"Der Mäzen der Aufklärung: Ernst Christoph von Manteuffel und das Netzwerk des Wolffianismus" was Johannes Bronisch's doctoral theses and reads like it - aimed at a strictly academic audience, long footnotes at times taking most of the page space etc - , while "Der Kampf um Kronprinz Friedrich: Wolff gegen Voltaire" is basically a canny Fritz-focused digested excerpt from it, repacked for a larger audience (though it's still clearly not for newbies who know nothing of the 18th century). Before I get into details, let me add what his dissertation is not, and doesn't claim to be: a biography of Mantteufel. The emphasis here is strictly on him in the context of his philosophical and literary networking from 1730 onwards (why 1730? Not for the reason you think), with his entire decades long life and career before that only summarized. This frustrated me a little, as I'd hoped for more of a complete life, but that's on me, the key is in the title(s), and also, I do know more about Manteuffel even before 1730 than I used to through the summarzing. (Also, courtesy of the footnotes, I know there is an early 20th century Manteuffel biography: Thea von Seydewitz: Ernst Christoph Graf von Manteuffel, Kabinettsminister Augusts des Starken. Persönlichkeit und Wirken (Aus Sachsens Vergangenheit 5), Dresden 1926, which Bronisch by and large approves of for its research but chides for its emphasis (on Manteuffel the politician) which he seeks to rectify by presenting Manteuffel the enlightenment networker and cultural beacon, though inevitably there are politics involved there, too.) (See other title.) Another thing: Bronish praises older Fritzian historians like Koser and Droysen for their never again matched knowledge of primary sources as well me might, but that also means he relies on them for the Prussian side of things, which means the occasional blip like poor Gundling still showing up as the court fool made head of the academy.
Sir not appearing in either volume at all (seriously, no single mention, not even in the footnotes): Suhm. Seriously, Bronisch not only apparantly had zero interest in the other Saxon envoy but doesn't think he's a factor in any way in his subject. (The titular fight from the canny repackage is carried out by French envoy La Chetardie and Voltaire as the main opponents.)
Okay, on to Mantteuffel. He was another case of an 18th century European noble - like Prince Eugene, Seckendorff, the Scottish Keiths or even Stratemann who ended up serving not in his country/state of birth but another country. Like Stratemann, he was actually born a Prussian subject, from Pommerania in his case with the first class education of a baroque nobleman that included visiting the university of Leipzig in neighboring Thuringia, and started out as a young noble at Grandpa F1's court but after some satiric verses on "one of hte King's mistresses" * (* as far as I know, F1 only had the one, the wife of one of the three Ws) blew up in his face prudently left Prussia for Saxony where he became bff with August the Strong and rose into office there. Unlike many a university visiting noble, he remained fluent in Latin (see Horace translations for the fun of it right into his old age), and united being an excellent courtier, witty, charming, with a genuine life long passion for literature and philosophy. According to none other than our Berlin Academy obituary writer Formey, whom I encountered here in another context - to wit, as a young Manteuffel acolyte who is both made a Wolffian by him and a member of the Manteuffel-founded Society of the Truth Lovers (Sociéte des Aletophiles) - , he remained a very handsome figure of a man into his old age, too. (So Formey writes not just immediately after Manteuffel died but also recalling him many years later.) In short, which isn't as Bronish puts it, when Crown Prince Fritz is on the prowl for sugar daddies in the 1730s, Manteuffel really was a great candidate.
