Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 30
Sep. 8th, 2021 09:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnIn which, despite the title, I would like to be told about the English Revolution, which is yet another casualty of my extremely poor history education :P :)
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Also, this is probably the place to say that RMSE opened with three Fritz-fics, all of which I think are readable with minimum canon knowledge:
The Boy Who Lived - if you knew about the doomed escape-from-Prussia-that-didn't happen and tragic death of Fritz's boyfriend Hans Hermann von Katte, you may not have known about Peter Keith, the third young man who conspired to escape Prussia -- and the only one who actually did. This is his story. I think readable without canon knowledge except what I just said here.
Challenge Yourself to Relax - My gift, I posted about this before! Corporate AU with my problematic fave, Fritz' brother Heinrich, who's still Fritz's l'autre moi-meme even in corporate AU. Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with the corporate world and the dysfunctions thereof.
The Rise and Fall of the RendezvousWithFame Exchange - Fandom AU with BNF fanfic writer Voltaire, exchange mod Fritz, and the inevitable meltdown. (I wrote this one and am quite proud of the terrible physics-adjacent pun contained within.) Readable without canon knowledge if one has familiarity with fandom and the dysfunctions thereof :P
Re: Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen
Date: 2021-09-29 05:24 pm (UTC)Reviewed (not in great depth, but makes it clear the book it didn't mention DNA, and might not be the most rigorous thing ever--of course, neither are most of the comments on this page) here.
Goldstone's footnote (is not very persuasive):
Fersen called both this daughter and Louis-Charles "the children," and saw them privately when he stayed with Marie Antoinette..
Oh, and "almost certainly the father of this child" in another note. Mmhmm.
Well, Farr's book is $12 on Kindle, so I might put it on my list. But not high. :P
But at no point does he deduce anything about the children's paternity from there.
He actually says she had done her duty and borne two male heirs before ceasing to sleep with Louis and starting to sleep with Fersen! Which would leave open the possibility that the fourth child, a girl, was Fersen's, but Zweig also says that Joseph wrote in a letter that his sister wanted to withdraw from Louis after the birth of the fourth child. And that this correlates with the beginning of the intimate relationship with Fersen.
So Zweig attributes the paternity to Louis.
Re: Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen
Date: 2021-09-30 07:50 am (UTC)Trying to think of 18th century examples for children born into a marriage where we know for sure the husband wasn't the bio dad, the one immediately coming to mind is William Lamb, later in his old age Queen Victoria's first PM as Lord Melbourne, whose mother, Lady Melbourne, one of the leading Georgian hostesses, had famously declared you owed your husband precisely one legitimate male heir, and then you were free to do as you pleased. (William started out as a younger son.) There, we have the family letters, with everyone, including her husband, aware of William's paternity.
But the Lambs didn't have a realm to inherit. Even with Catherine and son Paul, probably the most prominent 18th century example of a royal woman to give birth to children of dubious paternity, historians still add an "almost certainly" disclaimer for Paul and don't want to swear for either Peter or Saltykow with 100% assurance. (As opposed to her subsequent short lived children by her lovers.) Mind you, I think the qualification mostly is due to Paul successfully styling himself as much after Peter as humanely possible, thereby successfully confusing everyone who was ready to swear to his bastardy when he was born.
Re: Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen
Date: 2021-10-01 04:30 pm (UTC)Émilie comes to mind: do we know for sure about her last baby? (As with Lady Melbourne and hypothetically MA, this was only after she'd delivered 1-2 male heirs.)
Re: Marie Antoinette and Axel von Fersen
Date: 2021-10-02 04:02 am (UTC)