18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 35

[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?

Comments

Re: Zweig - first bit

[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.

Re: Zweig - first bit

[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.

Re: Zweig - first bit

[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.