cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 40

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I'm trying to use my other account at least occasionally so I posted about my Yuletide gifts there, including the salon-relevant 12k fic that features Fritz, Heinrich, Voltaire, Fredersdorf, Saint Germain, Caroline Daum (Fredersdorf's wife), and Groundhog Day tropes! (Don't need to know canon.)

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From:

selenak

Well, to be fair, if you share gossip about someone's sexuality with Liselotte, the worst thing that can happen is that she mentions it in her next letter to Germany. Okay, the worst thing is maybe that she brings it up in an argument with her husband who then blocks your career, if, that is, you want to get ahead in Versailles. But still. Whereas if you tell FW you think that someone is gay, let alone that he's made a pass (or several) at you, he'll have that person executed. By fire, if male, by sword, if female, going by actual events. So unless you want that person to die, you don't tell FW. And his sons' governor(s) seem to have all been fairly popular people. As opposed to the Marquis d'Effiat.

So... was she successful at not getting him to be her son's governor??

The book doesn't say, and googling only tells me that D'Effiat's wife (yes, he had one, though no children) became the governess of her children, plural. (She only had two surviving biological children, Philippe the later Regent and Elisabeth Charlotte the later mother of FS and thus mother-in-law to MT, but there were also Philippe the Gay's two surviving daughters from his marriage to Minette, one of whom would go on to marry Charles II the Genetic Wonder and last Habsburg in Spain.) Maybe that was a compromise? Otoh, I seem to recall from "Madame sein ist ein elendes Handwerk" ("Being Madame is a lousy craft"), the most recent edition of Liselotte's letters which I only have on audio, that she usually lost these kind of arguments with Philippe, because one of the many things that annoved her about the Chevalier de Lorraine was that he had the ultimate say over her household appointments, and he and d'Effiat were allied.

In any event, Philippe the Regent got along well with his father's various boyfriends but was himself seemingly exclusively heterosexual. How do we know? Because Philippe the Regent's orgies were talked about in great gossipy detail, including by a young Voltaire, and you can bet that if he'd done it with a guy or several, it would have been mentioned. Which isn't to say there was no influence. To memoirist Saint-Simon's great distress, for they were friends, Philippe the Regent died long before he had to, as a direct consequence of the hard partying life style he had from his teenage years onwards and which did start in his teenage years. Liselotte in her letters frequently complains of Monsieur condemming her to be thought of as the stern, disciplinarian parent while he's exclusively the fun, permitting everything parent, but that it wasn't good for her son to be allowed everything and gamble, drink and party non stop as a teenager. Unsurprisingly, they frequently clashed at that time, though her grown up son learned to appreciate her in later years, and they were unusually affectionate and close for (almost) royalty .

Incidentally, this quote from Primi Visconti - that I was twenty five years old already and had a beard. He replied that Frenchmen of taste neither were bothered by the age nor the beard - tells you something about Visconti (a straight man) expecting gay men to be only interested in teenage boys and young beardless men in their early 20s, while the Marquis de La Valliere evidently finds men of all ages attractive.

Edited Date: 2023-02-01 08:18 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Whereas if you tell FW you think that someone is gay, let alone that he's made a pass (or several) at you, he'll have that person executed. By fire, if male, by sword, if female, going by actual events.

Remind me if he did this for gayness? Huh, looking through the sodomy article again, it looks like if you were a noble, FW would just lock you up and let you go after a few years. I mean, that is still an excellent reason not to tell him!

His 1725 edict says "if you do it with a cow", and the author says that this is because the vast majority of cases in Brandenburg-Prussia, as opposed to Hamburg, were bestiality and not homosexuality cases.

Okay, yeah, here's a case where the woman who dressed up as a man and married her lover and penetrated her with a dildo was executed by FW's "You're letting her off too easy!" order, while the "seduced" partner was locked up for 3 years.

So, yeah. If you were a noble, you might get locked up for being gay, if you were a member of the lower classes, execution. Though apparently FW went along with the recommended milder punishments for the first 10 or so years of his reign, then decided that wasn't enough of a deterrent and too many people kept doing it, so he started insisting on death for non-nobles.

This remains a really interesting article, I should reread it.

tells you something about Visconti (a straight man) expecting gay men to be only interested in teenage boys and young beardless men in their early 20s, while the Marquis de La Valliere evidently finds men of all ages attractive.

Yeah, that is really interesting. That is definitely a stereotype that persists to this day.

Edited Date: 2023-02-04 02:20 pm (UTC)

From:

selenak

Remind me if he did this for gayness?

For female gayness, there's indeed poor Rosenstengel, and for male, I was thinking of the 1730 "sodomite" who did it with both animals and men (or am I misremembering?) according to the pamphlet I found and got burned. Neither was a noble, though.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I was thinking of the 1730 "sodomite" who did it with both animals and men (or am I misremembering?) according to the pamphlet I found and got burned.

I think you are misremembering, at least given your write-up:

But I can tell cahn now that poor Lepsch had a go at the sheep courtesy to the pamphlet you uploaded. Well actually, I don't know which animal(s) he had a go at, but it wasn't humans. The giveaway is "viehische Vermischung" again

From:

felis

You might be mixing up the Lepsch case - which was bestiality only IIRC - and the Ephraim Ostermann one (see towards the end of this comment), which was indeed both, although it was complicated by the fact that one of the guys he had sex with died, and that it's a bit unclear on which grounds he actually got the death penalty (which was sword first, then burning the dead body, as per FW's addition to the verdict).

From:

selenak

Yes, that's it, I was mixing up the two! Thank you for clearing this up.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Our sodomy expert to the rescue, thank you! :D

(Selena is our orgy expert: "But Philippe's orgies were well lit!")

I found a good essay on sodomy as a crime in Prussia...whose author...wrote his whole dissertation on the subject, i.e. sodomy as a crime in the 18th century

Damn, I went looking for the dissertation just now, and Google books shows it was made into a book, but I can't find it for sale anywhere, nor even in the Bavarian Stabi. :( Oh well.