Not least because he was also there, in Brandenburg, and not, I repeat, not as the official Saxon envoy. He's been the official Saxon envoy in earlier times, true, but after his recall (and Suhm's arrival, though as I said, Suhm is Sir Not Appearing In These Books) rose to cabinet minister in August the Strong's ministry, taking over one of his original patron Flemming's old jobs after Flemming's death. This is why Manteuffel in 1728 was in a position to found the Society Against Sobriety with August, FW, Grumbkow and Seckendorff when FW (and Fritz) visited Dresden in 1728. Which of course was less important for the drinking excesses of FW and August and more because of the Imperial Alliance networking of G, S and Mantteuffel, and Prince Eugene in Vienna. Bronisch argues that Manteuffel being Team Habsburg here isn't contradictory or shady in terms of him also being a Saxon government official, since the HRE still exists, and thus the Emperor does have claim on his top loyalty as German noble (especially since he's been made a Reichsgraf at this point). Manteuffel's idea of a policy for Saxony - pro-Emperor, in a close alliance with Prussia, anti France - is, however, dealt a big blow in 1730 when Karl Heinrich Graf von Hoym, until then Saxon anvoy at the Court of Versailles, manages to become the next big thing with August, filling the vaccuum Flemming left (which Manteuffel had not - he became a cabinet member, but not THE dominating minister the way Flemming had been). (Hoym, bw, as I was reminded recently wen reading through translation and excerpts of the interrogation protocols of Katte again, was also whom Fritz tried to contact and gt to help him at Zeithain.) Hoym was pro France, anti Habsburg, anti Prussia, and Manteuffel barely prevented getting fired by handing in his resignation on August 5 (Fritz is about to make his last escape attempt). However, Mantteuffel had seen where the wind was blowing for a while and thus had brought over thirty boxes filled with his secret correspondences with G & S as well as Eugene to his Pomeranian country estate, which means that when Hoym ordered a search of his vacated offices in Dresden, he found exactly nothing, whiile Manteuffel got a nice state pension of 12 000 Taler per annum and the continued use of his title of Cabinet Minister. Still, he was stuck in Pomerania for a while, cooling his heels. It's worth bearing in mind, though, that what Manteuffel does from this point onwards, and it's a lot, he does officially as a private citizen. He remains officially retired till the rest of his life.
(About the country seat: it's Kummerfrey, aka Sanssouci as the French writing Manteuffel always calls it, and Bronisch scoffs at Nicolai's anecdote as an explanation as to why Fritz called his own philosophical summer retreat the same name, pointing out that Manteuffel in a letter to Fritz even refers to his visitors as "his knights of Sanssouci" and that freaking FW visited for two days there in 1731, so there's no way Fritz was unaware of the precedent. To which I say, that doesn't mean he didn't mean the grave pun as well.)
Hoym in turn is toppled by Brühl and others and loses the top spot before 1731 has ended, ends up in Königstein accused of incest with his niece, and will commit suicide there in April 1736, with Manteuffel commenting on it in a letter to Fritz. Speaking of the letters: there is a severe problem for anyone studying the Fritz and Manteuffel relationship, to wit, most of the letters don't exist anymore. Of those which do exist, Preuss published nineteen letters from Fritz and twenty letters from Manteuffel in volume 16 and 25 of his gigantic edition. Except, says Bronisch, that not only was his textual basis for these letters lousy - Preuss didn't have originals but copies, and it's questionable even whether the copies were complete -, but Preuss misidentified several, with the last four letters from Fritz we today know for sure not to be addressed to Manteuffel while the last three letters from Manteuffel not addressed to Fritz, either. Simultanously to Preuss, one Karl von Weber published an additional eight letters from Fritz to Mantteufel and one from Manteuffel to Fritz from the Dresden State Archive, but didn't publish them completely, solely in excerpts. Guess what happened to the originals? WWII. And then in 1901 Curt Tröger managed to unearth a Manteuffel to Fritz letter from 1737. And that's it, while the correspondence by estimation of how many letters they mention in the ones which are preserved consisted of at least 200 letters. Which means that a lot of the takes on the Fritz/Manteuffel relationship can't come from their direct communication but from secondary sources, with history lucking out that Seckendorff Jr.s secret journal exists.
