cahn | Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 25

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From:

cahn

felis, who has always shown me friendship: okay, Fritz's will was HILARIOUS, especially given that, like, did Ferdinand ever say more than two words to him ever? (I know,

selenak already talked about that :) ) LOL FOREVER at the burn to Heinrich.

(Also the Pesne is a nice painting! I also like it, although I know basically zero about painting.)

Concerts Georg, who lives at Sanssouci and attends 10,000 concerts a day, is an outlier who should not have been counted. ;)

LOL. Yeah, just cause he was only attending a couple of concerts a week doesn't mean he doesn't like music :P

Also D'Argens sounds lovely about her in a letter to Fritz: "For a scholar, it is not a little thing to have a good wife. Since three years, I would have died or gone mad ten times if I hadn't had the fortune to win mine." (written in 1762) (I also find it interesting that EC, whom you wouldn't think to be fond of either Fritz' free-thinking friends or their ex commoner ex ballet dancer wives, sounds as warmly in her reply to the Marquise's condolence letter. It bears repeating: I have always, my dear Marquise, distinguished your late husband as a a very estimable man, and above all by his attachment to the late King, my husband of glorious memory whose death plunges me into the most severe pain. Rest assured that I am very sensitive to the sympathy that you show and I will always be delighted that, having fulfilled all your duties towards your husband, you are rewarded by all the possible happiness.

Awwww D'Argens <3 Also, EC gets an A+ for that condolence letter (*cough* JUST SAYING, FRITZ)

From:

cahn

Grumbkow & Seckendorf: We’re the incredibly dumb evil stooges of this play. The clever evil schemer is someone else, to wit:

FW’s valet Eversmann: Me!

WHAT

I thought Maria Theresia's dad made a much better Disney villain, and that's saying something!

G, S, E: Sire, Archduke Leopold the future Emperor is asking for your daughter’s hand!

Me: *blinks* I thought... there was this whole thing with the Pragmatic Sanction...?
[personal profile] selenak: WHO?
Me: Oh good, it's not me this time!
Wikipedia and mildred, more or less in unison: Charles had a son Leopold who died at age SEVEN MONTHS.

...There was a lot of my eyebrows contorting rather a lot reading this, I will have you know! Although I think it is hilarious that the Potsdam Giants showed up, because I think it is meta-hilarious that LITERALLY EVERYONE IN THE WORLD EXCEPT FW thinks the Potsdam Giants are hilarious!

resumably the one publication Gutzkow must have read when doing research for this are Wilhelmine's memoirs. Can you imagine reading them and coming up with this plot?

MAN. I still don't know where Leopold came from, but as for the rest of it, the only thing I can think of is a) lots of alcohol b) Gutzkow must have desperately wanted Wilhelmine to have a happy ending and a happy marriage as I did by the time I was done with volume 1 (I still haven't finished Vol 2).

From:

cahn

selenak: 1.) Zimmermann, as you may recall, is the planet's first Fritz/MT shipper and conspiracy theorist
Me: Oh yeah, I remember that now, but mostly I know him as the guy who --
selenak: Of course, the part of Zimmermann's "Fragments" everyone talked about wasn't this, it was the "Fritz: psychologically impotent due to botched penis operation after youth of STD...
Me: Yeah, that.

Heh, Nicolai is funny with his "nothing to see here, Herr von Z, move right along!" As well as what you say later about his whole "be nice to the ladies!!" thing.

Nicolai via selenak: He then, as Büsching did, prints signed testimony of the various guys involved to the effect Fritz had a completely normal piece of male equipment without any scarring tissue, meaning there can't have been any operation, botched or not, at any point.
Me: Why the heck was everyone so obsessed with Fritz's penis, anyway? [Not words I ever thought I'd say.]
Selenak: Because Nicolai is thorough, he also says readers (if they'd made it so far in this unsavoury subject) might wonder what the various people were doing checking Fritz' genitals close enough to look for scarring tissue.
Me: ...I am not sure whether I'm impressed that he thought this might be something people would ask about, or sort of freaked out that he's going that far. I guess given that he answered my question, I'll lean towards the impressed side. Maybe.

Zimmermann was filled full of male tenderness (männliche Zärtlichkeit)

That is... really manly tenderness, all right. Wow.

I feel a bit cruel for mocking Zimmermann; it's clear he did adore Fritz and was deeply affected by having to watch someone he loved so extensively be painfully ill without being able to truly help.

Okay, yeah, that sounds rather unfortunate. But also, I mean, broken penis theory :P

and secondly, none of them has ever said a harsh word about the equally Swiss Catt, did they? On the contrary, see all the positive references to Henri de Catt in his and Büschings collections since they talked with him, too. But you see, Z, CATT would never!

(I laughed.) Oh Nicolai, if you only knew!

"Eine Canaille von einem Gott" is my new favourite contemporary Voltaire description.

That is pretty awesome :D

From:

selenak

"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.

From:

selenak

And then, of course, Fritz writes to Voltaire. Bronisch admits that the double attack of Le Chetardie (the French envoy trying to steer the future King away from Vienna and to France) on the political and Voltaire on the pilosophical front wasn't the only reason why the Fritz/Manteuffel relationship started to get less close, then dissolve in later 1736 to 1737, he says Fritz probably became aware just how much Private Citizen Mantteuffel was involved with Team Habsburg, but he still thinks it's a key factor. Of course, Manteuffel didn't back off without a fight. Among other things, he financed the reprint in Prussia of not one but two anti-Voltaire pamphlets from Voltaire's arch enemies back home in France. This did not work as intended. Then there was the Pyrrhic victory of FW at long last coming around to not just tolerating but reading Wolff in 1739 (which took away from Wolff's remaining coolness in Fritz' eyes, though at that point he'd long since moved on in essence), of which the most blatant proof was in one of FW's hobby paintings from his last months of life. It shows Nossig, who Bronisch says was at that point one of Gundling's successor's as court fool (sigh, see above) and especially stupid. The painting depicts Nossic with asses ears and hung with bells reading various Pietist works, among them, prominently, several books by Joachim Lange, aka Wolff's arch enemy mainly responsible for his banishment, including Lang's "Exegese der Apostelbriefe" which had been printed on FW's orders just a few years earlier. (Manteuffel writes about this painting to Brühl.) However, as

