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cahnBackground: The kids' school has a topic for "Unit" every trimester that a lot of their work (reading, writing, some math) revolves around. These topics range from time/geographic periods ('Colonial America') to geography ('Asia') to science ('Space') to social science ('Business and Economics'). (I have some issues with this way of doing things, but that's a whole separate post.) Anyway, for Reasons, they have had to come up with a new topic this year, and E's 7/8 class is doing "World Fairs" as their new topic.
Me: I know E's teacher is all about World Fairs and I know she is great and will do a good job. But I feel like if we had a different teacher who wasn't so into World Fairs, they wouldn't do such a good job and another topic would be better.
Me: Like... the Enlightenment!
D: Heh, you could teach that! But you'd have to restrain yourself from making everything about Frederick the Great.
Me: But that's the thing! Everyone does relate to each other in this time period! Voltaire -- and his partner Émilie du Châtelet, who was heavily involved in the discourse of conservation of energy and momentum -- well, I've told you Voltaire had a thing with Fritz -- and then there's Empress Maria Theresa, who went to war with him a few times -- and Catherine the Great --
D, meditatively: You know --
Me: *am innocently not warned even though this is the same tone of voice that is often followed by, say, a bad pun*
D: -- it's impressive how everyone from this 'the Great' family is so famous!
Me: *splutters*
D, thoughtfully: But of course there's probably selection bias, as the ones who aren't famous don't get mentioned. You never see 'Bob the Great' in the history books...
Me: *splutters more*
Me: I know E's teacher is all about World Fairs and I know she is great and will do a good job. But I feel like if we had a different teacher who wasn't so into World Fairs, they wouldn't do such a good job and another topic would be better.
Me: Like... the Enlightenment!
D: Heh, you could teach that! But you'd have to restrain yourself from making everything about Frederick the Great.
Me: But that's the thing! Everyone does relate to each other in this time period! Voltaire -- and his partner Émilie du Châtelet, who was heavily involved in the discourse of conservation of energy and momentum -- well, I've told you Voltaire had a thing with Fritz -- and then there's Empress Maria Theresa, who went to war with him a few times -- and Catherine the Great --
D, meditatively: You know --
Me: *am innocently not warned even though this is the same tone of voice that is often followed by, say, a bad pun*
D: -- it's impressive how everyone from this 'the Great' family is so famous!
Me: *splutters*
D, thoughtfully: But of course there's probably selection bias, as the ones who aren't famous don't get mentioned. You never see 'Bob the Great' in the history books...
Me: *splutters more*
Get thee to a nunnery!
Date: 2023-12-07 04:50 pm (UTC)So the series heightens the stakes by diclaring the French wouldn't let MA return to Vienna post annulment, she'd be forced to enter a convent instead.
Now, that's rubbish. I mean, there's precedent - Philippe II. Auguste did that to his first wife, I believe, and also Louis XII - but those were different (medieval) times. Louis XVI wasn't that kind of jerk. MT and Joseph wouldn't have stood for it, either. (Not just out of familial sentiment - MA at this point was just 21 years old and eminently marriagable.) And why would Louis' ministers come up with such an idea? The script can't come up with anything better than MA being told "she knows too much" to be allowed to leave France, which is ridiculous.
Well, I'm getting close to the end of Stollberg-Rilinger, and she does report that MT threatened her daughter Amalia, married to Ferdinand-the-failed-pedagogical-experiment of Parma, with being locked up in a convent in Parma and not allowed to come back to Vienna, if she doesn't start behaving herself. This is 1772, only 5 years before the supposed MA episode in the show.
Now, obvious differences:
- Amalia and Ferdinand have already consummated their marriage and had a daughter (whom MT threatens Amalia with never allowing her to see when she's locked up for life in the convent) at this point, so remarriage would be trickier. So MT had less of an incentive to bring Amalia home and marry her off to someone else.
- This threat is coming from MT and not from the daughter's husband or husband's ministers, which makes it a different case from the Philippe Auguste and Louis XII examples. Plus it means MT is not going to be outraged at the family honor being impugned, etc., etc.
...but I think it still shows that "problematic wife gets locked up in a convent" is still a thing in the 1770s, and that there exists at least one circumstance in which MT would go along with it (albeit not the MA/Louis XVI circumstance).
I also agree, it goes without saying, that Louis XVI was not that kind of jerk. Louis XV did apparently tell MA that he might have to send her back to Vienna, but nothing about putting her in a convent that I'm aware of, no.
Re: Get thee to a nunnery!
Date: 2023-12-07 06:08 pm (UTC)Louis XV did apparently tell MA that he might have to send her back to Vienna, but nothing about putting her in a convent that I'm aware of, no.
Something I didn't mention is that Louis XV - presumably on a "he was a dirty old man and he did have sex with a bunch of teenage girls as we know!" - rationale gets a bit handsy with young MA, nothing undeniable, i.e. you can pass it off as grandfatherly attention, but at one point he shows up in the middle of the night at her bedroom door, only our young heroine has been warned and thus isn't there, and then old Louis XV gets back to putting pressure on future Louis XVI to consummate the marriage and no longer considers solving the continuation of the Bourbon line problem by molesting his granddaughter-in-law.
