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Frederick the Great discussion post 12
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rheinsberg :)
All the good stuff continues to be archived at
rheinsberg :)
Re: Blanning 3
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.
Re: Blanning 3
Re: why Blanning just accepts Preuss on Elizabeth when he doesn't accept Preuss' take on Fritz: I suspect laziness, pure and simple. He doesn't have to do extra research that way. (See also Burgdorf, who even has "Frederick the Gay" written on his agenda, still not bothering to go to the state archive himself, or read Lehndorff's diaries, and instead provides no other citation than Ziebura while presenting his summary of her research. And at least he does provide a citation there. Unlike for Grigorii the suicidal hussar - btw, I looked up anyone with a similar sounding name in the Frederician dictionary Leuschner put together, and no luck - or the statement that Wilhelmine was in love with Katte.) Blanning from what you say doesn't strike me as all that interested in the minor supporting cast, and Elisaveta shows up solely during the 7 Years War. So no extra research for her.
Was thinking of Louis 9 the Saint, yes, not Louis 7 Eleanor's husband (who did not have mistresses, either, true).
Blanning's "FW2 hastily removed all the male nudes" and Blannings "people thought Pompadour in politics = sleaze" strikes me as both committing the cardinal sin of assigning present day attitudes to the past. FW2 had a bad relationship with Fritz and was flamboyantly heterosexual, ergo, he must have been a homophobe censoring all the gay. A head of goverment's mistress believed to be in charge of politics - so sleazy! This just isn't how you should write biography.
Speaking of mistresses, behold this bit from the later conversations with Fritz:
Fritz: *spends a lifetime mocking Louis XV. for being run by his dick and allowing his mistresses, especially but not exclusively Pompadour, to influence him*
Fritz: *very annoyed that Louis XVI, married to daughter of MT, still won't budge from the France/Austria alliance*
Fritz to French visitors of the early 1780s: Your king should totally take a mistresss!
ETA: 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.
Haven't seen any mention of Catt in Lucchesini's diary, so if he was around and/or talked about, it's not there, or I overlooked it. (But I tried running the name through the search machine, and it doesn't find any Catt in the German translation of Lucchesini at least.)
(BTW: we know why Louis and MA didn't have kids during the first seven years until Joseph became the world's least likely marriage counsellor before Munck the Finnish sex machine in Sweden, because we have Joseph's letters on the subject. But it says something about how discreetly this was handled that Fritz, with all his claimed "secret sources" at Versailles, had zero idea about this spicy bit of gossip.) And all the later revolutionaries who ascribed all sorts of things to MA's sex life and questioned the paternity of her kids never seem to have heard of it, either.)
Re: Blanning 3
Re: why Blanning just accepts Preuss on Elizabeth when he doesn't accept Preuss' take on Fritz: I suspect laziness, pure and simple. He doesn't have to do extra research that way.
Yep, exactly. When writing about Fritz, stick to the sources that are about Fritz. I mean, I myself am not an expert on French, Austrian, or Russian politics, but at least I'm aware that I'm looking at everything through a Prussian lens! And I would not pass personal judgment, in a published book, on Elizaveta or her ministers or her lover/morganatic husband by quoting exclusively Prussian sources.
Fritz to French visitors of the early 1780s: Your king should totally take a mistresss!
Wasn't he trying to get his niece into power in the Netherlands? Women shouldn't have power unless it benefits him!
Re: Blanning 3
LOL, Fritz! Mistresses are fine if he supplies them!
Re: Blanning 3
(Yes, Zimmermann, I'm sure that was the true purpose of any handsome young male sighted in either Potsdam or Vienna.)
Re: Blanning 3
*choke*
Re: Blanning 3
I meant to add, if you don't want to do extra research, fair enough! But you can still do responsible scholarship by refraining from saying things that your sources might not be the most reliable on. If you're talking about the Seven Years' War from a Fritzian perspective, it suffices to say that Elizaveta was Empress and Bestushev was foreign minister, and attempts to bribe and persuade them out of attacking Prussia were unsuccessful. It is not necessary to start commenting on internal Russian politics, or the intelligence of Elizaveta's boyfriend/husband, as though the Prussian envoy had the final word on that subject.