felis mentioned, at this point Manteuffel and the other Berlin Wolffians were actually not keen at all in the idea of FW doing the recalling and reinstating of Wolff, because the triumphant return of Wolff was supposed to happen on Fritz' orders, thereby associating Wolff as THE philosopher of the new regime, not some last moment note of grace for the old one. As FW had sent another "court fool" named Morgenstern (meaning: maybe he was a fool, maybe he was, like Gundling, a scholar with the bad luck of being treated like one; at any rate, FW had promotedim in 1735 to Vice President of the university of Frankfurt an der Oder, and ordered as Morgenstern's introduction a debate on the subject of "Scholars are Fools and Blabberboxes") ) to sound out Wolff. This, Morgenstern managed, and heard from Wolff over a shared cup of coffee that sure, he'd love nothing better than return to Halle, especially since his wife is heartily sick of exile and wants back to her old home, if only such and such minor impendiment didn't exist. Morgenstern goes back to Berlin to report this to FW.

Team Berlin Wolffians, mainly bookseller Haude, Reinbek and Manteuffel, do not like to hear this. Haude writes in umistakable terms to Wolff on 31st October 1739 that he should trust his true friends in Berlin, the Aletophiles, and not to a court fool, for God's sake, see attached also two letters from Manteuffel, your most influential patron, Wolff, remember? DO NOT ACCEPT FW'S OFFER. Mantteuffel's own argument is of the psychological type, using period sexism very effectively; if Wolff now attempts, one has to assume that he was "un homme absulement gouverné par sa femme et qui par consequent n'est grand Philosophe". That does it. Wolff says of course he's the boss in his marriage and yeah, no accepting of FW's offer, promise.

Other Manteuffel activities of the 1739 include preparing a translated into French volume of "Best of Wolff" extracts under the title Le Roi Philosophe, dedicated to the Crown Prince of Prussia. Fritz' reply when he gets the printed copy in 1740 a few days before FW's death, once more raises everyone's hopes (Gottsched, another new literary Manteuffel friend at this point) quickly translates into German and spreads it and made the Wolffians hope once more that the fight for Fritz wasn't all lost, as it's very gracious, on the notes that not only every citizen but every prince and king should read this and it is up to the wise of this world to teach princes etc etc., and he's studied this for a long time and is delighted, etc. Alas. Alack. History happens. Btw, to Fritz' credit, especially that he later catches a lot of deserved flack for his treatment of German writers, thinkers and scientists, once Wolff has made it back to Halle, he really does his best to make Wolff accept a membership of the Academy. Which Wolff absolutely won't. One of the main arguments is the langugage: Wolff says that while he can read French, he can't understand it when it's spoken out loud and so quickly (I emphatize), let alone speak it, and Fritz has just nixed the previous Academy language, which was Latin, and which Wolff could speak, and won't accept German. As for the other Academy members already called according to the papers, this Algarotti fellow (WTF Newton for Ladies?), Maupertuis (did he really compare exploring Lappland to exploring a woman's body ?!?) and Voltaire (Arggggggh), yeah, no. "I can't talk to them, and they don't understand me." He stays in Halle, thank you very much.

As for Manteuffel, he moves to Leipzig after Fritz kicks him out shortly before invading Silesia (on November 5th 1740). Even Bronisch admits this was a necessary and prudent measure, since Manteuffel after Grumbkow died in 1739 immediately wrote home to Dresden and asked for a budget raise to he could take over Grumbkow's spy network, which he got and which he did. Post successful Silesian invasion, the remaining Aletophiles in Berlin became splintered, as many were swayed to the Fritzian side. When Reinbek made the mistake of writing a "Silesia Fuck Yeah!" type of letter, Manteuffel fired off a reply that's also an evisceration of Fritz, rethorically asking there was either a legal by HRE law justification for the invasion, or one by natural law, or one on the basis of religion (which Reinbek had argued), i.e. Fritz needing to save the Silesian Protestants from Catholic MT? And his reply to each of these was no. Fritz has become ~~a gangster with good PR~~ just another despot and a robber donning the robes of monarch. So much for you, Alcibiades.

Still, Manteuffel keeps up the good networking work and continues to be an A plus encourager of writers and philosophers. The refounded Aletophiles in Leipzig even have a female member, Louise Gottsched (remember her? Émilie fan and translator?), who points out to him in a letter even before the Silesian invasion that this Roi Philosophe dedication to Fritz and the whole Roi Philosophe concept is a mistake because she knows of not a few princes who had a great education and knew damm well what they were doing and did it anyway. Philosophy does not keep them from this.

Meanwhile, the remaining Berlin Aletophiles, if they haven't changed sides like Haude or miraculously managed remain friendly to both like Formey, don't fare so well. Primary example: Dechamps. Manteuffel protegé Dechamps in 1736 managed to score a double employment - he became Fritz' official court preacher at Rheinsberg (if you're surprised Fritz had an official court preacher at Rheinsberg, remember FW being alive and making surprise visits) as well as teacher to Heinrich and Ferdinand. (How this worked out geographically, I don't know.) He pointedly addresses Wolffian themes in his preachings. In 1741, he attempts to strike out against Voltaire in a major way and gets busy writing Cours abrégé de la philosophie wolffiene en formé de lettres, in wihch he says that Voltaire was just a rude religion mocker with the ability of making some neat verses, and an ugly, grimacing dwarf of a man to boot. Also, the works of the great Wolff naturally can't be understood by such a creature. Dechamps dedicates this to his two students and sends a copy directly to Fritz as soon as it's printed. The reaction doesn't take long. On November 1742, a one act play gets performed in Charlottenburg, Le singe de la Mode, in which a stupid provincial nobleman is looking for books to feel the shelves of his new library with. He discovers that the volumes best suited for this purpose are hundreds of copies of Dechamps' Cours abregé, which he can get to a bargain price since no one wanted to buy or read them. The author of this play: Fritz. How does Dechamps find out? From little Ferdinand. Oh, and he doesn't get his salary for teaching Ferdinand and Heinrich, either, and Fritz appoints Bielfeld as competing teacher, and Dechamps doesn't get to be a member of the Royal Academy. In 1746, he's finally had it (why so late?) and leaves Berlin for The Hague and London.