Manteuffel in 1733 (for chronology's sake: August the Strong dies, under August III. Saxony is now run by Sulkowski and below him Brühl, with Brühl working on becoming No.1) moves to Berlin, into a nice palais in Dorotheenstadt, the Landhaus Kameke, which had been built in 1712 by Andreas Schlüter and is described as a late baroque jewel, of which only remnants exist anymore (not because of WWII but because of subsequent rebuildings - parts of it ended up in today's Berlin Bode Museum). In Berlin, he's busy networking on both the political and philosophical front, becoming Wolff's most important patron (btw, the way he'll sell this to FW as an argument of how Wolff isn't, contrary to what Lange and the Pietists say, a man whose thoughts will lead to atheism is classic: he tells FW via Grumbkow that he, Manteuffel, used to have severe religious doubts until reading Wolff which showed him the light back to the Christian faith. FW is totally impressed and it's an argument that while not swaying him yet to reading the man's work himself does sway him to believe Wolff isn't an atheist in disguise but a good Christian), collecting promising young folk like Dechamps, Reinbek and Formey (even Jordan, though Jordan will ditch Manteuffel poste haste in Rheinsberg), and the bookseller Haude (whom we've met in Nicolai's anecdotes as holding back books for Fritz), and on the political front, as Private Citizen Manteuffel keeps reporting to both Vienna and nearly at the top Brühl back home in Saxony. He is, in short, an ideal candidate for a crown prince in search of an erastes.
On the subject of "How close were they when they were close?", Bronisch points out Manteuffel not just pitched Wolff at Fritz. (As proof one can be an enlightened philosopher and a Christian at the same time, among other things, but also because Manteuffel thought Fritz was a bright kid but that all this indiscriminate reading would have him end up in nihilism if he didn't get a philosophical guide line.) He also was responsible for the "little book" Fritz in his very first letter to Voltaire mentions including, the "Nouvelles Pièces", which consisted of an anti Wolff accusation by Wolff's main enemy Lang (chiefly responsible for FW kicking Wolff out of the country) and a pro Wolff defense. Not just responsible in the sense of enabling the print, Manteuffel had translated it into French, which wasn't noticed for a while, because the translator is only mentioned as being "un Q-t", which is a pseudonym using another nickname Manteuffel had adopted in his relationship with Fritz, "Quinze-Vingt".
(Explanation for nickname: it's complicated. French King Louis the Saint had founded a hospital for the blind called "les Quinze-Vingts" in the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris. The name alludes to the 300 beds available in the old Latin number. 18th century readers were reminded of this historical factoid again when Voltaire wrote a short story called "Petite Digression". When Fritz approached Manteuffel with a "please become my erastes teacher?" request, Manteuffel, being an adroit courtier, replied he didn't know whether he had enough knowledge to teach such a great prince next to whom he rather resembled a poor blind Quinze-Vingt. How do we know this happened? Because a) good old Formey, becoming a Manteuffel protegé this very decade, mentions it decades later, and b) the nickname actually shows up in the correspondence, which Formey wasn't familiar with.)
Manteuffel from the get go didn't miss the obvious chance offering itself here, but Bronisch makes a good case that it wasn't all worldly ambition. After a life time in politics, Manteuffel didn't have a high opinion of the current crop of rulers and thought it really needed a good one. In a text he published anonymously in 1739, he wrote that nearly all the great ones in the world had a distorted view of the use of power, seeing it as a license for despotism and just follow their instincts, to hell with everyone else. In a letter to Christian Wolff himself from June 16th 1738, Manteuffel wrote that two thirds of the princes in the HRE had shown themselves to be worse than useless plagues of humanity and called them "prètendus Dieux terrestres", but thankfully, one could expect a good counterexample to ascend soon. (Guess whom?) And in an unpublished treatise on how to educate a prince, written in the later 1730s, he wrote that absolute monarchical power was subject to the "Loix de la Nature et de la raison", and the monarchs needed to respect the laws of nature and reason all the more because they were carrying the responsibility for "le bien de la societé"; only this provides in Manteuffel's unpublished opinion a legitimization to the institution of kings at all, "l'unique fin de leur institution".
