts match Fritzian propaganda pretty closely. Which is surprising, from a guy who's pretty damn critical of Fritz's expansionism, foreign policy, tactics, strategy, treatment of civilians, treatment of allies, treatment of friends, treatment of family, treatment of subjects, treatment of employees, inadequate military or political intelligence*, misogyny, anti-Semitism, various hypocrisies, tastes in art, literature, and music, and tendency to hold forth on subjects about which he knows nothing. And probably a bunch of other things I'm forgetting.
* By intelligence I mean "gathering of information about what other people are up to," not "brainpower."
Blanning's not "Fritz never loved anyone except maybe Fredersdorf" deconstructionist guy, certainly, and he has some positive things to say and gives credit where credit is due. I would say he's more demythologizing than deconstructionist. Of all biographers I've seen or that
But he's bad about facts, as we've seen, and rereading him, I've spotted a few things that made me raise my eyebrows about the early 1750s.
1) Elizabeth of Russia doesn't control foreign policy, Prussophobe Count Bestushev does (and he controls her completely), and the reason she hates Fritz is that Bestushev makes sure she hears all the misogynistic things Fritz says and none of the good stuff about Fritz.
2) Madame de Pompadour may or may not have any input into foreign policy, as opposed to just being popularly believed to be influential in this domain. (I didn't realize there was any question about this, but Blanning says it's highly debated, and I used to believe that the partition of Poland was totally Fritz's idea, so...maybe? French politics is not something I have any deep knowledge on.)
3) MT totally addresses Pompadour as both "my sister" and "my cousin"! Because Preuss says so! (Blanning has about 50 citations of Arneth in his book, but apparently he missed the memo about this claim being disproved.)
All of these would be totally unremarkable in a "Fritz is the greatest!" bio, but they jumped out at me in Blanning's "Fritz is SO overrated, Heinrich was WAY more awesome" bio. He actually presents (3) in a positive light, evidence that MT was a much better politician than Fritz, but...if it's not true, it's not true.
Oh, he states as fact that Elizabeth married Razumovsky morganatically and had children by him. Like I've said elsewhere, I'm not up on the latest research and where the communis opinio stands on this issue. Not highlighting it as at all questionable jumps out at me, but maybe unfairly. Blanning also describes Razumovsky as an intellectual weakling but a "Hercules of Cythera," citation being the Prussian envoy. I would like a less biased source, Blanning?
Now for some quotes. Take everything with a grain of salt!
Apparently Europe has no clue about Russia in the 17th century:
It was not so long ago that Louis XIV had addressed a letter to Tsar Michael unaware that he had been dead for twelve years.
That would be 1657, per Wikipedia. Citation for this is Anderson, Europe in the Eighteenth Century, 1961. Considering Blanning is the guy who trustingly cites Norman Davies for the "she wept and took" MT quote, this citation doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. But MacDonogh's uncited "There stands one who will avenge me" turned out to be legit, so these things can go either way!
Fritz's prognostication skills are even weaker than usual:
By the beginning of January 1741 Frederick had reached the Silesian capital, Breslau; by 17 January he could claim in a letter to Algarotti that the entire province was his. Only the fortresses of Glogau, Glatz, Neisse and Brieg remained in Austrian hands. The whole affair, he boasted, had cost the lives of just twenty soldiers and two officers.
Final death toll will be in the hundreds of thousands. Blanning uses the very appropriate word "hubris".
This is why I think he would have gone to war without the childhood abuse; the glorification of conquest just has too long and too pervasive a history for someone as ambitious as Fritz, in the environment he grew up in, to resist:
he wrote to Voltaire to describe the privations of campaigning, adding that he would gladly pass them on to someone else “if that phantom called glory did not appear to me so often. In truth, it is a great lunacy, but a lunacy that is very difficult to shed once one is infatuated with it.” Two months later he confessed to his friend Charles-Étienne Jordan: “I love war for the glory.” Even when he wrote his history of the war for public consumption, he acknowledged more than once that the pursuit of glory had been a prime aim.
All FW had to do was glorify military pursuits and hand his army over to Fritz, and I think Fritz would have done the rest. There was no need to go trying to break his will. All you got out of that was an ill-informed anti-German tirade, FW. :P
In a rare moment of defending rather than attacking Fritz, Blanning challenges the traditional view by claiming that it wasn't personal cowardice but poor judgment that led Fritz to leave the field at Mollwitz:
All accounts agree that Frederick himself showed great personal courage in trying to rescue the situation, so much so in fact that his second-in-command, Schwerin, feared for his life and pleaded with him to leave the battlefield for a place of safety. Whether his consent amounted to a flight, as the Austrians— and their historians— claimed afterwards, is doubtful.
I haven't read "all accounts," but given his earlier and later behavior, I actually buy it. Fritz is just too much of a terrier. Just like his escape attempt was more a fight than a flight, I think getting talked into leaving Mollwitz very much went against the grain.
Vaguely misogynistic remark about MT not in Catt, this one from his Histoire de mon temps, which I'm reproducing without checking for context or accuracy:
“An ambitious and vindictive enemy, who was the more dangerous because she was a woman, headlong in her opinions, and implacable… devoured by ambition.”