Formey, otoh, gets asked by Voltaire whether he's one of those men paid to fool the people (Formey is a Calvinist clergyman) when first they meet, but he does get to be an academy member (and a good thing, too, or Mildred would never have read his obituary for Peter). His main work, other than obituaries, is the six volume philosophical novel "La Belle Wolffienne". In volume 2, which he works on in the early 1740s, he gets into a major spiritual crisis, which Manteuffel by mail manages to talk him through, so the rest of the magnum opus can be published. Manteuffel doesn't live long enough to witness the big Voltaire implosion, but he gets to see the first big Academy controversy from afar, see my write up of the Maupertuis biography. He also guides August III's son Christian August in his studies (Christian August, alas, will die in the same year his father will, in 1763), and dies a respected and admired private citizen (we swear!) in 1749.

As for Christian Wolff: in 1743, Fritz en route to Bayreuth stops in Halle. Wolff presents himself, but is told to wait in the antechambre and in the end is not received. This is of course on the same trip where Voltaire is with Fritz, visiting Wilhelmine, so Wolff notes in a letter to Manteuffel. Just to complete the humilation, in Histoire de mon temps, Fritz writes years later that there were only two German professors of genius ever: Only two men distinguish themselves through their genius and honor the nation: the great Leipniz and the learned Thomasius. I'm leaving Wolff aside. He just repeats Leipniz' system and repeats ramblingly what the later has written with fire and inspiration. Most German scholars were simple craftsmen, while the French ones were artists.

1790s German writer Boie, like many young men of the time a frustrated Fritz fan: I won't accept this.

Boie: writes RPF titled "Totengespräche", in which dead Fritz, with Voltaire at his side, meets dead Wolff in the underworld and tells Wolff he was the first one to make him think, the author of his soul and mind, everything he became as a thinker, he owes thus to Wolff. Wolff modestly says there's a much greater one he must present to Fritz and points to Lessing. Fritz and Wolff leave the unworthy shallow Voltaire behind and unite with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in the Hereafter. Happy ending!

Bronisch: yeah, I know. Even the idea that Wolff would have admired Lessing doesn't fit, never mind Fritz. But I still wanted to tell you the story. One more thing: Fritz totally named Sanssouci after Manteuffel's Sanssouci, and it wasn't because he was looking for his grave, it was because he was pining for the happy time with his mentor in the mid 1730s. So there. The end.

Edited Date: 2021-03-05 10:31 am (UTC)

From:

selenak

I thought Maria Theresia's dad made a much better Disney villain, and that's saying something!

I know. And if not him, and you want to present FW himself as strict but fair because you're a 19th century German playwright and evil Hohenzollern kings are not on, what's wrong with G & S, single or together, as the main villain(s)? Where does the evil valet come from?

think it is meta-hilarious that LITERALLY EVERYONE IN THE WORLD EXCEPT FW thinks the Potsdam Giants are hilarious!

I know. Even the occasional fervent FW defender whose text I've read thinks so.

the only thing I can think of is a) lots of alcohol b) Gutzkow must have desperately wanted Wilhelmine to have a happy ending and a happy marriage as I did by the time I was done with volume 1

As good an explanation as any! I can just imagine him reading that passage about her husband being subjected to the Tobacco Parliament and abused by FW only to talk back and leaving and thinking "in a play, that would have impressed her father and been the prelude for a happy ending and would have happened before the marriage, not after! I know! I'll write a Hohenzollern RomCom!

From:

selenak

Why the heck was everyone so obsessed with Fritz's penis, anyway? [Not words I ever thought I'd say.

See, other Kings don't have that effect! You hear about the occasional possible royal penis operation (Louis XVI) as an explanation for fertilty after years of non fertility, but you don't get signed testimonies!

Mind you, while Nicolai entirely blames Voltaire, it did occured to me that we've found out a few months back that not the "botched STD treatment/penis operation = impotence" story, but the youthful STD = impotence" theory predates both Zimmermann and Voltaire by decades, because my guy Boswell hears about it on September 2nd, 1764: He said the King of Prussia had been sadly debauched in his youth: for he used to go to the common bawdy houses as well as to divert himself with the Ladies of the Court. He is now (said Blancho) quite impotent.

So even non-Voltaire readers could possibly have heard rumors that made them look.

From:

felis

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.

Edited Date: 2021-03-05 02:33 pm (UTC)

From:

felis

Morgenstern (meaning: maybe he was a fool, maybe he was, like Gundling, a scholar with the bad luck of being treated like one

Salomo Jacob Morgenstern seems to have been a scholar, if not a very good one. Interesting detail at the end: Für Friedrich Nicolai, der ihn 1779 besuchte, hob er sich immerhin positiv von Friedrich Wilhelms übrigen „Hofgelehrten“ ab. Seine in vielem wenig zuverlässige, aber lebendige und, da auf persönlichen Erlebnissen beruhend, nicht uninteressante Geschichte „Ueber Friedrich Wilhelm I.“ erschien erst 1793.

(His book about FW is here and I have to say, he has to be the first person who started a description of FW like this: The late blessed King Friedrich Wilhelm in his youth must have been a well built and handsome man, because his face was appealing until his last sickness and his eyes not just light, but piercing and, most of the time, friendly. ... !
Oh, man, further on: Since he could see to the bottom of your heart, he suspected a bad conscience in everyone who didn't look at him freely; or that he could never trust them because of deceitfulness and perfidity of their heart. There are only few occasions where he was wrong in his judgment. A Gundling successor who turned out to be a FW fan? Wow. Seems kind of accurate when it comes to FW's way of thinking, though.)

Mantteuffel's own argument is of the psychological type, using period sexism very effectively; if Wolff now attempts, one has to assume that he was "un homme absulement gouverné par sa femme et qui par consequent n'est grand Philosophe".

Argh. Manteuffel! Very interesting to get the details of the sabotaged Wolff return, though.

As for the other Academy members already called according to the papers, this Algarotti fellow (WTF Newton for Ladies?), Maupertuis (did he really compare exploring Lappland to exploring a woman's body ?!?) and Voltaire (Arggggggh), yeah, no. "I can't talk to them, and they don't understand me." He stays in Halle, thank you very much.