The self education program Fritz started at Rheinsberg was, says Bronisch, based on Manteuffel's suggestions re: nearly every book in it. As an example for an earlier attempt by Mantteufel to teach a moral lesson without being FW like about it, he brings up Manteuffel bringing up the anecdote from Cassius Dio in a letter to Fritz from March 22nd 1736. (Short version: it's a huge crowd, Augustus is about to fell a bad sentence which could have resulted with him gaining a tyrant's reputation, Maecenas raises a writing tablet with the words "surge, carnifex!", Augustus sees it and desists) (The who is who casting is obvious without Manteuffel spelling it out.) Augustus didn't begrudge this and much later when Maecenas had died supposedly once said apropos a wrong decision that he wouldn't have made it if his trusted advisor was still around. The ability to stop, to reconsider yourself is a quintessential virtue of a good ruler.
His name is Diable. Le Diable: Good Times
Sir not appearing in either volume at all (seriously, no single mention, not even in the footnotes): Suhm. Seriously, Bronisch not only apparantly had zero interest in the other Saxon envoy but doesn't think he's a factor in any way in his subject. (The titular fight from the canny repackage is carried out by French envoy La Chetardie and Voltaire as the main opponents.)
Okay, on to Mantteuffel. He was another case of an 18th century European noble - like Prince Eugene, Seckendorff, the Scottish Keiths or even Stratemann who ended up serving not in his country/state of birth but another country. Like Stratemann, he was actually born a Prussian subject, from Pommerania in his case with the first class education of a baroque nobleman that included visiting the university of Leipzig in neighboring Thuringia, and started out as a young noble at Grandpa F1's court but after some satiric verses on "one of hte King's mistresses" * (* as far as I know, F1 only had the one, the wife of one of the three Ws) blew up in his face prudently left Prussia for Saxony where he became bff with August the Strong and rose into office there. Unlike many a university visiting noble, he remained fluent in Latin (see Horace translations for the fun of it right into his old age), and united being an excellent courtier, witty, charming, with a genuine life long passion for literature and philosophy. According to none other than our Berlin Academy obituary writer Formey, whom I encountered here in another context - to wit, as a young Manteuffel acolyte who is both made a Wolffian by him and a member of the Manteuffel-founded Society of the Truth Lovers (Sociéte des Aletophiles) - , he remained a very handsome figure of a man into his old age, too. (So Formey writes not just immediately after Manteuffel died but also recalling him many years later.) In short, which isn't as Bronish puts it, when Crown Prince Fritz is on the prowl for sugar daddies in the 1730s, Manteuffel really was a great candidate.
Not least because he was also there, in Brandenburg, and not, I repeat, not as the official Saxon envoy. He's been the official Saxon envoy in earlier times, true, but after his recall (and Suhm's arrival, though as I said, Suhm is Sir Not Appearing In These Books) rose to cabinet minister in August the Strong's ministry, taking over one of his original patron Flemming's old jobs after Flemming's death. This is why Manteuffel in 1728 was in a position to found the Society Against Sobriety with August, FW, Grumbkow and Seckendorff when FW (and Fritz) visited Dresden in 1728. Which of course was less important for the drinking excesses of FW and August and more because of the Imperial Alliance networking of G, S and Mantteuffel, and Prince Eugene in Vienna. Bronisch argues that Manteuffel being Team Habsburg here isn't contradictory or shady in terms of him also being a Saxon government official, since the HRE still exists, and thus the Emperor does have claim on his top loyalty as German noble (especially since he's been made a Reichsgraf at this point). Manteuffel's idea of a policy for Saxony - pro-Emperor, in a close alliance with Prussia, anti France - is, however, dealt a big blow in 1730 when Karl Heinrich Graf von Hoym, until then Saxon anvoy at the Court of Versailles, manages to become the next big thing with August, filling the vaccuum Flemming left (which Manteuffel had not - he became a cabinet member, but not THE dominating minister the way Flemming had been). (Hoym, bw, as I was reminded recently wen reading through translation and excerpts of the interrogation protocols of Katte again, was also whom Fritz tried to contact and gt to help him at Zeithain.) Hoym was pro France, anti Habsburg, anti Prussia, and Manteuffel barely prevented getting fired by handing in his resignation on August 5 (Fritz is about to make his last escape attempt). However, Mantteuffel had seen where the wind was blowing for a while and thus had brought over thirty boxes filled with his secret correspondences with G & S as well as Eugene to his Pomeranian country estate, which means that when Hoym ordered a search of his vacated offices in Dresden, he found exactly nothing, whiile Manteuffel got a nice state pension of 12 000 Taler per annum and the continued use of his title of Cabinet Minister. Still, he was stuck in Pomerania for a while, cooling his heels. It's worth bearing in mind, though, that what Manteuffel does from this point onwards, and it's a lot, he does officially as a private citizen. He remains officially retired till the rest of his life.
