cahn | 18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 38

Gonna go ahead and make this post even though Yuletide is coming...

But in the meantime, there has been some fic in the fandom posted!

Holding His Space (2503 words) by felisnocturna
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF, 18th Century CE Frederician RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf/Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great
Characters: Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf, Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great
Additional Tags: Protectiveness, Domestic, Character Study
Summary:

Five times Fredersdorf has to stay behind - and one time Friedrich doesn't leave.

Using People (3392 words) by prinzsorgenfrei
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 18th Century CE RPF
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great/Hans Hermann von Katte
Characters: Friedrich II von Preußen | Frederick the Great, Hans Hermann von Katte
Additional Tags: Fluff, Idiots in Love, reading plays aloud while gazing into each others eyes
Summary:

Friedrich had started to talk to him because he had thought of him as a bit of a ditz.
And now here he was. Here he was months later, bundled up in this very same man’s blankets with a cup of hot coffee in front of him, its scent mixing with that of Katte’s French perfume.
_
Fluffy One Shot about one traitorous Crown Prince and the sycophant he accidentally fell for.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cahn

which is very critical about said historians' dismissal of Wilhelmine's memoirs as being too biased to be worth considering

Yay!

His diligently kept diaries describe his efforts to educate the Crown Prince in all details, and one is forced to consider him a candidate for martyrdom based on it.

I did laugh at this.

but also was impudent, lacking focus, malicious, and often physically agressive, which resulted repeatedly in his educator ending up with black and blue spots. Besides, his student declared in all sincerity that he would cut his teacher's head off after his ascension to the throne.

Ack!

Rebeur connected his student's flaws, the arrogant violent temper to this teaching, and young Friedrich Wilhelm quickly realised that his notitae were pointing towards eternal damnation.

Oooooof.

And I wouldn't have wanted to teach young FW for the world, plus short of scaring the hell out of FW via religion, it's difficult to see what Rebeur could have done, given Tiny Terror FW was the Crown Prince and he evidently wasn't allowed to fight back when physically attacked.

Yeeeeah, that's a good point. I was going to say that it's hard enough when parenting/teaching to try to use discipline/pedagogic techniques that are better for the kid but slower and more work (I do sometimes reflect that gosh, it seems like it would be a lot easier just to instill obedience by fear... of course I don't do it, but it makes a lot more sense to me now that people do do that), but that's a really good point that he honestly didn't even have a lot of options at all.

From:

selenak

Prussian Severus Snape, who didn't just have future F1 but also older brother Karl Emil (by all accounts partly also a tiny terror) to teach, of course employed shouting and making his charges write sentences like "Fritz will always stay an ass" in Latin as alternate ~~humiliation~~ methods, and telling his charges they wouldn't get to see their parent if they behaved badly. But somehow I don't see this working with FW.

Of course, with royal children it always depended on how much leaveway you as a teacher were given. You might recall that FW's instructions to his sons' governors were "never leave them alone, don't swear but be more of a buddy than a supervisor, no sex talk and no sex, always prayer, but don't threaten them with me, threaten them with their mother, I want to be the good parent! And no Latin, minimal French literature, just enough history to rule the country, and no predestination!" With the result that his younger sons got a gay teacher and his oldest got several who did what they could to provide more Roman history and French literature than FW permitted, which in turn led to FW's sons liking their teachers way more than either F1 or FW liked theirs, but then with FW as a parent, and Fritz getting army drills from childhood onwards, all his teachers probably felt no need to use "discipline" anyway and had the advantage that he regarded knowledge as something forbidden and alluring.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, man, the gay governor, how could I have forgotten! Well,

cahn, if having kids has led you to realize how hard child-raising is, I think you and I both have some sympathy for how hard hiring is. You think you've found a brave Francophobic soldier in the trenches, and then he helps your wretched son buy up a secret library. You think your newest hire will teach your younger sons to hate all things ungodly, and instead one turns out gay and the other an ally! (FW: so glad he didn't live to see that.)

threaten them with their mother, I want to be the good parent!

That will never not be facepalmy.

From:

selenak

FW's "I want to be the fun parent, SD should be the discipline parent!" makes a bit more sense if you recall that his own father while probably not the fun parent (since F1's ideas of fun were so very different from FW's) was definitely not the stern discipline parent, either, Sophie Charlotte had been the one to demand different teachers and better education for her son (not fun!), and that his best buddy the Old Dessauer had his sons raised, well, if not illiterate as Lehndorff heard it, then with a minimum of education and was hugely popular with them for it. So FW's platonic ideal of fatherhood being jolly comrades with his sons who of course would enjoy exactly the same things he did and believe the same things he did is can probably be traced back to this. It's still facepalmy. As his unerring instinct to find governors for his sons who actually didn't transport his own ideals.

(That the teachers he picked were actually beloved by his sons is part of Jochen Klepper's argument in his novel about FW that FW did know his children and did know what he was doing, choosing people like Keyserling and Duhan because he knew they'd be kind and fun for Fritz to be with. (Klepper wrote in the 1930s under Nazi censorship, so gay governors for the younger kids don't make the cut.)

From:

cahn

lolololol! I do have sympathy for how hard hiring is! Though I must say I have never made quite those errors in hiring... :D

From:

mildred_of_midgard

That would make an interesting askamanager post...

From:

cahn

all his teachers probably felt no need to use "discipline" anyway and had the advantage that he regarded knowledge as something forbidden and alluring.

Oof. I mean, I guess it's the ideal for knowledge to be alluring, but it's just so weirdly backwards that it is the forbidden fruit, here. (When I was writing the Katte fic, Mildred pointed out how anyone else would have loved to have had a son like Fritz...)

From:

luzula

Besides, his student declared in all sincerity that he would cut his teacher's head off after his ascension to the throne.

OMG. It is so weird to me with children who have that much power, or at least know that they will have such power when they are adults. Like, children are literally so immature! It's not like adults can actually be trusted with that kind of power, either, but children... It's a scary thought.

From:

selenak

Indeed it is. Like I said, I bet many a child in that era and others had an idle "I hate my school lessons, I wish I could kill my teacher!" thought, but if this thought comes paired with someone who will indeed in a few years have that power, it's incredibly disturbing.

This said, being a royal child was no guarantee of being free of abuse (and I don't just mean by the parents). Wilhelmine's first governess, Madame Leti, was so brutal to her that her brother's governess told Queen Sophia Dorothea that if Leti wasn't replaced, Wilhelmine would be crippled for life (and thus not marriagable anymore). A while ago Mildred & self read a book about servant/aristocrat 18th century relationships, which while focused on France probably applied to the rest of Europe as well, and there was often a vicious circle going on where the servants, especially the female ones, were abused by the adult masters and mistresses and then took their revenge by brutalizing the aristocratic children, who in turn...