:DDD

Manteuffel after Grumbkow died in 1739 immediately wrote home to Dresden and asked for a budget raise to he could take over Grumbkow's spy network, which he got and which he did

Also interesting! Honestly, the 00Diable - as you so nicely put it - version of Manteuffel has to be my favourite one from a storytelling perspective.

Louise Gottsched (remember her? Émilie fan and translator?), who points out to him in a letter even before the Silesian invasion that this Roi Philosophe dedication to Fritz and the whole Roi Philosophe concept is a mistake because she knows of not a few princes who had a great education and knew damm well what they were doing and did it anyway

Good for her! I really like that she had such a different perspective on it.

re: Deschamps

- official court preacher at Rheinsberg (if you're surprised Fritz had an official court preacher at Rheinsberg, remember FW being alive and making surprise visits)

That, and possibly also for EC?

- as well as teacher to Heinrich and Ferdinand. (How this worked out geographically, I don't know.)

He became their teacher in 1740, when he wasn't at Rheinsberg anymore, see the excerpt at Trier here.

- On November 1742, a one act play gets performed in Charlottenburg, Le singe de la Mode

Premiered on the occasion of Keyserlingk's wedding and not played very well, as Fritz writes to Voltaire when he sends him a copy. (Of course he did.)

Boie: writes RPF titled "Totengespräche"

:DD This seems to have been a fanfic trend at the time, at least I remember coming across another "Totengespräch" between Fritz and Amelie at some point last year.

because he was pining for the happy time with his mentor in the mid 1730s. So there.

Ah, I see. That's why he doesn't mention Suhm, he's a shipper, too. :P

From:

selenak

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.

Yep. Definitely a pro.

From:

selenak

Morgenstern: reading a few pages more, ZOMG! I found the source for Jochen Klepper's "FW had a tender youthful love for Caroline the future Queen of England, and never quite stopped" s tale! Jochen K., I wronged you, I thought you made that up because you disliked SD so much and wanted your tragic hero to have loved someone else and be loved by them at least once.

Also, Morgenstern is the source for the supposed "smart woman, bad Christian" from FW about his mother Sophie Charlotte, and for the "she spoiled him, F1 neglected him by not micromanaging him" characterisation which I've already seen in Hinrichs. And good lord, does he (Morgenstern) have a go at F1, marvelling FW showed such general respect for his Dad when the guy was such a weak, vain and bad King and what not, and for good measure, also blames F1 for the death of FW's first kid (dead baby Friedrich Ludwig; why? Because of the loud salute shootings) and for "marrying a third time without need". And then he adds that possibly FW was told by his mother that he, FW, wasn't F1's kid at all, that FW upon becoming King and being drunk said "how can you believe I'm the son of such a weak man!", only to have one of his generals return "hang on, if you're not F1's son, you're not our King and master, either", wereupon he sobered up and said "joking, ob course!"

Now, Morgenstern was present for none of this, since according to the bio you linked he didn't join FW's circle until 1736 (which btw also explains a lot - he only knew FW personally during FW's last four years of life), and it doesn't jive with how Barbara Beuys presented family relationships at all, which she backs up with letters between FW and his parents, and between Sophie of Hannover and Sophie Charlotte as as between Sophie and other folk. (Not to mention that cheerfully telling your kid he's a bastard is just not something any royal woman of the era would have done. That's downright suicidal. But IF Morgenstern didn't make it up entirely from scratch but bases it on some stuff FW actually said when drunk and sick during those last four years (say, about the first baby dying, or complaints that neither of his parents were good Christians in his eyes), then there's a shot that maybe he actually did have a youthful thing for Caroline. (Giving him additional reason to hate on G2!)

He became their teacher in 1740, when he wasn't at Rheinsberg anymore

Ah, that makes sense. Bronisch made it sound like it happened simultanously.

This seems to have been a fanfic trend at the time, at least I remember coming across another "Totengespräch" between Fritz and Amelie at some point last year.

Same. It wasn't very good, tough, so I never bothered to read more than a bit of it. But yeah, clearly a late 18th Century fanfic trend!

That's why he doesn't mention Suhm, he's a shipper, too.

Most def.

Edited Date: 2021-03-05 05:23 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

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.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, you're right! I remember Boswell had heard the debauched youth and STD stories in 1764, but had forgotten the impotence rumors were making the rounds already. Need not have been Voltaire, then!

I'm increasingly inclined to think Voltaire picked up on existing rumors rather than started them.

From:

felis

Okay, so, one more perspective on the final years, because I enjoyed this little book and it was a really soothing read after all the feuding. :)

Friedrich der Einzige in seinen Privat- und besonders literarischen Stunden betrachtet by Charles Dantal (original French: Les délassements littéraires, ou Heures de lecture de Frédéric II)
ETA: Oh, hey, I only just realized that the German translator added "der Einzige" to the title. *facepalm*

Dantal (born 1759, death 1799) was Fritz' last reader and the one who actually got to read instead of being read to. Unlike all the others, he was a Prussian citizen from the local French colony, and also a French teacher at the Potsdam orphanage before getting the job as reader. He first met Fritz in October 1784 and started reading in November, usually in the evening / late afternoon and for up to three hours. The last session was on July 30th, 1786, because Fritz was in too much pain from then on.

His account was written and published in 1791, but he clearly based it on notes he took during his time with Fritz. The book is split into two parts: first a prose part that contains a general description of his job, Fritz' comments and/or short yay/nay reviews for each of the books, plus a few anecdotes; second a complete list of the books read with reading times, places, and dates. (So if you want to know which book and chapter he was reading to Fritz on any given day between November 1784 and July 1786, this is your source.)

General comments:

He reports that Fritz had a lot to say about pronunciation, kept correcting him and generally had his own ideas on the topic. If Fritz himself wasn't sure how to pronounce certain words, he tried to say them quietly to himself at first [...]. I was surprised that the King didn't let go of a wrong pronunciation of certain words once he'd settled on it, even though I told him my reasons with all the reverence I owed him. [...] Other mistakes, probably due to a failing memory, he never begrudged when pointed out to him; one day he even told me that a young man was allowed to correct an old one [Greis] if he was wrong.

