cahn

In the previous post Charles II found AITA:

Look, I, m, believe in live and let live. (And in not going on my travels again. Had enough of that to last a life time.) Why can't everyone else around me be more chill? Instead, my wife refuses to employ my girlfriend, my girlfriend won't budge and accept another office, my brother is set on a course to piss off everyone (he WILL go on his travels again), and my oldest kid shows signs of wanting my job which is just not on, sorry to say. And don't get me started about Mom (thank God she's living abroad). What am I doing wrong? AITA?

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From:

cahn

Sooooo I started reading the Marie Antoinette biography. I'm not very far in yet but I had to pause and marvel at just how into his theory of sex Zweig is. I mean, I admire him for having the guts to talk about it, but, like, he really wants everything to be about Louis XVI's impotence, even all the things about his personality that... seem to have been the case before he even met MA?? I went back and looked at the notes from when Mildred read it, and Selena's note:

When the biography came out, Feuchtwanger snarked that if you believe Stefan Zweig, the French Revolution would not have happened if only teen Louis XVI had been able to ejaculate properly.

seems spot on, lol!

Anyway... I didn't think I was going to say this but OKAY, mildred, you were right, I'm glad I read Goldstone because -- and I didn't think I was going to say that I agreed with her about anything either -- on Louis XVI I think she's right, I think Louis being on the spectrum is a much better explanation for all of his issues, including at least some of the sex difficulties, than the sex difficulties being an explanation for everything. Correlation is not causation!

(Zweig does seem to gloss over many of the things Goldstone mentioned in support of the ASD hypothesis, like Louis's Really Very Boring Diary, but there are enough clues that I think I believe most of what Goldstone says -- like, Zweig does mention that Louis's only entry on the day he met MA was "Rien," corresponding to not having hunted anything that day (well, according to Goldstone), and Zweig certainly records Louis as being somewhat baffled by what he was supposed to do with MA.)

From:

selenak

marvel at just how into his theory of sex Zweig is

Well, to be fair, writing about sex - and Freudianism - was still new and exciting back then, and in Austria certainly daring. I mean, everything had been explicit in the 18th century, but in the 19th century, it broadly applied that women were legless angels, as one writer once snarked, and men had "urges" which could not be discussed in polite society. Also, for Zweig specifically, one can add Freud wasn't a theory - he was literally a patient of Sigmund Freud. (His chief competitor in the biographie romancee genre, Emil Ludwig, after his death was tasteless enough to argue this proves Freud is rubbish because he wasn't able to save Zweig from suicide. Which, well. There are about a thousand things you can critisze Freud for, but being unable to keep a man who is on another continent when there's a world war and a genocide going on from which they are both refugees and are aware not all of their friends and families made it out alive is really not one of them.)

I think Louis being on the spectrum is a much better explanation for all of his issues, including at least some of the sex difficulties, than the sex difficulties being an explanation for everything. Correlation is not causation!

I think long distance diagnosis is a problem in either case (Goldstone and Zweig), but yes, the sex difficulties being a symptom rather than the cause from today's perspective sounds more plausible. This said, it's also worth pointing out that the social conditions around Louis (all the etiquette around the heir of the French throne) were enough to intimidate and inhibit any child and teenager without a solid sense of self and reliable sources of affection. I mean: good old Louis XIV, who was the creator of the system for the major part, was also the only French King able to worth with it, and he might have had a childhood involving sort of civil war on the outside, but he had two steady parental figures who showed him affection and approval (his mother, Queen Anne, and Mazarin), and a not much younger brother (and Philippe might have been a terrible husband, but he and Louis seem to have been close as kids) to share that extraordinary condition with.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I'm not very far into Schultz's double bio of Louis XVI and Robespierre, because I can't freaking get enough sleep, but he's told me so far that Louis' charming, outgiong older brother was the favorite. But then he died of tuberculosis, and then the "spare" became the heir. His parents were a bit, "Really? This one has to be the future king? *Sigh*"

When little Louis was a kid, he had this experience with his brothers:

One remembers well the lottery game of the princes, who gave each other little gifts--each one to the one he especially liked. In the middle of the cheerfulness and laughter, no gift ended up in the hands of Berry [future Louis XVI]. Completely respecting the emotional rules of the children's lottery, he held his own gift defiantly in his hand. "Well, I know nobody loves me, and I don't love anybody, and I don't think I have to give away my gift."

