"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.
Sir not appearing in either volume at all (seriously, no single mention, not even in the footnotes): Suhm.
What!? That's surprising. I guess it would have complicated matters for his Manteuffel/Wolff vs. Le Chetardie/Voltaire premise. *side-eyes* Fits with what you say about his reliance on Koser/Droysen, though, i.e. possibly not doing too much research into the Fritzian aspect himself.
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.
He doesn't put it that way? ;) Although given the emphasis on Manteuffel's good looks, he might as well. This still reads to me as Fritz having an (intellecutal) crush on someone who did indeed seem very appealing at first (and was very adept at presenting himself that way) but then quickly cooling on him.
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).
That I found interesting, because Manteuffel's political motivations make more sense to me that way.
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,
Did not know about the office search! Manteuffel being prepared seems like another sign that he was pretty good with his information and spy network. (I think there was also a mention of him burning letters at certain points, which is another reason that a lot of them didn't survive.)
To which I say, that doesn't mean he didn't mean the grave pun as well.
Especially because they fell out! Just because Fritz knew there was a precedent, doesn't mean he didn't still need a reason for going with it.
with Manteuffel commenting on it in a letter to Fritz
And Fritz responding: I have the misfortune of having attacks of hypochondria, and I have been in a very harsh prison; I know that the first is an evil that you cannot know unless you have had it, and the other is a situation where you have to arm yourself with all the consistency possible to resist boredom, loneliness, and the terrible thought of deprivation of liberty. The Earl of Hoym will surely have believed in the immortality of his soul, otherwise he would not have had the heart to reduce it to nothingness, and it is to be hoped that the good Lord, who is a God of mercy, will have compassion on him, by virtue of the fact that he did not sin so much from wickedness as from temperament. I am sure, my dear Quinze-Vingt, that your generous heart will be charmed to see the apology of a person who was once your enemy, and I expect to see you collect the ashes from his pyre.
The thing about the letters at Trier is interesting, though. A quick skim tells me that at least Fritz' last ones are pretty obviously not to Manteuffel because he switches from "Mon cher Quinze-Vingt" to "Mon Très Cher General". Since Preuss even includes a note from Grumbkow to Manteuffel saying "Voici la suite de ma correspondance avec Junior", I really don't know how Preuss didn't realize what was going on here and that letters to Grumbkow ended up in Manteuffel's collection of Fritz letters. (On top of that, Grumbkow seems to have been a go-between for letters exchanged between Fritz and Manteuffel at other times, I saw a mention of it in one of Manteuffel's letters.)
Also, this way, Fritz' last known letter to Manteuffel is from August, which makes more sense with the falling-out timeline, as opposed to a friendly one from as late as November.
ETA: Oh, by the way, does he give a source for the Manteuffel/Fritz conversation about the immortality of the soul (I think) in August 1736? Because the relevant pages weren't included in the preview and I was curious where he got that from.
Conversation about the immortality of the soul: yes, it takes place in August 1736, in front of the Berlin town palace, two days before Fritz leaves for Rheinsberg. And the source is Seckendorff Jr.s secret diary, bless.
I guess it would have complicated matters for his Manteuffel/Wolff vs. Le Chetardie/Voltaire premise. *side-eyes*
Probably, but it's such an odd avoidance. I mean, it's not even that the Suhm connection is anything new for the research, what with their correspondence having been published in the freaking 18th century already. Now, if you're just someone casually interested in Fritz, you might overlook Suhm's existence - I certainly didn't know about him before Salon times, and when Mildred found him! - but for a doctoral thesis, you dig deeper. Hang on - just checked his bibliography - yes, the Suhm correspondence is listed (Trier edition, i.e. in the original French). So it is a conscious choice not to mention the envoy formerly known as Diablotin.
Speaking of the bibliography, among his unprinted sources are the family archive of the Seckendorff clan (which is located at the Thüringisches Staatsarchiv Altenburg), and from the Prussian Secret State Archive the few surviving Fritz-Manteuffel letters, plus Grumbkow-Manteuffel letters; from the Berlin Stabi, the Nachlass of Maupertuis and of Formey (there specifically Formey's correspondence with Manteuffel, with Manteuffel's daughter Charlotte, with Deschamps). Now if Peter von Keith's autobiographical essay that Formey based his obituary on still survives among the unprinted material, it surely would be in the Formey Nachlass, too...
Manteuffel being prepared seems like another sign that he was pretty good with his information and spy network.
I continue to be amazed and awed at the free tuition offered at this university, I mean in this fandom. :D
which means the occasional blip like poor Gundling still showing up as the court fool made head of the academy.
So many of my modern sources do that if not for you, I wouldn't know any better!
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.
