Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 42

[cahn]

Last post, we had (among other things) Danish kings and their favorites; Louis XIV and Philippe d'Orléans; reviews of a very shippy book about Katte, a bad Jacobite novel, and a great book about clothing; a fic about Émilie du Châtelet and Voltaire; and a review of a set of entertaining Youtube history videos about Frederick the Great.

Comments

Re: Snark and other miscellanea

[mildred_of_midgard]

More miscellanea as I skip from book to book: Michael Müller's Polen zwischen Preussen und Russland wins first prize for most overestimating my intelligence and/or education. You see, he thinks his readers are fluent in French, Latin, and Polish, and thus would not need anything translated. (Berlin, 1983, as you're no doubt wondering.) This is what his paragraphs look like:

Noch genauer aber führt der Verfasser des »Głos wolny« aus: »Sacro sancte tedy chcąc liberum veto in omni authoritate konserwować, o to się tylko starać należy, żeby nie dać żadnej okazyi ani pretextu do szkodliwej kontradykcyi...« das liberum veto werde »per abusus« verwechselt mit der » potestas sistendi activitatem«--das liberum veto sei »>fundamentum status nostri«, das »Hemmen« aber eine »despotica potestas«, die der freien Nation widerrechtlich die »authoritas der Beratung« einschränke; denn »przyznam się, że wertując konstytucje, zda mi się, że nie znalazłem żadnej a condita republica, żeby wolno było zerwać sejm [...] albo sistere activitatem«

Furthermore, I discovered something about 17th century Poles. I knew that Latin was their language of administration long after most of Europe had moved on, but what I didn't know was that they intermingled Latin and Polish like other Seckendorff does French and German, or Catt does with random languages. Meaning it's hard to even ask Google what it means, because Google's only meant to handle one language at at ime. Example:

» ... Akt teraźnieyszy consensu Omnium ordinum w Seym obracamy. Formam Reipublicae ad antiquum Statum przywracamy, jako to Seymy, Seymiki, Izbę Poselską, libertatem sentiendi jus vetandi przy prawie ...«

Guys, I'm trying to learn about Polish constitutional history, but it's hard. I can handle the French, I've got about 90% of the Latin, but I've only got like 4 Polish words at my disposal, plus whatever obvious cognates there are. And that's not nearly enough for Berlin in 1983, it seems.

So far, I've learned a couple of things: the author says that the liberum veto, the right of any Polish nobleman to veto anything during the meeting of the Sejm (parliament), was actually just a right to point out that some proposal was unconstitutional, not a right to say "I don't like it." It was certainly not a right, either legally or in people's minds, to break up any meeting without anything getting done just because. That was the "liberum rumpo", which was at least theoretically different. If your colleagues felt like you were vetoing in support of your special interests, that was a big no-no. At least so far; we've talked mostly about the 17th and early 18th century in the part I've read. I'm not sure if that changes when you get later in the 18th century and closer to the partitions. I'll let you know if I manage to read further and learn anything about how that evolved.

He's also said that if the common perception of the liberum veto as the reason nothing got done were correct, you would expect every Sejm that attempted a reform during the reign of Augustus III to be broken up that way, but actually only two were, under special circumstances.

That's pretty much all I've got so far. But one day I intend to learn more about 18th century Polish history, one way or another!