As part of the research for "How I Survived My First Christmas with the Hohenzollerns", cahn and I split the costs for a book called Domestic Enemies: Servants and Their Masters in Old Regime France, and I read and summarized parts of it for her!
There were way more parts that I thought were interesting, but due to limited computer time, I will copy-paste what I emailed her for now, and will at some point get around to summarizing or at least copy-pasting the best parts from the rest of the book. But for now, here's the email I sent (in two parts because comment length restrictions).
You will notice that I'm addressing very specific historical beta questions she had. Please weigh in on any opinions, additional evidence, or counterevidence you may have. In many cases, I'm blatantly speculating and even throwing my hands up, because of the perennial "FW is sui generis" problem.
Caveat that this is France, but I'll try to make allowances for both Prussia and FW when answering your specific questions.
Oh, the author is a history professor, and it's full of notes and charts and graphs and data and stuff, and reliance on primary sources. I don't promise it's all correct or representative, or that I would agree with her interpretations of everything if I went through the data myself, but it's a promising start. (Totally worth our combined $10!)
Dragooning Fredersdorf: Yes! "From gentlemanly secretary to lowly servante: this then was the servant hierarchy in seventeenth- and early eighteenth -century households. But we should not take either the status distinctions or the division of labor it implied too seriously. For Old Regime French households were not like English country houses of the nineteenth century, where each servant's task was strictly delimited (at Hatfield House servants' duties were spelled out in printed regulations), and the lady's maid would have felt insulted had she been asked to clean the parlor. Instead, memoirs show that even specialized servants often stepped outside their usual roles. Valets de chambre cooked for their employers when the need arose; cooks were summoned from the kitchen to run errands when no one else was available; a mere lackey who caught his master's fancy might be asked to play the role of valet de chambre and read to his employer or amuse his guests."
I feel comfortable translating this to FW's household.
Where does Fredersdorf sleep? Depends. Either in a small room adjoining Fritz's so as to be on call 24/7, or in the servants' quarters. If in the servants' quarters, in France it would be a dormitory separated by gender, and the room would probably be filled with just beds. Servants might have beds of their own or might have to share a bed with other servants. FW is no doubt trying to save money, so servants probably have to share beds. But the author points out that a bed of one's own would be a luxury to someone from a peasant background anyway (which I already knew).
Fritz was allowed to have the servant who shaved him sleep with him even in Küstrin, except for the very strictest part of his confinement, so I assume FW would let Fredersdorf sleep with/near him at court. But if you want Fredersdorf with the other servants, you could have someone else sleeping with Fritz and Fredersdorf not having gotten that promotion yet (it's only been a year).
Where does Fredersdorf eat? Kitchen. In a French nobleman's establishment, in a very specific kitchen. In FW's world, I kind of doubt he's paying for a separate room that has to be especially heated, just to produce desserts, so probably just the only kitchen.
But since I found the bit about multiple kitchens fascinating, here's what French nobles got up to:
"Most noble hôtels had at least two kitchens, the kitchen proper, where the maître d'hôtel and the cuisinier, assisted by numerous aides and garçons de cuisine, reigned supreme, and the office, domain of the officier who had charge of the household's bread, wine, silver, and linen and created its preserves, candies, liqueurs,and desserts. The office was necessary because the preparation of desserts and reserves involved sugar, which absorbs moisture readily from the air and is then useless in many recipes. Such preparations therefore had to be done away from the moist and steamy air ofthe main kitchen. The main feature of the office was an étuve, a storage space for sugar, candy, and the like, heated with a charcoal brazier to insure a constant flow of warm dry air. Because of its pleasant atmosphere, the office was the place where the households' servants ate their meals and spent their free time."
Does Fredersdorf talk to Pannewitz? Probably not, but for different reasons than I thought. So as I said in one of my previous rambly emails, the 18th century is a transitional period for servants. They start out occupying the same physical space as their masters, maybe just hanging out in a different part of the room, eating lower at the table, but extremely visible. In this case, they interact a lot. By the 19th century, architecture is set up to keep them completely separate. In our period? It varies by decade and country.
