cahn | 18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 32

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:) Still talking about Charles XII of Sweden / the Great Northern War and the Stuarts and the Jacobites, among other things!

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From:

mildred_of_midgard

leads to Fritz snarking in that excellent work of history, Histoire de mon temps:

Lol!

he very much regrets Fritz wasn't able to see that Bernstorff was his only equal as a statesman in Europe at the time, the only other genius in a top position.

*blink*

I guess 300 years of historians have missed this too! Certainly salon has.

Bernstorff, who was in fact German, from Mecklenburg, (and didn't learn Danish in 20 years of ruling Denmark)

Fritz: This is not an obstacle to ruling a country.

After explaining that bribery wasn't unusual in that century (you think?)

Arneth: See!

Why is Juliana a Fritz fan? Because Juliana is Juliana of Braunschweig-Wolffensbüttel, (much younger) sister to EC and Louise (Juliana was born in 1729).

And that makes her a fan? :P

treating her better than any other family member (with the arguable exception of Louise in the post AW years) and certainly way better than his wife. Juliana remains a fan.

I see, I see. :P

More seriously, I hadn't realized there was this connection, so this is useful!

In conclusion: no, Mildred, you don't have to buy the book. But we do know a bit more than we did before.

This is the conclusion I had come to, yes. But thank you for telling us what we didn't already know!

One nice thing Juliana did: she took in the surviving siblings of locked up Czar Ivan IV. who were after all her nieces and nephews when Catherine finally released them from the end of the world. But she did have Catherine pay for their upkeep.

Oh, that was her! So many connections...

From:

selenak

he very much regrets Fritz wasn't able to see that Bernstorff was his only equal as a statesman in Europe at the time, the only other genius in a top position.

*blink*

I guess 300 years of historians have missed this too! Certainly salon has.

Quite. To be sung to the tune of "It was Agatha all along": It was Bernstorff all along!" Maria Theresia who? Voltaire what? Heinrich, bah. Bernstorff is the arch nemesis/equal to be treasured!

Fritz: This is not an obstacle to ruling a country.

All the Ptolemies except for Cleopatra who actually spoke Egyptian: We agree.

Catherine: I don't. Which is I am alive and Peter is dead. :)

BTW, Hartmann has this thing where he says "Struensee actually made German the official administrative language, the bastard!" (tiny footnote: okay, Bernstorff spoke German with his administrative underlings, too, but he didn't make it official, he was too much of a tactful genius to!). And speaking of languages, Prussian envoys under FW wrote their reports home in German and all had to switch to French at once when Fritz came to the throne. It remained French under FW2 at least the first few years, since 1789 is the cut off point of the book.

Juliana the fan: well, that's why I emphasized from the start that she was Ferdinand's age (and thus presumably would not have been exposed to EC and Louise being called the Zimperliesen in the first years of Fritz' reign and ostracized), and then once she became the power behind the Danish throne was flattered by Fritz non stop via letter. Presumably younger Juliana just basked in the glow of being the sister-in-law to the cool monarch everyone was talking about (and whom she'd never met) and older Juliana loved being taken seriously and flattered by the guy. Especially since her life in Denmark until the takeover was nothing to write home about. The Danish King she married (and had a son by, but, fatefully, only a second son), whose second wife she was, with his late first wife a British princess she was told she couldn't live up to, drank himself into an early death, her stepson was emotionally unstable at best from the get go and didn't like her much, being way nicer to his grandmother than to her, so she was the overlooked one of the two living Queen Dowagers, and then step son marriages a bright young thing from Britain (!) whom at first he might not get along with but who is still compared in her favor to Juliana and has zero interest in her, and then commoner Struensee shows up, shacks up with both King and Queen and completely takes over the realm with his ungodly reforms. Which is when her hour comes at last. "I am the sister-in-law of Frederick the Great" probably was a self esteem booster before that, and let's hope no one told her that being the brother-in-law to Frederick the Great only got her brother a rec that he and his family should be exiled to the end of the world.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

BTW, Hartmann has this thing where he says "Struensee actually made German the official administrative language, the bastard!" (tiny footnote: okay, Bernstorff spoke German with his administrative underlings, too, but he didn't make it official, he was too much of a tactful genius to!).

OMG, this guy. I'm waiting to find out that he was born in 1900 and this book was published in his 80s.

Though in 1900, the Germans were usually more...pro-German, weren't they?

Charles XII: I liked German better than Swedish and was more fluent in it! Swedish >>> French, though. Especially if it's a French envoy coming to Sweden, that just goes without saying!

Presumably younger Juliana just basked in the glow of being the sister-in-law to the cool monarch everyone was talking about (and whom she'd never met)

Fair! I mean, a number of us have loved Fritz better from a distance.

Voltaire: *waves*