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: Aladàr von Boroviczény: Graf von Brühl. Der Medici, Richelieu und Rothschild seiner Zeit. (19

[selenak]

No kidding. I mean, I'm sometimes playing that game myself, but while you can wonder about which developments would have resulted in a better Germany (my answer to this is a succesful 1848 revolution, followed by a unification to a constitutional parliamentary monarchy as intended, meaning unification would have happened not as the result of a war and "from above", but as the result of a democratic process and "from below"), I'm not sure that would have made much difference to (a) WWI happening. All those Empire-minded European powers would have been on a collision course anyway. And our author while speculating a Germany led by House Wettin (that's the Saxons) and the Habsburgs instead of the Hohenzollern completely ignores the massive share the Austro-Hungarian Empire contributed by its sheer existence - all those non-Austrian nations who were part of it would have wanted independence in such an AU, too, and without a more flexible rule from the Habsburgs which would have allowed Serbia, Croatia etc. to gain that independence peacefully, well, what's changed? You'd have needed someone else than Franz Joseph as Emperor for the second half of the 19th and the early 20th century for this to happen, if you want to make it personal, and that had absolutely nothing to do with the Prussians.