In 17th century England, Pepys took it for granted that servants were included in their masters' games and conversations. In the late 18th century, an English visitor to Italy is shocked that the servants are behaving so improperly as to occasionally comment on what their master is saying to someone else.
In early 18th century France, lackeys are hanging out in antechambers, in the same physical space as the masters' guests, and are joining in their card games and talking to them. Are they trash talking their masters? Hopefully not often; the masters are in the next room. But are they talking about innocuous stuff, or at least having comments addressed to them? Evidently.
Late 18th century France, this is a no go.
Early 18th century Prussia? So the interesting thing here is not only that Prussia is a much less elaborate version of France. It's that FW behaves like a middle-class man (the fact that he picks out his ideal wife--EC--as someone Lehndorff says would be well suited as a burgher's wife is very telling), emphasis on privacy, intimacy, sexual fidelity, and responsible money management over public display. Fritz is an absolutely fascinating contradiction between the French style and his father's middle class style that drove contemporaries and posterity alike crazy, but in his personal life, he was known for an unusual craving for privacy compared to his contemporaries, even German ones. There's a reason Versailles has one gazillion rooms and Sanssouci had 12 people in residence, including staff, when Fritz wasn't entertaining important guests.
So you're going to simultaneously see Fritz and FW putting their lives less on public display in front of servants, and doing more things that servants would do, which will lead to both more and less mingling with servants.
Then there's SD, who's trying to be all French, all the way. So she might really want a lot of lackeys standing around looking good in her room, and they might then have a chance to mingle with the guests. But! The antechamber is for the people who haven't (yet) been admitted to the inner chamber, and they're desperately trying to get in. So I doubt Pannewitz, as a personal friend of the Queen, is often going to be left cooling her heels outside the inner circle. And if she is, if she does end up talking to Fredersdorf, it's going to be in a very public venue, so anything she says will reach the Queen.
This French arrangement is probably also when FW is not in residence, which is not the case for the Christmas visit. (Things apparently got much more French when he was away.)
So for slightly different and more decade-appropriate reasons, I'm going to go with: Pannewitz is not the person to dish out the gossip on the Hohenzollerns to Fredersdorf.
How does Fredersdorf spend his time with the other servants? Good question. In France, he would spend it playing cards and gossiping. Including in the antechamber, where apparently, if you sat off to the side and read a book and didn't participate in the communal activities, you were snubbed forever by the other servants. Which, of course, tells you people did it (that so would have been me), but that they should take some heat for it.
In Prussia...well, SD was apparently allowed by FW to play cards as long as she pretended she was gambling for coffee beans, i.e. just playing for fun, and not gambling for high stakes. As soon as he left the room, of course, she went back to gambling like a proper royal/noblewoman of France.
Thanks to Lehndorff, we know a lot of card-playing happened among the nobility at EC's court, and she was FW-approved pious lady. So unless Selena knows something very specific about servants at FW's court in 1732 that I don't, the way for Fredersdorf to bond with the other servants is to play cards with them when he's not busy doing something else. Small problem: normal servant life in our period is typically long periods of boredom, standing around waiting on your master to need you, interspersed with briefer periods of actual activity. FW hates idleness and will beat you with his cane if he sees you being idle. How this translates to what his servants did on an hour-to-hour basis, who tf knows.
But assuming FW isn't in the room or the next room, which will be the case a lot of the time, Fredersdorf might find himself in a place where card games (licit or illicit) were taking place, needing to take part in order not to be snubbed, and wanting to gather some gossip, both for his own purposes and for Fritz's (what kind of mood is FW in, that sort of thing). Remember, servants are a useful source of gossip, and Fritz is always on the lookout for "tell me everything Dad is saying about me!" info from everyone he knows, from page Peter Keith in the 1720s to AW in the 1730s. So Fredersdorf might well be under orders to gossip with the other servants. Who can then tell him all *sorts* of things Fritz hasn't mentioned.