Suhm, certainly not relevant to Saxon enovys trying to win Fritz over to Wolff. I mean, what. Especially since you found out later that he's aware of Fritz. Sigh.
Fritz even told Wilhelmine he was studying philosophy with La Chetardie and Suhm in Berlin, in March 1736, and that it was normally Suhm and occasionally Chetardie!
Oh well.
Ah, I see. That's why he doesn't mention Suhm, he's a shipper, too. :P
Yes, yes, this makes perfect sense. It's like the slash fics that go, "Wife/girlfriend? What wife/girlfriend?" Only in this case, it's "Other erastes? What other erastes?" :PPP
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.
Uh huh. Anyway, this is really interesting, because when we first encountered Fritz showing all possible tendernesses to him circa 1736, Selena wondered if that meant sex. And my first response was, "Not to be ageist, but he is 60, and it is the 18th century, so he might not have had all that much sex appeal..." but clearly Formey is here to tell me otherwise!
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.
Bronisch, maybe he heard the name and it SPOKE TO HIM, because he had all these psychological issues, omg.
Guess what happened to the originals? WWII.
ARGH. This keeps happening to us!
Explanation for nickname: it's complicated.
I actually knew this, thanks to MacDonogh! But he doesn't give our sources for it, so that's a nice addition.
(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.)
A classical anecdote I didn't know, thank you! And yes, obvious parallelism is obvious.
It's like the slash fics that go, "Wife/girlfriend? What wife/girlfriend?" Only in this case, it's "Other erastes? What other erastes?" :PPP
That's the only explanation that makes sense for the lack of Suhm when the bibliography proves he has, in fact, read the letters. I should perhaps add here that while Bronisch quotes the passage in Seckendorff Jr.'s journal about Manteuffel getting the Socrates/Alcibiades golden knob, he doesn't quote other passages like Manteuffel telling S that Fritz is like Hadrian, or the "can't embrace her with passion" bit about EC; in fairness, that's outside his main subject (whereas the Socrates/Alicibiades gift is relevant because Voltaire later gets the same thing). Bronisch also when starting his cunningly repacked readers digest book with Fritz writing his first letter to Voltaire says "thus began one of the oddest, if not the oddest, flirtation in political-literary history" (he does use the word "Flirt" in German) re the Fritz/Voltaire relationship, so while he doesn't dive into Fritz & homoeroticism, he's not in denial or unaware about it.
Anyway, this is really interesting, because when we first encountered Fritz showing all possible tendernesses to him circa 1736, Selena wondered if that meant sex. And my first response was, "Not to be ageist, but he is 60, and it is the 18th century, so he might not have had all that much sex appeal..." but clearly Formey is here to tell me otherwise!
And Bronisch makes sure to work that into both books. "Jean Henri Samuel Formey, der den Diplomaten zu Beginn der 1730er Jahre kennenlernte, beschrieb ihn als einen hochgewachsenen, noch im Alter stattlichen, ja "schönen" Mann mit einem ausgeprägten Talent zur geistvoll-galanten Konversation."
That's a "A tall, still handsome in his old age, even "beautiful" man with a distinct talent for witty and galant conversation", if your German fails you. I think Wilhelmine in that passage about Manteuffel (when he was the Saxon envoy in the early 1720s) becoming involved in a G & S scheme with SD's lady-in-waiting also describes him as rather dashing. (For what it's worth, he was married, but not very happily; his wife remained in the Pomeranian countryside and didn't follow him to Berlin on eithe occasion - i.e. the 20s or the 30s. ETA: since they had children nonetheless, Manteuffel actuallly thus knows whereof he speaks when telling Fritz love isn't necessary to reproduce./ETA)
I didn't know the "surge, carnifex!" anecdote, either, but then I've never read Cassius Dio. (Just came across quotes of his in other contexts.)
"A tall, still handsome in his old age, even "beautiful" man with a distinct talent for witty and galant conversation"
So, like, because I'm in this for the trashy fandom I just have to say that I am charmed that it's not just the princes who are getting the "Hot or not?" treatment! :)
Poniatowski also wrote a "hot or not?" about himself at Catherine's request, but I know what you mean. :)
BTW, the fact that Manteuffel was tall might explain why he got along far better than Suhm (who was small) with FW despite being into the arts, big time....
So he did, you are right,and they all, envoys and Prussian nobles alike, agree on "hot"!
For that matter, adding the Nicolai and Büsching Glasow takes to my big Glasow post at rheinsberg has reminded me that everyone agrees that Glasow was a looker, too, with Kalckreuth and Lehndorff in particular - no matter how much they disagree on his character - emphasizing his beauty. Whereas Nicolai makes it sound as if Fritz just had a fatherly fondness for Glasow and wishing to educate him etc. (Look, Nicolai, I can buy this fatherly stuff for the actual Karlchen, Carel. But Glasow? No way.)