If he really was on the spectrum, it's quite possible he got into this bad feedback loop where he was "weird," and the other kids (and adults) didn't know what to do with him, and they shunned him, and that had an adverse effect on his social development, which exacerbated the problem, ad infinitum. But it could just as easily have been a case of a shy kid who wasn't the center of attention initially because of birth order, and basically the same bad feedback loop developed.

As Selena says, the etiquette would not have helped.

From:

selenak

he's told me so far that Louis' charming, outgiong older brother was the favorite. But then he died of tuberculosis, and then the "spare" became the heir. His parents were a bit, "Really? This one has to be the future king? *Sigh*"

F1 can relate. But at least he was loved by his siblings, and his mother, and his first wife. Seriously now, this "the spare became the heir, everyone was disappointed" thing is a recurring pattern, I feel. Cases where the spare was the one everyone (or at least the parents) loved and didn't become the heir are much rarer, though Louis XIII is a case in point in that Maria de' Medici blatantly prefered younger brother Gaston from the get go, schemed with him and had a terrible relationship with her oldest son throughout. (Before anyone says AW and Fritz, I'm not sure that counts, because while AW as popular with people other than FW, Fritz as prince was very much loved by everyone not FW, and as King while he had his hatedom he also had a (larger) fervent fandom, and other than possibly Heinrich and Ferdinand, I don't think anyone was subscribing to the "AW for King now!" newsletter.)

But back to little Berry, that's heartbreaking, especially since it looks as if he was right.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Honestly, I'm *not* convinced that the boring diary, which was specifically a hunting diary, is a symptom of ASD. I mean, I'm a very verbal person, so I put all sorts of walls of text and emotions in my blog, but I've also kept purpose-oriented diaries, like German progress and medication side effects. And if I weren't a super verbal person, I could easily end up putting "nothing" in a German-progress or side effect diary, because the diary isn't about political developments.

I have read at least one historian, I forget who, who made a convincing--to me, at least--case that too much has been made of that journal entry. It's trotted out every time anyone talks about Louis XVI (I had certainly encountered it a million times), but since it was in effect a hunting diary, it makes sense that it only reports hunting developments.

He also wasn't the only prince to keep a hunting diary, though I'm not going to remember who the others are. Yes, maybe they were all on the spectrum, but on the other hand, if hunting is your passion and you're not a big writer, you might just keep a hunting diary because you've heard other people in your class who are into hunting keep hunting diaries.

[Like I said when you read Goldstone, nothing I know about Louis makes an ASD diagnosis feels wrong, but I don't consider the diary strong evidence. There's too much cultural context for hunting diaries.]

From:

cahn

Heh, fair enough, as

selenak pointed out, one's not supposed to layman-diagnose people in real life, much less separated by hundreds of years! Still, I assert that his being on the spectrum is more likely than his impotence causing everything, even if neither of those things is true ;) I didn't know that about hunting diaries, though (though Goldstone isn't basing it just on the hunting diary) -- I guess for obvious reasons I've been more exposed to the Lehndorffs who are writing voluminious memoirs and the Fritzes and Voltaires who are writing... everything. (Which reminds me, I was also going to mention that I laughed when I saw Goethe namechecked as having had opinions on MA's wedding. That guy got everywhere!)

...And I also see what you're both saying about how it could itself be a thing; if Louis was a person, not necessarily on the spectrum, but whose strengths were in e.g. building things, or hunting, rather than really being into all this verbalization stuff, well, as far as I can tell those don't seem to be qualities that were greatly valued as an 18th-C dauphin. (D isn't on the spectrum, and has successfully fathered biological children, and doesn't even have an inferiority complex, buuuuut I can see him having done really not so well in Louis's place in the pre-Revolutionary days, because he frankly does not care about the act of getting things done that involve writing or politics or complex interpersonal relations.) (Though since he's very good in a crisis, I suspect he would've done better than Louis once things came to a head.)