Occasionally, Fritz did get annoyed and angry because of his own memory lapses, though. One of the few anecdotes is about this: he couldn't remember the author of a book he wanted to read, Dantal suggested the right one but Fritz didn't hear/register and therefore grumpily dismissed it, then sent Dantal, who didn't dare to mention it again, away to do research. Dantal had just reached the city gate, when he was called back because Fritz had remembered the name at last and all was right with the world: "Now he was completely content again and the gentle tone with which he said "c'est fort bien", gave me back the trust/confidence [Zutrauen], which the critical moment had taken away before."

Dantal also mentions the order that was kept in Fritz' libraries, and that they were sorted by content, not looks, i.e. without regard for different sizes next to each other, which some owners of libraries care for the most (ha). He describes the way the books were bound (with the letters on the covers - "S" for the New Palais (the Palace of Sanssouci) for example, and of course Sanssouci had a "V" because Fritz always called it Vignes) and also mentiones that nobody was allowed to move the books in Fritz' room.

Some reading details, chronologically:

1. Early on, they are reading a book of speeches by Isocrates and others and Fritz comments on and dissects the arguments in every speech; for example, he was never happy with the ones that were given before big events/undertakings, because he thought they just delayed the point where somebody took action. He also spent quite some time on the speech in which Isocrates is trying to convince Philippos to wage war against the barbarians [the Persians I think] to free Greece, and he didn't find Isocrates' reasons convincing enough. (I could not help but think of Crusader!Voltaire in this context, although there's no mention of Fritz doing the same.)

2. Fritz did crossreferencing - reading Tacitus and Sueton in parallel to compare their take on the same events - and read/commented on editor's notes. (:D)

3. In March 1785, Fritz got sick with fever and so they switched to less challenging and more entertaining stuff = Voltaire. Le Taureau Blanc and Candide on this occasion, both of which made him laugh a lot.

4. Fritz gets annoyed with Rollin for connecting everything to religion and Christ, quote: as if the heathens couldn't be just as virtuous as the Christians.

5. Fritz' very own theory on Socrates death: It's the sculptors' fault! They feared for their income because Socrates spoke against polytheism, so they accused him of various political offenses and got him killed.

6. Spring/Summer 1785: Because of frequent breaks during revue season, they read Moliere's comedies. No reading during a July week when Amelie and Charlotte were visiting.

7. Fritz returned from Silesia on August 30th; Dantal notes that he got sick and almost died on September 19th, because of an asthma attack (that's what "Steckfluss" is, right? I'm not sure how the fact that he got an emetic plays into it, though); the reading sessions continued September 24th.

8. On January 1st, 1786, they are in the middle of reading Bayle, an excerpt from the Dictionnaire that Fritz made himself [as in: he had the stuff he was interested in reprinted and bound in octave for his convenience] and this is where we get a favourite dog mention!

I want to include a short monologue, which the King adressed to his favourite dog, Arsinoé, whom he was holding on his lap at that point. Because when I read the following words - [about animals not being capable of reasoning] - the King turned to his favourite dog and said: "Do you hear, my mignonne, they are talking about you and claiming that you don't have reason [esprit], but you do have it, my little mignonne!"

So, favourite dog half a year before his death: Arsinoé, not Superbe. Doesn't have to mean that it was still Arsinoé when he died, but it's a data point.
Also: we have a pet name he used, Mignonne, i.e. sweet, cute, lovely.

9. February 4th, 1786: While Dantal was reading about Turenne, Fritz fell into a deep sleep, which Dantal thinks was the start of his last and enduring illness, so I guess he observed that Fritz was consistently worse from that point on.

10. During the last months, they go back to a lot of Voltaire, mostly the history works (Louis XIV and XV), and Fritz', although pretty sick, has comments, for example, as late as July:

When I read the following words about the battle at Rossbach - "Friedrich, surrounded by so many enemies, decided to die with a weapon in his hand, in the middle of the army of the Prince of Soubise" - the King, as sick as he was that day, could not help but call out: "Oh, oh! There was no reason to die yet!"

11. During the last weeks, Fritz often fell asleep while Dantal was reading - by then, he would be wearing his nightclothes already so he could just stay asleep if he wanted - and Dantal therefore stayed until 10 at night, when he would quietly leave the room because he assumed that Fritz wouldn't want any more reading this late, even if he woke up again. Dantal also says that Fritz still read by himself during that last year: "His habit was to read out loud to himself, especially verse, and I believe to have noticed by the quiet voice with which he was often reading when I entered, that it exhausted him a lot."

Edited Date: 2021-03-05 10:32 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Schöning: SECOND chamber hussar OMG SECOND: shaving Fritz, giving Fritz his medications, taking care of Fritz' enemas, otherwise "just like every other servant"'s duties

ROTFL SO VERY HARD

Also informative!

dressing him (?? - maybe once he was ill?)

Maybe handing him his clothes, hanging the sweat-soaked ones in front of the fire, etc.?

Zimmermann, who hears about Desen, can't resist improving on this because he's all about how misunderstood Fritz was really loving at heart, and says that Fritz was really sorry once the guy had shot himself and said maybe he shouldn't have been so harsh. Neumann, apparantly feeling the need to defend Fritz from this, too, which tells you something about Neumann, says NO HE DID NOT, he couldn't have cared less about Desen by then, he just said he hadn't thought Desen would have the courage.

Wow, that is really something. Thank you for sharing that with us.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

To felis, who has always shown me friendship:

This made me laugh so hard. :DD

From:

mildred_of_midgard

And if not him, and you want to present FW himself as strict but fair because you're a 19th century German playwright and evil Hohenzollern kings are not on, what's wrong with G & S, single or together, as the main villain(s)? Where does the evil valet come from?

If you've been reading W's memoirs lately, she does rather hate on Eversmann, so I can kind of squint and see where you'd get that.

What's interesting to me is that Eversmann, being a valet, really is a stooge rather than a main villain in the memoirs, and specifically his main role is carrying messages between FW and Wilhelmine. And she hates on him SO MUCH, that given that the messages are things like "Your dad is beating up your brother again, fyi he's covered in blood" and "All this family strife is your fault for not marrying the latest guy your dad picked--just do what he wants and everyone can be happy!" that I have to wonder how much of the sheer hate-on is transferred anger at her father that W can't give full expression to. What with W's classism, the fact that hating your parents is not on, and hating and loving your parents at the same time is complicated in any century, never mind the 18th, Eversmann looks to me like a really, really safe target for sheer unadulterated hatred. Even G & S come across in W's memoirs as more three-dimensional characters than Eversmann does.

think it is meta-hilarious that LITERALLY EVERYONE IN THE WORLD EXCEPT FW thinks the Potsdam Giants are hilarious!

