cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 41

You're viewing

cahn's journal
Create a Dreamwidth Account Learn More

Reload page in style: site light

Now, thanks to interesting podcasts, including characters from German history as a whole and also Byzantine history! (More on this later.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

selenak

...and I think I also traced down the relevant Liselotte letter about when her adult son was on campaign:

It is sadly only too true that my son is on campaign, and now both armies are marching, so I feel very uneasy, for while they are not far from each other, they may encounter each other, and then it might get bad enough. I know - and my dear Frau von Harling has taught me well years ago - that God will can keep his people safe, but I haven't got any sealed pledge that almighty God will keep my son, and I know that one endures great danger in war; besides, the example of the two dear princes Friedrich August and Carl - two of her cousins, Sophie's younger sons, who have both died fighting the Turks - has made me terribly concerned. The heads and bodies of princes aren't any tougher than those of other people, and metal can enter them as easily as with a common soldier, and in a battle there is little safety. This why I have to admit I am very afraid right now, and I won't rest until I have my boy with me again!

(She writes "meinen Buben" in German, which for an adult man is exactly what it sounds like. No wonder Philippe the future Regent was embarrassed! But Liselotte wasn't into battle heroics even if none of her own relations were endangered. There's a great quote which I think I already once quoted in salon, but that was when we knew next to nothing about the Danes, so here it is again, concerning Frederik V's pious Dad in his youth, who seems to be contemplating teaming up against Sweden in the Great Northern War based on the date (1700):

Young people like the King in Denmark think they become heroes, if they can only conduct war, and don't consider it might end badly and that they could, if fortune doesn't want them, end up as zeroes instead; I hope, the King in Denmark will listen to reason...

Liselotte critisized her son, too, for all the partying, though she did the evil advisors thing as well, in her case, Monsieur's favourites teaching him the frat boy party life early on and Monsieur never laying down any law, making her the only parent who tried to install some discipline but who, being powerless, was of course not listened to. Still, she was up in his defense every time someone else talked against him, which meant she was firing off indignant letter after indignant letter when he was badmouthed as a family poisoner when all those French royals kicked the dust because of measles, small pox and bad doctors, and you know she was all "how dare!!!" when Old Dessauer, then young Dessauer, talked about killing him.

Incidentally, while of course exclusively blaming the Philippe I boyfriends for Philippe II's hard partying life style which would end killing him in the long term (thankfully after her death) is of course simplifying things and letting him off the hook for personal responsibility, it can't have helped, so she's not entirely wrong there. Philippe the Regent's bff Saint-Simon as I recall from Horowski was also "what a waste!" feeling when the Regent died.

From:

cahn

Young people like the King in Denmark think they become heroes, if they can only conduct war, and don't consider it might end badly and that they could, if fortune doesn't want them, end up as zeroes instead; I hope, the King in Denmark will listen to reason...

Aw, Liselotte is so great!

Liselotte critisized her son, too, for all the partying, though she did the evil advisors thing as well, in her case, Monsieur's favourites teaching him the frat boy party life early on and Monsieur never laying down any law, making her the only parent who tried to install some discipline but who, being powerless, was of course not listened to.

Yeah, like you say, she might have had a bit of a point there...

From:

selenak

Now undoubtedly she's idealizing the Palatinate and Hannover method of child raising from a distance, plus as we see with FW and Fritz, what a parent imagines they'd have enjoyed as a child can be the opposite of what their child likes/doesn't like. But all the same, one thing Sophie and Ernst August can't be accused of is indulging their sons in the kind of frat boy life the younger generation in Versailles lived in. (Not least because all this stuff is expensive. If you are a German principality who has just extended themselves to become an Electorate, you really can't afford your sons gambling fortunes away when they're not drinking themselves unconscious and/or terrorizing the populace.) And they had no problem laying down the law, so if PHilippe II had grown up with Aunt Sophie the way Liselotte herself had done, he might have returned to France a more disciplined man with a solid work ethic. But there's no way not just Monsieur but Louis XIV would have permitted a Prince of the Blood to be raised in a Protestant (!) German principality which Louis was at war with some of the time.