Yes, I forgot to mention his citation is Preuss, which is interesting considering their completely different takes on Fritz. Again, if Blanning were pro-Fritz, this wouldn't be remarkable, but trustingly accepting Preuss's interpretation of Russian politics after what you've told me about Preuss's attitude toward Fritz is striking. Can we maybe get a source with some kind of Russian provenance to countercheck? Or at least state that this is the pro-Prussian perspective and may or may not represent the whole picture?
Not to mention that FW had militarized Prussia so thoroughly, and put the idea of service = military service, and without service = male life is pointless so completely in everyone's mindset that even less energetic and ambitious young men than Fritz were caught up
Yep, that's really all you had to do.
I'm thinking of your point that Peter Keith, returning to Prussia,did not see being treated as a civilian as a sign of favor.
Agreed, and while the part where it might have been a sign of favor is my hypothesis, the part where Keith is upset about it is straight out of Jordan's letter saying that he can't swallow the humiliation of staying home when all the other young men are going off to war. And as you point out, Peter Keith was no Frederick the Great!
Antinous statue: hastily nothing. Boo, Blanning. Do you have it in for FW2 that you keep accusing him from immediately removing male nudes when he did no such thing?
Seriously! If he's got this many mistakes I can spot of the top of my head, I don't know how many things I'm not spotting. Good at opinions, bad at facts.
Also, Mercury/Mars? That's a new mythological ship. Heee.
Louis the Saint (VII)
Typo or minor chronological error: IX. VII was Eleanor of Aquitaine's husband. Who was pretty pious himself, and if he had a mistress, I'm not aware of it. There are definitely too many Louis, and I have to look them up every time.
But I'm not sure their contemporaries in France would have regarded either fact as "sleaze". That really smacks of a 20th/21st century Anglosaxon or US perspective.
That's exactly what I'm thinking. I really don't see where the sleaze comes in.
There's a John Lennon quote about Ringo not being the world's best drummer and not even the best drummier within the Beatles, for example, which to this day couldn't be traced to a single interview, and yet it keeps coming up. And again: "let them eat cake". The power of meme.
To be fair, I obviously did it myself in this write-up! But I wasn't writing for publication. Just as I imagine you would have looked up the Danzig acquisition date before you published a book.
He uses it to point out the children being depicted as mini adults to illustrate that the whole concept of childhood as we think of it today did not exist, something expressing itself in the non existence of seperate clothing for children as well.
I've seen this claim, and I've also seen it challenged: that while there's certainly a difference between modern childhood and the childhood of the past, the idea that children were supposed to be mini-adults was an ideal that got so much press precisely because it was so rarely observed. Rather like Israel in the Old Testament: the reason our authors keep harping on monotheism is because polytheism is so widespread all around them.
So for example, assuming the Seckendorff quote hasn't been grossly misrepresented, one of FW's contemporaries is dismayed that Fritz is being held to his father's schedule despite being only 13, and that it's making him old before his time. Even without that, I've seen enough quotes from the last millennium from moralists berating parents for indulging their children, giving them toys, playing games with them, that I find it plausible that there must have been some concept of childhood as a separate time where you went easy on your kids, even if their concept of "easy" would look like appalling child labor to us.
(No excuse for not reading Arneth thoroughly if you have him in your bibliography anyway.)
If you're going to cite him almost 50 times, might as well read him!
Lucchesini ,to his credit, isn't quite gullible enough to swallow that one and notes down his suspicion that Fritz has been trolling him with the Pompadour reply and that that one was really written by his majesty.)
Ha. Good for him. Also, Catt is still around at this date, I think? I've seen 1780 and 1782 for his dismissal. But I haven't seen it in any contemporary source, so I don't know.
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Re: Blanning 3
Date: 2020-02-29 11:28 pm (UTC)Yes, I forgot to mention his citation is Preuss, which is interesting considering their completely different takes on Fritz. Again, if Blanning were pro-Fritz, this wouldn't be remarkable, but trustingly accepting Preuss's interpretation of Russian politics after what you've told me about Preuss's attitude toward Fritz is striking. Can we maybe get a source with some kind of Russian provenance to countercheck? Or at least state that this is the pro-Prussian perspective and may or may not represent the whole picture?
Not to mention that FW had militarized Prussia so thoroughly, and put the idea of service = military service, and without service = male life is pointless so completely in everyone's mindset that even less energetic and ambitious young men than Fritz were caught up
Yep, that's really all you had to do.
I'm thinking of your point that Peter Keith, returning to Prussia,did not see being treated as a civilian as a sign of favor.
Agreed, and while the part where it might have been a sign of favor is my hypothesis, the part where Keith is upset about it is straight out of Jordan's letter saying that he can't swallow the humiliation of staying home when all the other young men are going off to war. And as you point out, Peter Keith was no Frederick the Great!
Antinous statue: hastily nothing. Boo, Blanning. Do you have it in for FW2 that you keep accusing him from immediately removing male nudes when he did no such thing?
Seriously! If he's got this many mistakes I can spot of the top of my head, I don't know how many things I'm not spotting. Good at opinions, bad at facts.
Also, Mercury/Mars? That's a new mythological ship.
Heee.
Louis the Saint (VII)
Typo or minor chronological error: IX. VII was Eleanor of Aquitaine's husband. Who was pretty pious himself, and if he had a mistress, I'm not aware of it. There are definitely too many Louis, and I have to look them up every time.
But I'm not sure their contemporaries in France would have regarded either fact as "sleaze". That really smacks of a 20th/21st century Anglosaxon or US perspective.
That's exactly what I'm thinking. I really don't see where the sleaze comes in.
There's a John Lennon quote about Ringo not being the world's best drummer and not even the best drummier within the Beatles, for example, which to this day couldn't be traced to a single interview, and yet it keeps coming up. And again: "let them eat cake". The power of meme.
To be fair, I obviously did it myself in this write-up! But I wasn't writing for publication. Just as I imagine you would have looked up the Danzig acquisition date before you published a book.
He uses it to point out the children being depicted as mini adults to illustrate that the whole concept of childhood as we think of it today did not exist, something expressing itself in the non existence of seperate clothing for children as well.
I've seen this claim, and I've also seen it challenged: that while there's certainly a difference between modern childhood and the childhood of the past, the idea that children were supposed to be mini-adults was an ideal that got so much press precisely because it was so rarely observed. Rather like Israel in the Old Testament: the reason our authors keep harping on monotheism is because polytheism is so widespread all around them.
So for example, assuming the Seckendorff quote hasn't been grossly misrepresented, one of FW's contemporaries is dismayed that Fritz is being held to his father's schedule despite being only 13, and that it's making him old before his time. Even without that, I've seen enough quotes from the last millennium from moralists berating parents for indulging their children, giving them toys, playing games with them, that I find it plausible that there must have been some concept of childhood as a separate time where you went easy on your kids, even if their concept of "easy" would look like appalling child labor to us.
(No excuse for not reading Arneth thoroughly if you have him in your bibliography anyway.)
If you're going to cite him almost 50 times, might as well read him!
Lucchesini ,to his credit, isn't quite gullible enough to swallow that one and notes down his suspicion that Fritz has been trolling him with the Pompadour reply and that that one was really written by his majesty.)
Ha. Good for him. Also, Catt is still around at this date, I think? I've seen 1780 and 1782 for his dismissal. But I haven't seen it in any contemporary source, so I don't know.