(About the country seat: it's Kummerfrey, aka Sanssouci as the French writing Manteuffel always calls it, and Bronisch scoffs at Nicolai's anecdote as an explanation as to why Fritz called his own philosophical summer retreat the same name, pointing out that Manteuffel in a letter to Fritz even refers to his visitors as "his knights of Sanssouci" and that freaking FW visited for two days there in 1731, so there's no way Fritz was unaware of the precedent. To which I say, that doesn't mean he didn't mean the grave pun as well.)
Hoym in turn is toppled by Brühl and others and loses the top spot before 1731 has ended, ends up in Königstein accused of incest with his niece, and will commit suicide there in April 1736, with Manteuffel commenting on it in a letter to Fritz. Speaking of the letters: there is a severe problem for anyone studying the Fritz and Manteuffel relationship, to wit, most of the letters don't exist anymore. Of those which do exist, Preuss published nineteen letters from Fritz and twenty letters from Manteuffel in volume 16 and 25 of his gigantic edition. Except, says Bronisch, that not only was his textual basis for these letters lousy - Preuss didn't have originals but copies, and it's questionable even whether the copies were complete -, but Preuss misidentified several, with the last four letters from Fritz we today know for sure not to be addressed to Manteuffel while the last three letters from Manteuffel not addressed to Fritz, either. Simultanously to Preuss, one Karl von Weber published an additional eight letters from Fritz to Mantteufel and one from Manteuffel to Fritz from the Dresden State Archive, but didn't publish them completely, solely in excerpts. Guess what happened to the originals? WWII. And then in 1901 Curt Tröger managed to unearth a Manteuffel to Fritz letter from 1737. And that's it, while the correspondence by estimation of how many letters they mention in the ones which are preserved consisted of at least 200 letters. Which means that a lot of the takes on the Fritz/Manteuffel relationship can't come from their direct communication but from secondary sources, with history lucking out that Seckendorff Jr.s secret journal exists.
Manteuffel in 1733 (for chronology's sake: August the Strong dies, under August III. Saxony is now run by Sulkowski and below him Brühl, with Brühl working on becoming No.1) moves to Berlin, into a nice palais in Dorotheenstadt, the Landhaus Kameke, which had been built in 1712 by Andreas Schlüter and is described as a late baroque jewel, of which only remnants exist anymore (not because of WWII but because of subsequent rebuildings - parts of it ended up in today's Berlin Bode Museum). In Berlin, he's busy networking on both the political and philosophical front, becoming Wolff's most important patron (btw, the way he'll sell this to FW as an argument of how Wolff isn't, contrary to what Lange and the Pietists say, a man whose thoughts will lead to atheism is classic: he tells FW via Grumbkow that he, Manteuffel, used to have severe religious doubts until reading Wolff which showed him the light back to the Christian faith. FW is totally impressed and it's an argument that while not swaying him yet to reading the man's work himself does sway him to believe Wolff isn't an atheist in disguise but a good Christian), collecting promising young folk like Dechamps, Reinbek and Formey (even Jordan, though Jordan will ditch Manteuffel poste haste in Rheinsberg), and the bookseller Haude (whom we've met in Nicolai's anecdotes as holding back books for Fritz), and on the political front, as Private Citizen Manteuffel keeps reporting to both Vienna and nearly at the top Brühl back home in Saxony. He is, in short, an ideal candidate for a crown prince in search of an erastes.