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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.
Re: His name is Diable. Le Diable: Good Times
What!? That's surprising. I guess it would have complicated matters for his Manteuffel/Wolff vs. Le Chetardie/Voltaire premise. *side-eyes* Fits with what you say about his reliance on Koser/Droysen, though, i.e. possibly not doing too much research into the Fritzian aspect himself.
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.
He doesn't put it that way? ;) Although given the emphasis on Manteuffel's good looks, he might as well. This still reads to me as Fritz having an (intellecutal) crush on someone who did indeed seem very appealing at first (and was very adept at presenting himself that way) but then quickly cooling on him.
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).
That I found interesting, because Manteuffel's political motivations make more sense to me that way.
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,
Did not know about the office search! Manteuffel being prepared seems like another sign that he was pretty good with his information and spy network. (I think there was also a mention of him burning letters at certain points, which is another reason that a lot of them didn't survive.)
To which I say, that doesn't mean he didn't mean the grave pun as well.
Especially because they fell out! Just because Fritz knew there was a precedent, doesn't mean he didn't still need a reason for going with it.
with Manteuffel commenting on it in a letter to Fritz
And Fritz responding: I have the misfortune of having attacks of hypochondria, and I have been in a very harsh prison; I know that the first is an evil that you cannot know unless you have had it, and the other is a situation where you have to arm yourself with all the consistency possible to resist boredom, loneliness, and the terrible thought of deprivation of liberty.
The Earl of Hoym will surely have believed in the immortality of his soul, otherwise he would not have had the heart to reduce it to nothingness, and it is to be hoped that the good Lord, who is a God of mercy, will have compassion on him, by virtue of the fact that he did not sin so much from wickedness as from temperament. I am sure, my dear Quinze-Vingt, that your generous heart will be charmed to see the apology of a person who was once your enemy, and I expect to see you collect the ashes from his pyre.
The thing about the letters at Trier is interesting, though. A quick skim tells me that at least Fritz' last ones are pretty obviously not to Manteuffel because he switches from "Mon cher Quinze-Vingt" to "Mon Très Cher General". Since Preuss even includes a note from Grumbkow to Manteuffel saying "Voici la suite de ma correspondance avec Junior", I really don't know how Preuss didn't realize what was going on here and that letters to Grumbkow ended up in Manteuffel's collection of Fritz letters. (On top of that, Grumbkow seems to have been a go-between for letters exchanged between Fritz and Manteuffel at other times, I saw a mention of it in one of Manteuffel's letters.)
Also, this way, Fritz' last known letter to Manteuffel is from August, which makes more sense with the falling-out timeline, as opposed to a friendly one from as late as November.
ETA: Oh, by the way, does he give a source for the Manteuffel/Fritz conversation about the immortality of the soul (I think) in August 1736? Because the relevant pages weren't included in the preview and I was curious where he got that from.
Re: His name is Diable. Le Diable: Good Times
I guess it would have complicated matters for his Manteuffel/Wolff vs. Le Chetardie/Voltaire premise. *side-eyes*
Probably, but it's such an odd avoidance. I mean, it's not even that the Suhm connection is anything new for the research, what with their correspondence having been published in the freaking 18th century already. Now, if you're just someone casually interested in Fritz, you might overlook Suhm's existence - I certainly didn't know about him before Salon times, and when Mildred found him! - but for a doctoral thesis, you dig deeper. Hang on - just checked his bibliography - yes, the Suhm correspondence is listed (Trier edition, i.e. in the original French). So it is a conscious choice not to mention the envoy formerly known as Diablotin.
Speaking of the bibliography, among his unprinted sources are the family archive of the Seckendorff clan (which is located at the Thüringisches Staatsarchiv Altenburg), and from the Prussian Secret State Archive the few surviving Fritz-Manteuffel letters, plus Grumbkow-Manteuffel letters; from the Berlin Stabi, the Nachlass of Maupertuis and of Formey (there specifically Formey's correspondence with Manteuffel, with Manteuffel's daughter Charlotte, with Deschamps). Now if Peter von Keith's autobiographical essay that Formey based his obituary on still survives among the unprinted material, it surely would be in the Formey Nachlass, too...
Manteuffel being prepared seems like another sign that he was pretty good with his information and spy network.
Yep. Definitely a pro.
Re: His name is Diable. Le Diable: Good Times
which means the occasional blip like poor Gundling still showing up as the court fool made head of the academy.
So many of my modern sources do that if not for you, I wouldn't know any better!
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.
