Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 39

[cahn]

Last post, along with the usual 18th-century suspects, included the Ottonians; changing ideas of conception and women's sexual pleasure; Isabella of Parma (the one who fell in love, and vice versa, with her husband's sister); Henry IV and Bertha (and Henry's second wife divorcing him for "unspeakable sexual acts"). (Okay, Isabella of Parma was 18th century.)

Comments

French as a lingua franca

[mildred_of_midgard]

being fluent in French was a sine qua non for the continental nobility (especially the Germans), to the point where this was literally their first language, this wasn't the case for the English nobility.

Nor Spain, at least at the beginning of the century. Obviously Philip "the Frog" V's court contained Frenchmen exported from Grandpa's court, but Horowski says that when Saint-Simon showed up in 1722 as envoy during the exchange of princesses, he had to speak Latin to the Spaniards. Furthermore, the pronunciation of Latin in France and Spain had diverged so much that after Saint-Simon gave his speech in Latin, one of the Spaniards very politely said he would prefer to speak Latin, as he unfortunately didn't understand French!

From Henry Kamen's bio of Philip:

Philip's contact with French ideas and influences was a novelty, not shared by most of the ruling class in Spain. The continued isolation of the nobility from European influences can be seen also in the conduct of the country's foreign affairs. Spain's new aggressive stance in European politics was directed by personnel who, if they were Spaniards, had little or no experience of the world outside the peninsula...In the first years of Alberoni's influence, the ambassadors of Spain in The Hague, London and Paris were all Italians. Only these people, for instance, had any knowledge of foreign languages, and in particular of French, the tongue used by all diplomats to communicate among themselves.

I'm also seeing, glancing through Kamen, that Isabella Farnese arrived "fluent" in French, but preferring to write in Italian in response to French letters (much like half the people I end up emailing in Germany, present company excepted).

Mind you, I continue to be annoyed that Kamen manages to produce the following sentences at different points in the same book:

He was unable to pick up the Spanish language, a failure which aggravated his feeling of isolation (throughout his reign he continued to speak only French).

He probably knew little of how Spaniards lived, for he did not habitually speak their language.

In nearly all these areas, he made tourist visits to cathedrals and monasteries, prayed at the principal shrines, and had some contact with his subjects. His language did not cut him off from them: though he always preferred to use French, he read and spoke Spanish, and (as we have seen) he habitually employed it when annotating state documents.

Make up your mind, Kamen!