On the subject of "How close were they when they were close?", Bronisch points out Manteuffel not just pitched Wolff at Fritz. (As proof one can be an enlightened philosopher and a Christian at the same time, among other things, but also because Manteuffel thought Fritz was a bright kid but that all this indiscriminate reading would have him end up in nihilism if he didn't get a philosophical guide line.) He also was responsible for the "little book" Fritz in his very first letter to Voltaire mentions including, the "Nouvelles Pièces", which consisted of an anti Wolff accusation by Wolff's main enemy Lang (chiefly responsible for FW kicking Wolff out of the country) and a pro Wolff defense. Not just responsible in the sense of enabling the print, Manteuffel had translated it into French, which wasn't noticed for a while, because the translator is only mentioned as being "un Q-t", which is a pseudonym using another nickname Manteuffel had adopted in his relationship with Fritz, "Quinze-Vingt".
(Explanation for nickname: it's complicated. French King Louis the Saint had founded a hospital for the blind called "les Quinze-Vingts" in the Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris. The name alludes to the 300 beds available in the old Latin number. 18th century readers were reminded of this historical factoid again when Voltaire wrote a short story called "Petite Digression". When Fritz approached Manteuffel with a "please become my
erastesteacher?" request, Manteuffel, being an adroit courtier, replied he didn't know whether he had enough knowledge to teach such a great prince next to whom he rather resembled a poor blind Quinze-Vingt. How do we know this happened? Because a) good old Formey, becoming a Manteuffel protegé this very decade, mentions it decades later, and b) the nickname actually shows up in the correspondence, which Formey wasn't familiar with.)Manteuffel from the get go didn't miss the obvious chance offering itself here, but Bronisch makes a good case that it wasn't all worldly ambition. After a life time in politics, Manteuffel didn't have a high opinion of the current crop of rulers and thought it really needed a good one. In a text he published anonymously in 1739, he wrote that nearly all the great ones in the world had a distorted view of the use of power, seeing it as a license for despotism and just follow their instincts, to hell with everyone else. In a letter to Christian Wolff himself from June 16th 1738, Manteuffel wrote that two thirds of the princes in the HRE had shown themselves to be worse than useless plagues of humanity and called them "prètendus Dieux terrestres", but thankfully, one could expect a good counterexample to ascend soon. (Guess whom?) And in an unpublished treatise on how to educate a prince, written in the later 1730s, he wrote that absolute monarchical power was subject to the "Loix de la Nature et de la raison", and the monarchs needed to respect the laws of nature and reason all the more because they were carrying the responsibility for "le bien de la societé"; only this provides in Manteuffel's unpublished opinion a legitimization to the institution of kings at all, "l'unique fin de leur institution".
The self education program Fritz started at Rheinsberg was, says Bronisch, based on Manteuffel's suggestions re: nearly every book in it. As an example for an earlier attempt by Mantteufel to teach a moral lesson without being FW like about it, he brings up Manteuffel bringing up the anecdote from Cassius Dio in a letter to Fritz from March 22nd 1736. (Short version: it's a huge crowd, Augustus is about to fell a bad sentence which could have resulted with him gaining a tyrant's reputation, Maecenas raises a writing tablet with the words "surge, carnifex!", Augustus sees it and desists) (The who is who casting is obvious without Manteuffel spelling it out.) Augustus didn't begrudge this and much later when Maecenas had died supposedly once said apropos a wrong decision that he wouldn't have made it if his trusted advisor was still around. The ability to stop, to reconsider yourself is a quintessential virtue of a good ruler.