Servants - part 1
There were way more parts that I thought were interesting, but due to limited computer time, I will copy-paste what I emailed her for now, and will at some point get around to summarizing or at least copy-pasting the best parts from the rest of the book. But for now, here's the email I sent (in two parts because comment length restrictions).
You will notice that I'm addressing very specific historical beta questions she had. Please weigh in on any opinions, additional evidence, or counterevidence you may have. In many cases, I'm blatantly speculating and even throwing my hands up, because of the perennial "FW is sui generis" problem.
Caveat that this is France, but I'll try to make allowances for both Prussia and FW when answering your specific questions.
Oh, the author is a history professor, and it's full of notes and charts and graphs and data and stuff, and reliance on primary sources. I don't promise it's all correct or representative, or that I would agree with her interpretations of everything if I went through the data myself, but it's a promising start. (Totally worth our combined $10!)
Dragooning Fredersdorf: Yes!
"From gentlemanly secretary to lowly servante: this then was the servant hierarchy in seventeenth- and early eighteenth -century households. But we should not take either the status distinctions or the division of labor it implied too seriously. For Old Regime French households were not like English country houses of the nineteenth century, where each servant's task was strictly delimited (at Hatfield House servants' duties were spelled out in printed regulations), and the lady's maid would have felt insulted had she been asked to clean the parlor. Instead, memoirs show that even specialized servants often stepped outside their usual roles. Valets de chambre cooked for their employers when the need arose; cooks were summoned from the kitchen to run errands when no one else was available; a mere lackey who caught his master's fancy might be asked to play the role of valet de chambre and read to his employer or amuse his guests."
I feel comfortable translating this to FW's household.
Where does Fredersdorf sleep? Depends.
Either in a small room adjoining Fritz's so as to be on call 24/7, or in the servants' quarters. If in the servants' quarters, in France it would be a dormitory separated by gender, and the room would probably be filled with just beds. Servants might have beds of their own or might have to share a bed with other servants. FW is no doubt trying to save money, so servants probably have to share beds. But the author points out that a bed of one's own would be a luxury to someone from a peasant background anyway (which I already knew).
Fritz was allowed to have the servant who shaved him sleep with him even in Küstrin, except for the very strictest part of his confinement, so I assume FW would let Fredersdorf sleep with/near him at court. But if you want Fredersdorf with the other servants, you could have someone else sleeping with Fritz and Fredersdorf not having gotten that promotion yet (it's only been a year).
Where does Fredersdorf eat? Kitchen.
In a French nobleman's establishment, in a very specific kitchen. In FW's world, I kind of doubt he's paying for a separate room that has to be especially heated, just to produce desserts, so probably just the only kitchen.
But since I found the bit about multiple kitchens fascinating, here's what French nobles got up to:
"Most noble hôtels had at least two kitchens, the kitchen proper, where the maître d'hôtel and the cuisinier, assisted by numerous aides and garçons de cuisine, reigned supreme, and the office, domain of the officier who had charge of the household's bread, wine, silver, and linen and created its preserves, candies, liqueurs,and desserts. The office was necessary because the preparation of desserts and reserves involved sugar, which absorbs moisture readily from the air and is then useless in many recipes. Such preparations therefore had to be done away from the moist and steamy air ofthe main kitchen. The main feature of the office was an étuve, a storage space for sugar, candy, and the like, heated with a charcoal brazier to insure a constant flow of warm dry air. Because of its pleasant atmosphere, the office was the place where the households' servants ate their meals and spent their free time."
Does Fredersdorf talk to Pannewitz? Probably not, but for different reasons than I thought.
So as I said in one of my previous rambly emails, the 18th century is a transitional period for servants. They start out occupying the same physical space as their masters, maybe just hanging out in a different part of the room, eating lower at the table, but extremely visible. In this case, they interact a lot. By the 19th century, architecture is set up to keep them completely separate. In our period? It varies by decade and country.