Suhm, certainly not relevant to Saxon enovys trying to win Fritz over to Wolff. I mean, what. Especially since you found out later that he's aware of Fritz. Sigh.
Fritz even told Wilhelmine he was studying philosophy with La Chetardie and Suhm in Berlin, in March 1736, and that it was normally Suhm and occasionally Chetardie!
Oh well.
Ah, I see. That's why he doesn't mention Suhm, he's a shipper, too. :P
Yes, yes, this makes perfect sense. It's like the slash fics that go, "Wife/girlfriend? What wife/girlfriend?" Only in this case, it's "Other erastes? What other erastes?" :PPP
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.
Uh huh. Anyway, this is really interesting, because when we first encountered Fritz showing all possible tendernesses to him circa 1736, Selena wondered if that meant sex. And my first response was, "Not to be ageist, but he is 60, and it is the 18th century, so he might not have had all that much sex appeal..." but clearly Formey is here to tell me otherwise!
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.
Bronisch, maybe he heard the name and it SPOKE TO HIM, because he had all these psychological issues, omg.
Guess what happened to the originals? WWII.
ARGH. This keeps happening to us!
Explanation for nickname: it's complicated.
I actually knew this, thanks to MacDonogh! But he doesn't give our sources for it, so that's a nice addition.
(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.)
A classical anecdote I didn't know, thank you! And yes, obvious parallelism is obvious.
Re: His name is Diable. Le Diable: Good Times
That's the only explanation that makes sense for the lack of Suhm when the bibliography proves he has, in fact, read the letters. I should perhaps add here that while Bronisch quotes the passage in Seckendorff Jr.'s journal about Manteuffel getting the Socrates/Alcibiades golden knob, he doesn't quote other passages like Manteuffel telling S that Fritz is like Hadrian, or the "can't embrace her with passion" bit about EC; in fairness, that's outside his main subject (whereas the Socrates/Alicibiades gift is relevant because Voltaire later gets the same thing). Bronisch also when starting his cunningly repacked readers digest book with Fritz writing his first letter to Voltaire says "thus began one of the oddest, if not the oddest, flirtation in political-literary history" (he does use the word "Flirt" in German) re the Fritz/Voltaire relationship, so while he doesn't dive into Fritz & homoeroticism, he's not in denial or unaware about it.
Anyway, this is really interesting, because when we first encountered Fritz showing all possible tendernesses to him circa 1736, Selena wondered if that meant sex. And my first response was, "Not to be ageist, but he is 60, and it is the 18th century, so he might not have had all that much sex appeal..." but clearly Formey is here to tell me otherwise!
And Bronisch makes sure to work that into both books. "Jean Henri Samuel Formey, der den Diplomaten zu Beginn der 1730er Jahre kennenlernte, beschrieb ihn als einen hochgewachsenen, noch im Alter stattlichen, ja "schönen" Mann mit einem ausgeprägten Talent zur geistvoll-galanten Konversation."
That's a "A tall, still handsome in his old age, even "beautiful" man with a distinct talent for witty and galant conversation", if your German fails you. I think Wilhelmine in that passage about Manteuffel (when he was the Saxon envoy in the early 1720s) becoming involved in a G & S scheme with SD's lady-in-waiting also describes him as rather dashing. (For what it's worth, he was married, but not very happily; his wife remained in the Pomeranian countryside and didn't follow him to Berlin on eithe occasion - i.e. the 20s or the 30s. ETA: since they had children nonetheless, Manteuffel actuallly thus knows whereof he speaks when telling Fritz love isn't necessary to reproduce./ETA)
I didn't know the "surge, carnifex!" anecdote, either, but then I've never read Cassius Dio. (Just came across quotes of his in other contexts.)
Re: His name is Diable. Le Diable: Good Times
So, like, because I'm in this for the trashy fandom I just have to say that I am charmed that it's not just the princes who are getting the "Hot or not?" treatment! :)
Re: His name is Diable. Le Diable: Good Times
BTW, the fact that Manteuffel was tall might explain why he got along far better than Suhm (who was small) with FW despite being into the arts, big time....
Re: His name is Diable. Le Diable: Good Times
Fredersdorf also got "hot or not" reports, I wish to point out. ;)
Re: His name is Diable. Le Diable: Good Times
For that matter, adding the Nicolai and Büsching Glasow takes to my big Glasow post at
Re: His name is Diable. Le Diable: Good Times
they all, envoys and Prussian nobles alike, agree on "hot"!
Envoys, Prussian nobles, famous French authors, and sons of merchants from Hamburg!
Re: His name is Diable. Le Diable: Good Times
Argh, what I meant to type here was "Especially since you found out later that he's [Bronisch is] aware of Suhm."