![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cahnAnd, I mean, it doesn't have to be just 18th century characters, either!
(also, waiting for Yuletide!)
(also, waiting for Yuletide!)
cahncahn
Profile
cahn
Page Summary
Active Entries
Style Credit
- Style: by timeasmymeasure
Expand Cut Tags
No cut tags
Diderot, Catherine, and Fritz
Date: 2021-12-12 04:55 pm (UTC)Diderot: *is in Russia*
French envoy: *also in Russia*
French envoy: So, Diderot, you know how Catherine hates me and likes you? Versailles is trying to make a Franco-Russian treaty happen, and you can help! You're a patriot, right? Here's a list of talking points we'd like you to bring up with her next time to you talk.
Diderot: Eep! Catherine will be very upset if I start trying to push a French political agenda. Also, I'm really not qualified!
French envoy: Forgot to add, remember the last time you got locked up for your freethinking publications? It's not 1789 yet, and the Bastille is still there. Just saying. :D
Diderot: Fuck! If I can't go home, I'll be stuck as Catherine's guest in this wretched country forever, and she *is* kind of an absolute monarch who makes me nervous. And my wife and daughter and grandchildren are in France, I want to go home! But also not piss off the absolute monarch who's currently making me nervous. What do?
[Mildred: Normally I would say the refuge for freethinking French philosophes in trouble at home is Prussia, but I guess you burned that bridge.
(Remember that as we learned from the Diderot bio I reported on, Fritz really wanted Diderot to come say hi on his way to St. Petersburg, but Diderot was like "Hell to the no" and ostentatiously went out of his way to avoid Prussian territory, while badmouthing Fritz. Then Fritz started writing anti-Diderot pamphlets, because of course he did.)]
Some time later...
Diderot: Catherine, fount of all generosity and wisdom, I have come to throw myself on your mercy! I will be totally honest and up front with you about everything that's currently troubling me.
Catherine: Was not expecting this, but go on. What's up?
Diderot: Lots of complicated stuff, so I've got to work my way up to the big confession. Let's start with some common ground that we can all agree on. Fritz is THE WORST, amirite?
[Mildred: Burn that bridge, baby!
Author: "Given Catherine’s close personal and diplomatic ties to Frederick of Prussia, Diderot's vow of candor bordered on the suicidal."
Mildred: Well, I don't think she was *that* close personally as in a huge fangirl, but yeah, they were kind of allied, which is what the French are trying to change.]
Diderot: You know how the French court and us freethinking French philosophes don't see eye to eye on much? The one thing we can all agree on, ministers and philosophes alike, is without exception, we sincerely hate Fritz!
[Author: "While Catherine knew this claim was dubious—after all, didn't her good friend Voltaire, despite his difficult moments with the Prussian ruler, still praise Frederick?—she allowed Diderot to continue."
Mildred: Well, I can't blame Diderot for being confused by Fritz/Voltaire! Everyone was confused!]
Diderot: So France, France should be your ally. The time has come for you to open your eyes and see what Fritz is really like. He's just pretending to be an enlightened despot, but really he's a straight-up despot. And as for other enlightened monarchs? Let me flatter you by saying that it's just you. Louis XV can't claim any greatness either. He's mediocre, and we're on our way down. We haven't hit rock bottom in France yet, but who knows what the next reign holds? "Personally, I'm pessimistic, but let's hope I'm wrong!"
[Mildred: It's 1773, and you're not wrong.]
Catherine: So France...would or wouldn't make a great ally? You're undermining your own argument that I should break up with Fritz to ally with France.
Diderot: This is why I told the French envoy I wasn't qualified to push a political agenda! Which, after much meandering and a rant about Fritz I apparently just really needed to get out of my system, brings me to what I've been trying to work up the courage to say. I need you to know that that the French envoy approached me with this list of talking points and threatened me. Please help, and don't be mad at me. I don't want to talk foreign policy with you. Look how bad I am at it!
Catherine: Okay, I see that this is not your fault. You may tell the French envoy that you gave me the list, and tell him what I did with it.
Catherine: *tosses list into fire*
Catherine: All good!
[Mildred: Well, that was...odd.]
Re: Diderot, Catherine, and Fritz
Date: 2021-12-12 05:45 pm (UTC)Author: "Given Catherine’s close personal and diplomatic ties to Frederick of Prussia, Diderot's vow of candor bordered on the suicidal."
Mildred: Well, I don't think she was *that* close personally as in a huge fangirl, but yeah, they were kind of allied, which is what the French are trying to change.]
Hang on, if it's 1773, hadn't they just partitioned Poland together, and wasn't it time for Heinrich's second trip to Russia where he plays Yenta to about-to-get-widowed Grand Duke Paul, and finds out out future FW2's wife can't stand him? And hangs out with Lehndorff at Königsberg on his return? This is really not good timing for an attempt to make Catherine break up with Prussia. Though if you want to talk with someone about how Fritz is the worst, Heinrich isn't a bad candidate, I guess. (Though possibly not when he's representing Prussia on a diplomatic mission.)
[Author: "While Catherine knew this claim was dubious—after all, didn't her good friend Voltaire, despite his difficult moments with the Prussian ruler, still praise Frederick?—she allowed Diderot to continue."
Mildred: Well, I can't blame Diderot for being confused by Fritz/Voltaire! Everyone was confused!]
No kidding. :) Which is how Fritz and Voltaire liked it, no doubt. :) Somewhat closer at home, Diderot's pal D'Alembert was at least pro-Fritz enough to correspond with him and visit a few times, and of course there's the Marquis D'Argens - would Diderot have counted him as a philosophe?