I know. Even the occasional fervent FW defender whose text I've read thinks so.

Not Showalter! Dennis Showalter, modern military historian, thinks they were TOTALLY sensible and not at all a fetish. From his 1996 military history of Fritz:

Even the King’s most often-cited military indulgence, his regiment of ‘giant grenadiers’, was a useful test bed for new methods of drill and new items of equipment as well as a military hobby.

...

The King preferred tall, well-built soldiers. Big men could more readily handle and more quickly reload the long-barrelled infantry musket. Linking size and physical fitness was also reasonable in an economic environment where malnutrition was common and a military environment where captains and colonels concerned with keeping their muster rolls reasonably honest might well overlook such minor problems as double hernias.

One important thing to note in this context is that nearly every page of Showalter's book has some kind of "Actually, so-and-so had a really good strategic reason for such-and-such a decision, despite a centuries-long history of criticizing their judgment and/or attributing the decision to psychological factors" interpretation of something or other. So be aware that he has this particular bias.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Among other things, he financed the reprint in Prussia of not one but two anti-Voltaire pamphlets from Voltaire's arch enemies back home in France.

OOOOH, I didn't know this!

Fritz: I write my own anti-Voltaire pamphlets, thank you very much. :P

several books by Joachim Lange, aka Wolff's arch enemy mainly responsible for his banishment

I remind everyone that Lange as an enemy of Wolff has made an appearance in passing before, in the "Mimi burns Wolff" anecdote:

Our wits maintain that the monkey wanted to study the Metaphysics and, being unable to construe a word, put it to the flame. Others aver that Lange had corrupted her, and that she played that turn from motives of zeal inspired by the prig. Finally, others said that Mimi was annoyed at the number of prerogatives which Wolff accords to man over beast, and offered up to Vulcan a book which denigrated her race. (Translation MacDonogh's, with the exception of making Mimi female, as Fritz said she was.)

Mantteuffel's own argument is of the psychological type, using period sexism very effectively; if Wolff now attempts, one has to assume that he was "un homme absulement gouverné par sa femme et qui par consequent n'est grand Philosophe". That does it. Wolff says of course he's the boss in his marriage and yeah, no accepting of FW's offer, promise.

Sigh.

One of the main arguments is the langugage: Wolff says that while he can read French, he can't understand it when it's spoken out loud and so quickly (I emphatize), let alone speak it, and Fritz has just nixed the previous Academy language, which was Latin, and which Wolff could speak, and won't accept German.

Huh, I didn't know that either. And lol to his opinions of the other scholars!

Louise Gottsched (remember her? Émilie fan and translator?)

Yes, thanks to you!

who points out to him in a letter even before the Silesian invasion that this Roi Philosophe dedication to Fritz and the whole Roi Philosophe concept is a mistake because she knows of not a few princes who had a great education and knew damm well what they were doing and did it anyway. Philosophy does not keep them from this.

Ding ding ding we have a winner! Even as a kid, even with my terrible education, I always had the Nazis held up to me as prime examples of how educated people commit atrocities too. Good for her for noticing!

Dechamps. Manteuffel protegé Dechamps in 1736 managed to score a double employment - he became Fritz' official court preacher at Rheinsberg (if you're surprised Fritz had an official court preacher at Rheinsberg, remember FW being alive and making surprise visits)

He is mentioned in a footnote by the English translator of the Suhm letters (which I am still reading almost as slowly as cahn is reading Orieux!), who has this to say:

Jean Deschamps, second brother to him who died Minister at Berlin, in 17852 was attached to the service of the church at Reinsberg, as candidate, and having preached before the Court, he assumed the title of Chaplain. - The Prince Royal never attended his sermons. - M. Deschamps having been one of Wolff's disciples at Marbourg, translated first, his German Logic into French, the translation was well received by the public.-- He afterwards published an entire course of Wolf's philosophy, in a series of letters addressed to one of his friends, a young Theologian, called Cabrit, who died in 1741, Minister of the church at Francfort upon the Oder.

The editor then tells roughtly the same story of the literary war between Fritz and Deschamp, and his flight to Kassel and London. No idea how accurate the details are, but this is what 1787 guy says!

How does Dechamps find out? From little Ferdinand.

Who has always shown Fritz friendship!

he does get to be an academy member (and a good thing, too, or Mildred would never have read his obituary for Peter

Indeed! Though, now I'm wondering: were the obituaries on the initiative of the Academy or Formey? IOW, did they continue after Formey, and would we still have them if Formey hadn't taken it upon himself to write them?

Speaking of the Academy, new findings in the library. In 1900, Harnack published a three volume (but like the seventh Harry Potter movie, the first one is split in two, and also there's a supplementary volume with documents, bless 19th century scholars) history of the Academy of Sciences, in excruciating detail (~600 pages per volume). In the interests of space, only the first volume (from the founding under F1 up to the death of Fritz) and the Urkunden volume are in the library, but I have the others if we need them for something.

Searching "Keith" (natch) in the first volume, I see that the author says that the post of Curator, which I've always been wondering what its specific duties were, meant almost nothing already in 1747 (when Peter was appointed), and nothing at all in 1753. They didn't even bother replacing curators when they died (Peter was the first to go :(), so that when Fritz died, there was only one left of the original four.

And speaking of the library, Dantal is now under memoirs and diaries, and Morgenstern under biographies. Good finds,

felis!

Bronisch: yeah, I know. Even the idea that Wolff would have admired Lessing doesn't fit, never mind Fritz. But I still wanted to tell you the story.

Lol, well, we sympathize.

One more thing: Fritz totally named Sanssouci after Manteuffel's Sanssouci, and it wasn't because he was looking for his grave, it was because he was pining for the happy time with his mentor in the mid 1730s. So there. The end.

I love how this matters SO much to Bronisch. I see nothing incompatible with declaring that Rheinsberg was the only happy time of your life, that you'll never be happy again as long as you live, and longing for both the time before your current unhappy life and the time to come after it aka death.

