Well, thank God for that. And I mean, woobie or not, poor kid indeed.
Quite. It's pretty guesome to read all the methods tried on him. No doubt everyone meant well, but good lord. It would be the perfect origin story for a supervillain instead of a royal who when all things were said and done was neither the worst nor the best of his time and seems to have been an okay, non-abusive human being.
The Karl Emil to F1 letter is adorable, isn't it? I also note that "Herzallerliebst" and or "Herzlieb" seems to be a baroque sibling thing, since Liselotte to her fave half brother also writes "Herzliebster Carl-Lutz".
the author of the Schwedt book wrote that the French envoy had no horse in this race
LOL. Even accounting for Werner Schmidt's own bias - he keeps comparing Louis and his envoy with Moliere's Tartuffe, for example - , he does provide more than enough background and quotes to demonstrate what the stakes for the French were. BTW, he also does make his case that the Elector's military victory against Louis was a Pyrrhic kind of victory since the follow up secret treaty was so much more good for France. I mean: if you were a European prince, specifically a German prince, who has already witnessed Louis invading the Palatinate under the flimsy pretext of protecting his sister-in-law's rights (which she was horrified about), and saw Louis about to put his grandkid on the Spanish throne, would YOU risk making freaking Louis the executor of your last will? (Promising to vote for him in the next HRE elections I get. That's more a fuck you gesture to the Habsburgs than anything else, since there was no way at this point the rest of the electors would vote for Louis.)
Well, if that doesn't sound like history repeating...
Alas. The really weird thing in the chain of Hohenzollern dysfunction is really that F1 & FW are the outliers there, and then with FW & Fritz, Fritz & FW2 etc. we're back to the pattern.
Re: Once Upon A Time in Brandenburg: Portrait of F1 as a Young Woobie
Quite. It's pretty guesome to read all the methods tried on him. No doubt everyone meant well, but good lord. It would be the perfect origin story for a supervillain instead of a royal who when all things were said and done was neither the worst nor the best of his time and seems to have been an okay, non-abusive human being.
The Karl Emil to F1 letter is adorable, isn't it? I also note that "Herzallerliebst" and or "Herzlieb" seems to be a baroque sibling thing, since Liselotte to her fave half brother also writes "Herzliebster Carl-Lutz".
the author of the Schwedt book wrote that the French envoy had no horse in this race
LOL. Even accounting for Werner Schmidt's own bias - he keeps comparing Louis and his envoy with Moliere's Tartuffe, for example - , he does provide more than enough background and quotes to demonstrate what the stakes for the French were. BTW, he also does make his case that the Elector's military victory against Louis was a Pyrrhic kind of victory since the follow up secret treaty was so much more good for France. I mean: if you were a European prince, specifically a German prince, who has already witnessed Louis invading the Palatinate under the flimsy pretext of protecting his sister-in-law's rights (which she was horrified about), and saw Louis about to put his grandkid on the Spanish throne, would YOU risk making freaking Louis the executor of your last will? (Promising to vote for him in the next HRE elections I get. That's more a fuck you gesture to the Habsburgs than anything else, since there was no way at this point the rest of the electors would vote for Louis.)
Well, if that doesn't sound like history repeating...
Alas. The really weird thing in the chain of Hohenzollern dysfunction is really that F1 & FW are the outliers there, and then with FW & Fritz, Fritz & FW2 etc. we're back to the pattern.