We still don't envy ambassadors:
So close did Frederick keep his cards to his chest that foreign diplomats could find nothing beyond gossip and idle speculation to send back to their courts. The Austrian ambassador lamented in 1749 that not even the notional foreign minister, Podewils, had any idea as to what his master’s intentions were. Frederick himself was reported to have said that, if he discovered that his own skin knew what he was going to do, he would have it peeled off and thrown away. A royal interview was not only pointless, it also exposed the unwelcome guest to Frederick’s notoriously acid tongue. According to the French envoy, the Duc de Guînes, very few of his intimidated colleagues were brave enough even to ask for an audience at Potsdam.
Fritz has opinions and isn't shy about expressing them:
Although so often described as a Francophile, Frederick in fact had a generally low opinion of contemporary French culture. During the golden age of the mid-seventeenth century, he believed, French writers, led by Corneille and Racine, had produced dramatic works of unsurpassable quality, but since then their star had waned. Dismissing their music as “puerile,” he told Graun to stop composing overtures in the French style. Modern Italian music was mellifluous when sung properly but essentially “stupid.” What Frederick demanded was music in the Italian style but written by Germans. Ascribed to him was the dictum: “The French only know how to write drama and the Italians only know how to sing; the Germans alone understand how to write music.”
Neat little detail if true:
According to the soprano Elizabeth Mara, when the weather was cold, soldiers were drafted into the theater to warm up the auditorium with their body heat.
Fritz is a troll:
More frivolously, the new gallery also gave him the opportunity to indulge his contempt for Christianity, by juxtaposing Carlo Maratta’s Madonna with Guido Reni’s Toilet of Venus. (He played the same sort of trick in the Potsdam Town Palace, where Correggio’s The Repentant Mary Magdalene was placed among a group of erotic fête galante pictures, including Watteau’s Cythera.)
I feel like one of these explanations dates to a different century than the other:
On the eastern side was Mercury, a classical statue inherited from Frederick’s sister Wilhelmine. He was chosen perhaps because he was the god of commerce (among other things) and so implied that the Prussian economy was in good shape, or more likely because he was a beautiful naked youth awaiting the attention of Mars opposite. On Frederick’s death, his heir had the statue removed and it has never returned.
What, thanks to
It was only after his death that the statue was renamed The Praying Boy and hastily removed to a museum.
He does think it might have been a Katte tribute, though, so props for that.
1734 is the Siege of Phillipsburg, when Fritz met Eugene, famous general and famous open-secret homosexual, whom he admired. Also, other Seckendorff is a gossipy sensationalist:
Christoph Ludwig von Seckendorf wrote in his secret diary for 1734 that Frederick was imitating Eugene’s laconic manner. He also recorded the following conversation: “The Prince of Anhalt-Dessau: ‘Does Your Highness still get an erection?’ Prince Eugene, taking a pinch of snuff: ‘No, I do not get an erection.’
Fritz ships my ship:
The same homoerotic theme could also be found in the two most important paintings commissioned for the New Palace nearby. The first was Pompeo Batoni’s The Family of Darius, which depicts another celebrated pair of male lovers, Alexander the Great and Hephaestion...In Batoni’s version, the intimacy of the relationship between the two men is emphasized by Hephaestion placing his hand on Alexander’s wrist. Commissioned in 1763, it was not delivered until 1775, but such was the importance Frederick attached to it that the allocated space was kept vacant. This was in the Blue Antechamber, which led to Frederick’s apartments.
Supposedly FW used the word "sodomite" of Fritz, but no citation given.
Just me finding the wording amusing here:
Louis XV may have thought that the invasion of Silesia was the act of a lunatic, but Frederick had shown that when madness succeeds, it has to be renamed audacity. Of all those who wanted to see Frederick back where he belonged, in the asylum, Maria Theresa was the most implacable.
I don't even know what to make of the "sleaze" line. Like, whose perspective is that? Not Blanning's, surely. Kaunitz? Fritz? Contemporary French opinion?
In 1750 Kaunitz was sent off to Versailles as Austrian ambassador. There he found a once dominant power whose feet of clay were beginning to crumble. The Peace of Aachen, which handed back all the conquests in India and the Low Countries, had been greeted by French public opinion with consternation and anger: “bête comme la paix” (as stupid as the peace) became a popular simile. As it was believed that the chief minister de facto was the royal mistress, Madame de Pompadour, sleaze was added to incompetence. Just how much influence on policy (as opposed to patronage) she actually exercised has been much debated. In any event, she was a useful whipping girl for all who opposed the apparent incoherence and indecision of royal policy.
Blanning links to this painting of the tobacco parliament, which I hadn't known about. The description underneath the painting is pretty interesting as well.
Note that it's 1737, and Fritz is glad to be well away from the hated tobacco parliament. According to Asprey, Fritz commented that year to Grumbkow that a fitting epitaph for him would be "Here lies one who lived for a year." He moved into Rheinsberg in mid 1736.
I had meant to include this in the last write-up, when I talked about the sensationalist love triangle, but I missed it because it was in an end note. Anyway, Blanning shares our views on gossipy sensationalism and attitudes toward it:
A recent study of Algarotti and Frederick by Norbert Schmitz blithely ignores all the evidence relating to Algarotti’s bisexuality, referring to Hervey only once and then only as a “friend” of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Schmitz also primly observes: “The voyeuristic looking under the bedcovers of prominent people belongs to the province of the tabloid press”
And yet *nobody* seems to hesitate when talking about, say, the mistresses of Charles II.