In 17th century England, Pepys took it for granted that servants were included in their masters' games and conversations. In the late 18th century, an English visitor to Italy is shocked that the servants are behaving so improperly as to occasionally comment on what their master is saying to someone else.
In early 18th century France, lackeys are hanging out in antechambers, in the same physical space as the masters' guests, and are joining in their card games and talking to them. Are they trash talking their masters? Hopefully not often; the masters are in the next room. But are they talking about innocuous stuff, or at least having comments addressed to them? Evidently.
Late 18th century France, this is a no go.
Early 18th century Prussia? So the interesting thing here is not only that Prussia is a much less elaborate version of France. It's that FW behaves like a middle-class man (the fact that he picks out his ideal wife--EC--as someone Lehndorff says would be well suited as a burgher's wife is very telling), emphasis on privacy, intimacy, sexual fidelity, and responsible money management over public display. Fritz is an absolutely fascinating contradiction between the French style and his father's middle class style that drove contemporaries and posterity alike crazy, but in his personal life, he was known for an unusual craving for privacy compared to his contemporaries, even German ones. There's a reason Versailles has one gazillion rooms and Sanssouci had 12 people in residence, including staff, when Fritz wasn't entertaining important guests.
So you're going to simultaneously see Fritz and FW putting their lives less on public display in front of servants, and doing more things that servants would do, which will lead to both more and less mingling with servants.
Then there's SD, who's trying to be all French, all the way. So she might really want a lot of lackeys standing around looking good in her room, and they might then have a chance to mingle with the guests. But! The antechamber is for the people who haven't (yet) been admitted to the inner chamber, and they're desperately trying to get in. So I doubt Pannewitz, as a personal friend of the Queen, is often going to be left cooling her heels outside the inner circle. And if she is, if she does end up talking to Fredersdorf, it's going to be in a very public venue, so anything she says will reach the Queen.
This French arrangement is probably also when FW is not in residence, which is not the case for the Christmas visit. (Things apparently got much more French when he was away.)
So for slightly different and more decade-appropriate reasons, I'm going to go with: Pannewitz is not the person to dish out the gossip on the Hohenzollerns to Fredersdorf.
How does Fredersdorf spend his time with the other servants? Good question.
In France, he would spend it playing cards and gossiping. Including in the antechamber, where apparently, if you sat off to the side and read a book and didn't participate in the communal activities, you were snubbed forever by the other servants. Which, of course, tells you people did it (that so would have been me), but that they should take some heat for it.
In Prussia...well, SD was apparently allowed by FW to play cards as long as she pretended she was gambling for coffee beans, i.e. just playing for fun, and not gambling for high stakes. As soon as he left the room, of course, she went back to gambling like a proper royal/noblewoman of France.
Thanks to Lehndorff, we know a lot of card-playing happened among the nobility at EC's court, and she was FW-approved pious lady. So unless Selena knows something very specific about servants at FW's court in 1732 that I don't, the way for Fredersdorf to bond with the other servants is to play cards with them when he's not busy doing something else. Small problem: normal servant life in our period is typically long periods of boredom, standing around waiting on your master to need you, interspersed with briefer periods of actual activity. FW hates idleness and will beat you with his cane if he sees you being idle. How this translates to what his servants did on an hour-to-hour basis, who tf knows.
But assuming FW isn't in the room or the next room, which will be the case a lot of the time, Fredersdorf might find himself in a place where card games (licit or illicit) were taking place, needing to take part in order not to be snubbed, and wanting to gather some gossip, both for his own purposes and for Fritz's (what kind of mood is FW in, that sort of thing). Remember, servants are a useful source of gossip, and Fritz is always on the lookout for "tell me everything Dad is saying about me!" info from everyone he knows, from page Peter Keith in the 1720s to AW in the 1730s. So Fredersdorf might well be under orders to gossip with the other servants. Who can then tell him all *sorts* of things Fritz hasn't mentioned.