Re: Diderot, Catherine, and Fritz
Date: 2021-12-12 06:18 pm (UTC)They had indeed just partitioned Poland, but the second trip to Russia was 1776, when Natalia died horribly in childbirth. In 1773, Paul was just getting married for the first time. (Wiki tells me Paul married in September, and Diderot arrived in October and stayed for 5 months. Heinrich arrived in Russia for the second time in April 1776, per Ziebura.)
Though if you want to talk with someone about how Fritz is the worst, Heinrich isn't a bad candidate, I guess. (Though possibly not when he's representing Prussia on a diplomatic mission.)
True on both counts!
Diderot's pal D'Alembert was at least pro-Fritz enough to correspond with him and visit a few times, and of course there's the Marquis D'Argens - would Diderot have counted him as a philosophe?
Somehow I get the impression Diderot may not have been thinking what he said through on this occasion...
Re: Diderot, Catherine, and Fritz
Date: 2021-12-14 02:53 am (UTC)Remember when I said
Fritz started writing anti-Diderot pamphlets, because of course he did.
? Our author provides more details:
By January the court [at St. Petersburg] was relishing a review, passed from hand to hand, of an unauthorized edition of Diderot’s collected works. Though anonymous, the review’s author appeared to be Frederick, still smarting from Diderot’s earlier stiff-arm when he directed his carriage to give Berlin wide berth. He lambasted Diderot’s plays, harrumphing that they “are not written so that they can be acted and are scarcely better suited to be read”—the first claim is not inaccurate, while the second is invidious—and sniggered over the “sublime tissue of nonsense” found between the covers of his early philosophical essay Pensées sur l’interprétation de la nature.
And then this gem:
More sublimely nonsensical, it would turn out, was Frederick’s expectation that Diderot, in Grimm’s tow, would nevertheless honor him with a visit on his much-anticipated return to Paris.
Mildred: *spittake*
Fritz: I have a love-hate relationship with Voltaire, I don't see why I can't have one with Diderot!
As his homesickness deepened, Diderot had begun to make plans for his return to Paris. Determined to make the trip with Grimm, he was no less determined to avoid a layover in Berlin. Torn by his devotion to Diderot and his debt to Frederick, Grimm’s predicament seemed without issue. “I am more than a bit embarrassed over Denis’s intentions,” he confided to Nesselrode at year’s end. “As you can imagine, the last thing in the world I want is to cancel Berlin, but the last thing Denis wants is to place his foot there.”
Grimm and Diderot ended up traveling separately, so they could respectively go to, and avoid the hell out of, Berlin.
In his farewell letter to Catherine, Diderot shows that a certain other monarch is still on his mind:
After several jabs, some of them a bit awkward, at his arch-nemesis Frederick—“If we knew where the Fredericks are hatched, a good man would break all the eggs and replace them with Catherines”—Diderot again apologized for the “unheard-of stubbornness with which he tried Your Majesty’s patience.” With great panache, he finally swore that if his praise of Catherine ever rang hollow, he would agree to be declared the worst of ingrates. Soon enough, though he was not alive to hear it, this is precisely what Catherine would call him.
(Remember, he takes a copy of her work with his annotations when he leaves Russia, and she has his baggage searched and the document confiscated when he's in the Netherlands (iirc). Like Fritz/Voltaire if both parties were sane!)
But the hatching Frederick eggs made me laugh.
Re: Diderot, Catherine, and Fritz
Date: 2021-12-14 07:15 pm (UTC)Re: Diderot, Catherine, and Fritz
Date: 2021-12-14 07:27 pm (UTC)I was thinking of
And after all, the Fritz-Voltaire moving in together started *after* Voltaire had tried to spy on Fritz for France and Fritz had tried to get Voltaire exiled from France, and they knew this about each other and still decided
getting marriedliving together was just the thing!And if Diderot was okay with Catherine's brand of enlightened despotism, I bet Fritz was confused about what exactly Diderot found objectionable about his...
I've been trying to figure out what exactly's so much better about Catherine, because it sure isn't an absence of neighbor-invading or failure to treat her heir like shit, and the only things I can come up with are 1) more generous with her money, 2) less scapegoat-y (I think), 3)
understands that people are insulted when you insult themless sarcastic.But hey, (1) means she just bought Diderot's library for a huge sum of money and allowed him to keep it, in France, during his lifetime and gave him a salary as her librarian! This despotism is obviously more enlightened than "No court jester was ever so expensive" (Fritz about Voltaire in 1740, for those who've forgotten)!
ETA: Also,
Do not worry, Diderot, hatching Fredericks demand a very special constellation of parents and circumstances to become fully fledged!
made me laugh. :D It also made me think of this poem:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
(And that means try not to be as a father to your siblings and nephews either, Fritz.)
Re: Diderot, Catherine, and Fritz
Date: 2021-12-15 07:38 am (UTC)And yes, I was thinking of good old Larkin, too. Re: Diderot going with Catherine as his enlightened despot of choice, yeah, I think it's a case of money, dear boy. (Though Catherine being less prone to confuse friendly banter with insults probably didn't hurt.) Also, Russia is far away and wasn't France's enemy in the 7 Years War. Now I have no idea whether this would have mattered to Diderot, you know him far better than I do. But Maupertuis definitely got trouble from fellow French philosophes for not resigning from his Academy President office when the war began, and Voltaire got bad press for his entire thing with Fritz as well, despite the Frankfurt scandal.