From:

selenak

If you've been reading W's memoirs lately, she does rather hate on Eversmann, so I can kind of squint and see where you'd get that.

Point taken, though Gutzkow picking him rather than G or S as the mastermind, and presenting them as his evil yet foolish to incompetent stooges is still his choice!

I have to wonder how much of the sheer hate-on is transferred anger at her father that W can't give full expression to. What with W's classism, the fact that hating your parents is not on, and hating and loving your parents at the same time is complicated in any century, never mind the 18th, Eversmann looks to me like a really, really safe target for sheer unadulterated hatred.

Oh, that's very plausible! And let me add that it's also in miniature form the tried and true vehicle for anti-monarch feelings through the centuries - it's really the evil minion/mistress/advisor/favourite who is hateable and responsible for the bad policies under which I'm suffering, not the monarch themselves. I mean, the father/daughter issue is largest for Wilhelmine, of course, but the fact that FW is the King is also there. (Both because she's been raised in a state of absolute monarchy, and because she gets at the time of writing her memoirs a good deal of her self esteem in tiny Bayreuth - where her husband is still part of FW's army due to having one regiment since the wedding - from the fact she's the daughter of a King.)

....and with all that, you still have all those later 19th century and early 20th century editors (like Stratemanns) complaining what a terrible, unfeeling daughter she was to write the way she did about her father.

Meanwhile, Lord Hervey is the outlier in the "blame the minion!" game in that he's fine with blaming Fritz of Wales entirely for being ~~a love rat~~ the worst, and while treating his (Hervey's) successor in FoW's friendship, Doddington, with contempt and dissing on Mrs. Archibald Hamilton and Princess Augusta for not even being that pretty (both) and badly educated (Augusta), he still reserves his supreme bile for FoW. Who wasn't his King but as far as Hervey knew when writing this would be by the time these memoirs got to print. And of course G2 only fares slightly better in that book, with the occasional not awful moment, but his awfulness still outshines that of anyone who works for him.

LOL on Showalter. Does he explain why Fritz dissolves the regiment if the Giants were so useful?

From:

selenak

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.)

Edited Date: 2021-03-06 06:40 am (UTC)

From:

selenak

OOOOH, I didn't know this!

Fritz: I write my own anti-Voltaire pamphlets, thank you very much. :P

No kidding, though who would have known that then? :)

Wolff: his statement re: French and his opinion on the other scholars also makes into both books. BTW, the Manteuffel/Wolff correspondence is bilingual, in that Manteuffel writes French and Wolff writes German, so I think we can take Wolff at his word - he oould read and understand French in written form well enough, but wasn't comfortable enough with it to write, let alone talk in the language. I can see why, even aside from everything else, this would make you balk at joining an instutition where the King has just decreed all conversation and all writing must be in French.

The editor then tells roughtly the same story of the literary war between Fritz and Deschamp, and his flight to Kassel and London. No idea how accurate the details are, but this is what 1787 guy says!

Well, Dechamps is another who later wrote a vengeful memoir, so I assume that was the common source for both this editor and Bronisch.

How does Dechamps find out? From little Ferdinand.

Who has always shown Fritz friendship!

LOL. I had a quick gander in the Bielfeld letter where he writes about taking over Ferdinand's education, and he says that while ten years old F's education clearly had been somewhat neglected so far, what with Ferd only showing enthusiasm for hunting (don't do it, Ferdinand, your aim is terrible!) and the military, NOW that Bielfeld has taken over, the scholarly bug has bit him. I note - as several biographers before me - that Fritz was on to something re: his brothers' education having been neglected under FW, but again I say: if you're a teacher and have seen how Fritz' teachers have faired, what would you do?

I love how this matters SO much to Bronisch.

So much that it's even included in the blurb printed on the back of the "Kampf um Kronprinz Friedrich" book - ...(Bronisch) solves the mystery of the naming of "Sanssouci"....

From:

selenak

Which leads us back to - who talked with Voltaire about rumors of the state of Fritz' sex life (or lack of same)? :)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

This is such a great find, thank you so much!

ETA: Oh, hey, I only just realized that the German translator added "der Einzige" to the title. *facepalm*

Hahaha, that's hilarious. You may have noticed we're always making "der Einzige" jokes in this salon. :D

So if you want to know which book and chapter he was reading to Fritz on any given day between November 1784 and July 1786, this is your source.

Yes! Yes, this is what I've always wanted! Thank you.

He reports that Fritz had a lot to say about pronunciation, kept correcting him and generally had his own ideas on the topic.

If one sentence about Fritz was ever in character, this is it.

If Fritz himself wasn't sure how to pronounce certain words, he tried to say them quietly to himself at first [...].

To be fair, there are plenty of words in English I don't know how to pronounce because I've only seen them in writing! And my instinct for where to put the stress is consistently wrong, gdi.

I was surprised that the King didn't let go of a wrong pronunciation of certain words once he'd settled on it

You were surprised? In 1784-1786?? Dear lord. In the words of Selena, "I have two words for you. Quintus Icilius." Also what do you think the Seven Years' War was all about? In the words of Macaulay on the Treaty of Hubertusburg, "The king ceded nothing. The whole Continent in arms had proved unable to tear Silesia from that iron grasp." HE DOESN'T LET GO. That's what he does! That's who he is!

he couldn't remember the author of a book he wanted to read, Dantal suggested the right one but Fritz didn't hear/register and therefore grumpily dismissed it, then sent Dantal, who didn't dare to mention it again, away to do research. Dantal had just reached the city gate, when he was called back because Fritz had remembered the name at last and all was right with the world: "Now he was completely content again and the gentle tone with which he said "c'est fort bien", gave me back the trust/confidence [Zutrauen], which the critical moment had taken away before."

Ooh, this is surprisingly like and unlike the story of Fritz and Catt not being able to think of the name of an opera and going crazy over it. Specifically, it's rather more like the doctored version Catt tells in his memoirs in which Fritz is in the wrong, than in the diary where he comes across much more positively. The two versions of the anecdote, if anyone needs a reminder. (Thank goodness for Rheinsberg!)

