Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 20

[cahn]

Yuletide signups so far:
3 requests for Frederician RPF, 2 offers
2 requests for Circle of Voltaire RPF, 3 offers !! :D :D

(I am so curious as to who the third person is!)

Comments

Re: Early Education

[mildred_of_midgard]

Funny enough, this whole part was then followed by a provision stating that if Fritz was disobedient, they (= Finkenstein and Kalkstein) should always threaten him with the Queen's reaction, never with FW's

Yes indeed. We have discussed how FW, in many respects, didn't understand child psychology, like, at all. And--surprise!--none of his children turned out as he intended.

poor Duhan got sent into Memel exile on September 3rd already.

This is why, if I ever manage to write that fix-it fic I've been sporadically talking about for over a year now, Duhan's going to be the first one to join Fritz in exile while we wait on everyone else to show up over the course of the story.

Also new to me: that Fritz managed to get Duhan out of exile and working for the Braunschweigs in 1733

Yeah. As I recall, Fritz tried to get him back, but couldn't, so a position with the in-laws was the best he could do until he inherited. Then Duhan and Algarotti got nearly verbatim "come quickly!" one-liners on June 3. Thrifty reuser of words, as Selena likes to joke. (This was not the first time Fritz self-plagiarized; Voltaire and Suhm got nearly verbatim reports of Algarotti's visit to Rheinsberg in 1739.)

I've now started reading his correspondence with Duhan, which is very sweet so far.

Ooh, do share if you find anything good. This is the one thing I don't think any of us have read, only seen quoted in other sources. (The bit where Fritz says "They have cut deeply into the marble [with Katte and Küstrin], and that stays forever," has always stuck with me.)

disapprovingly reported conversations about open marriages

An opinion Fritz seems to have kept throughout his life! From his 1730s declared intention of having an open marriage with EC (whether he would have followed through in practice is an open question), to Catt recording disapprovingly in his diary Fritz's progressive opinion that if the husband cheats first, the wife is free to follow suit, to Fritz privately sympathizing with niece EC2 when future FW2 was cheating on her and she retaliated in kind, Fritz is partway to not having a double standard. (The man still has to cheat first, and if it's politically expedient to punish the woman, she still has to pay the price while her husband gets off scot-free, but it's a step in the right direction!)

And hey, I'm definitely farther than Blanning in that regard, who indexes one Schulenberg for three different ones and still has the wrong one for both these cases.

Ooh, good catch! My Kindle copy lacks an index altogether. Blanning does miss things from time to time, as we've found.

Re: Early Education

[cahn]

Funny enough, this whole part was then followed by a provision stating that if Fritz was disobedient, they (= Finkenstein and Kalkstein) should always threaten him with the Queen's reaction, never with FW's

Yes indeed. We have discussed how FW, in many respects, didn't understand child psychology, like, at all. And--surprise!--none of his children turned out as he intended.

Heh, this actually does seem to me that he kind of did understand the concept of good cop, bad cop? Only... it might have worked better if he had actually stuck to it and not in fact had all these over-the-top reactions that everyone was quite correctly scared of :P