Dantal also mentions the order that was kept in Fritz' libraries, and that they were sorted by content, not looks, i.e. without regard for different sizes next to each other, which some owners of libraries care for the most (ha)

Ha indeed! Now that's the mark of a serious reader. :D

(with the letters on the covers - "S" for the New Palais (the Palace of Sanssouci) for example, and of course Sanssouci had a "V" because Fritz always called it Vignes) and also mentiones that nobody was allowed to move the books in Fritz' room.

Oooh, so I new they had the letters on the covers, and I knew that he often referred to what we think of as Sanssouci as his "vineyard", but I didn't realize that extended as far as thinking of it as V and the New Palace as S! Huh.

the speech in which Isocrates is trying to convince Philippos to wage war against the barbarians [the Persians I think] to free Greece

The Persians, yes. Isocrates had a bee in his bonnet about crusading against the Persians for the sake of uniting the squabbling Greek city-states. ("Free Greece" is...well, I see it's a direct translation of Dantal, but we'll call it a euphemism for "aggressive war for ulterior motives couched as freeing Ionia, a gambit which Philip declined but Alexander took up, not because he gave a shit about Greece, but because it gave the first stage of his Rendezvous with fame a veneer of respectability, a la freeing the Silesian Protestants something something :P").

Though I believe it was a letter rather than a speech--ah, I see the French has "harangue" and the German translator has chosen to translate it "Rede". Which I guess can mean "address" as well as "speech", but I see why "speech" was the obvious choice. The thing about Isocrates is that none of his works, even the ones today called "speeches", were ever delivered orally. He was a written rhetorician only, in contrast to people like Demosthenes and Aeschines. (Was 4th century Athenian oratory what I was in the middle of studying in 2019 when I got sucked into full-time Fritz? You bet it was! :'D)

Oh, and skimming through Dantal, I see Fritz has opinions on the pronunciation of Greek names like Epaminondas, and he and Dantal don't always want to stress them on the same syllables. I mean, that's fair! Even English today usually has at least two different widely accepted pronunciations of polysyllabic Greek names, usually differing in stress placement.

Fritz' very own theory on Socrates death: It's the sculptors' fault! They feared for their income because Socrates spoke against polytheism, so they accused him of various political offenses and got him killed.

Points for creativity! I'm not sure I've encountered that before.

an asthma attack (that's what "Steckfluss" is, right? I'm not sure how the fact that he got an emetic plays into it, though)

Either asthma or pulmonary edema, aka water in the lungs. Since Fritz had dropsy (edema, water retention) at the end and a severe cough in that last year, I think he had congestive heart failure, his lungs were filled with fluid, and the enema might have been intended to drain some of the water.

Because when I read the following words - [about animals not being capable of reasoning] - the King turned to his favourite dog and said: "Do you hear, my mignonne, they are talking about you and claiming that you don't have reason [esprit], but you do have it, my little mignonne!"

Ah, that's where that anecdote comes from! I had shared it before, but never known the source or if it was reliable.

Good to know it was near the end and that Arsinoé might have been the final favorite!

During the last months, they go back to a lot of Voltaire, mostly the history works (Louis XIV and XV)

I had always read that the last thing Fritz had read to him in July, before he was in too much pain/too little consciousness, was Voltaire. I now, thanks to you, see that it was an account of Damiens, aka the gruesomely executed mentally ill guy who tried to assassinate Louis XV.

...What a note to go out on.

During the last weeks, Fritz often fell asleep while Dantal was reading - by then, he would be wearing his nightclothes already so he could just stay asleep if he wanted - and Dantal therefore stayed until 10 at night

Awww, this whole last paragraph is so exactly the kind of thing I wanted to know, thank you. <33 I might add this book to my reading list once my German is up to it. And then bonus points for having it in French and German, because I plan to start reading a lot of things in French that I've already read in English or German or both.

From:

selenak

Oh, this is another excellent find. Dantal sounds lovely.

I was surprised that the King didn't let go of a wrong pronunciation of certain words once he'd settled on it

Clearly, he hadn't talked with Quintus Icilius about how the later got his name.

ther mistakes, probably due to a failing memory, he never begrudged when pointed out to him; one day he even told me that a young man was allowed to correct an old one [Greis] if he was wrong.

Awww.

Fritz did crossreferencing - reading Tacitus and Sueton in parallel to compare their take on the same events - and read/commented on editor's notes.

One of us!

Arsinoe: most likely the final girl, err, dog then, given that a) the previous favourite Alcmene had only died either two or one year before, meaning Arsinoe most likely was still young, and b) there were only a few months left. Also I don't recall an Arsionoe from the still readable (i.e latest) tombstones at Sanssouci.

I think I've seen that story about Fritz addressing his dog with this or a similar comment somewhere else, in a modern biography or an old anecdote collection, but without either the name of the dog or the context of this being relatively shortly before his own death. (Though of course he might have said it more than once, given Luccessini and Schöning noted he tended to repeat himself in his later years.)

Le Taureau Blanc and Candide on this occasion, both of which made him laugh a lot.

I'm glad, because Henri de Catt had him somewhat disgruntled about Candide, though that might have been colored by Catt's own take.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I think I've seen that story about Fritz addressing his dog with this or a similar comment somewhere else, in a modern biography or an old anecdote collection

Kugler gives the name of the dog, which I had indeed shared once, but not his source.

Also I don't recall an Arsionoe from the still readable (i.e latest) tombstones at Sanssouci.

I also didn't remember it from the list taken down in the 19th century, when they were all readable, and sure enough, it's not there. As a reminder: Alcmene, Thisbe, Diane, Phillis, Thisbe, Alcmene, Biche, Diane, Pax, Superbe, Amourette.

I'm glad, because Henri de Catt had him somewhat disgruntled about Candide, though that might have been colored by Catt's own take.

In the diary, yes, but from the memoirs, he reports this:

Candide, which he read three times, amused him a good deal. "That is the only novel you can read and re-read."

I think it's likely Fritz both ranted about the parts he disagreed with and raved about the parts he loved over the years, and that both the diary and memoirs are reliable on this point.

Clearly, he hadn't talked with Quintus Icilius about how the later got his name.

Salon wavelength!

Fritz did crossreferencing - reading Tacitus and Sueton in parallel to compare their take on the same events - and read/commented on editor's notes.

One of us!

Kindred soul! And we all sort our books by content, right? ;) With occasional exceptions for oversize books that simply don't fit? Which at least in my case, inspire rants about how I need more bookcase space.