Now, as opposed to the threat to put her into a French convent as opposed to sending her home to Vienna, I thought this was a bit more plausible an invention. So, do we think Louis XV would have? I'm mostly inclined to say no, because MA wasn't just any teenage girl, she was his grandson's wife, and for a believing Catholic, which Louis XV was, this would have been incest. (Also terrible power abuse etc., but not many absolute monarchs pay attention to that part.)
Re: Get thee to a nunnery!
Date: 2023-12-07 06:35 pm (UTC)Agreed, I'm just saying that had the situation been different in MA's case, a non-medieval convent was still a possible outcome in the 1770s.
no longer considers solving the continuation of the Bourbon line problem by molesting his granddaughter-in-law.
Louis XV: If there's one thing I know how to do...!
So, do we think Louis XV would have? I'm mostly inclined to say no, because MA wasn't just any teenage girl, she was his grandson's wife, and for a believing Catholic, which Louis XV was, this would have been incest.
I agree, I suspect the incest part would have stopped him, where sheer adultery didn't. OTOH, I don't know Louis XV's personality *that* well; maybe there's some counterevidence out there.
Re: Get thee to a nunnery!
Date: 2023-12-08 01:12 am (UTC)This seems plausible to me! (Whereas the terrible power abuse argument doesn't seem like it would be a factor, I agree...)
Re: Get thee to a nunnery!
Date: 2023-12-08 01:11 am (UTC)I'm just sad about this. MT, don't be like that! :(
MT's A+ parenting
Date: 2023-12-09 08:02 am (UTC)S-R goes into how MT always insisted her children needed to be totally up-front and honest with her about everything, anything less was an insult to her motherly love--*she* was always open with them, after all!--while in reality, MT was constantly going behind their backs; spying on them; telling each child one thing while telling another child, extended family member, or someone in their retinue another thing, in an effort to try to play people off against each other; using a "divide and conquer" strategy to isolate the siblings and keep them from figuring out what was going on and uniting against her; playing favorites; and, *drumroll*, herself constantly falling for manipulations carried out by both her favorite family members and the ministers she trusted (who were also two-timing around the adult kids at other courts, and some of them--Kaunitz and Mercy--were doing so more successfully than MT).
S-R says MT insisted on honesty while creating an environment where being honest did *not* pay off, between the siblings competing for favor, plus the fact that MT did not react well to actual honesty at all. That resulted in family dynamics where everything was acting and hypocrisy. The better you were at concealing what you thought and being manipulative of others, the better off you were.
I read this and was like, "I need to tell
And that's the secretive part: there was also the constant open micromanaging. MT named her grandkids, came up with their educational plans, etc. Adulthood meant very little in terms of independence if she was your mother; and if you actually showed any independence (Amalia, Carolina, MA, Leopold, JOSEPH), her reaction was not pretty.
MT had major, major control issues, and the spying and isolating and micromanaging were all attempts to make sure she was in total control of her adult children living at other courts. And to add insult to injury, because of the whole "mother + monarch" thing, you were supposed to pretend that you were voluntarily consulting her superior wisdom, and that she wasn't actually micromanaging you against your will. (I am violently allergic to this kind of thing too).
Much of the reason MT and Joseph were always butting heads was that when they disagreed on something, he refused to play the game his father did of saying he agreed with her and presenting a united front to others. Joseph would ostentatiously be all, "I'm doing this under duress! You, my mother, are the Empress! You have all the real power here! I'm just your loyal subject and son. I'll do it your way, but I disagree vehemently, and I wash my hands of the outcome." And MT, who did not react well to actual honesty, was always metaphorically stomping her foot and going, "No! We are equals, co-regents! You have just as much power as I do, and you're supposed to do what I want of your own free will!"
Joseph: "A coregency where the parties involved disagree this much and there is no way of arbitrating between them is NOT a functional coregency of equals. The ONLY way to survive is to make sure I pass the buck to you and everyone knows when I'm not in agreement. That way, when you die, I can start over, without being held responsible for your decisions."
This, by the way, is the exact same reason Leopold refused to come to Vienna when a dying Joseph wanted him to: he didn't want to be held responsible for Joseph's decisions when his turn came to rule.
MT also told all her daughters "rules for thee, not for me": you must be subordinate to your husbands, because that's where all your power comes from, and if you should happen to influence him, you have to make sure neither he nor anyone else notices. And her daughters were like, "You mean like you and Dad?" When they tried behaving in exactly as domineering a manner as MT always had, MT was like, "No, no, no, you're doing it wrong! You're suppposed to defer to your husband (and also to me)."
* Finished! I mean, I skipped parts, like Selena did, but only because I haaaad to, lol. I would say I read probably about 80%, and the parts I skipped were parts I would probably have skipped even if I had been reading in English.
ETA: To be fair to MT, there were a lot of times when she was right, like with Marie Antoinette, and even Amalia. But the hypocrisy of "do as I say, not as I do" was rampant--even if it made sense in a misogynistic world--and she was wrong a lot of the time too. And her efforts to control everything in sight massively backfired.
Re: MT's A+ parenting
Date: 2023-12-12 06:18 am (UTC)S-R goes into how MT always insisted her children needed to be totally up-front and honest with her about everything, anything less was an insult to her motherly love--*she* was always open with them, after all!--while in reality, MT was constantly going behind their backs; spying on them; telling each child one thing while telling another child, extended family member, or someone in their retinue another thing, in an effort to try to play people off against each other
Argh, I hate this kind of thing!!
and, *drumroll*, herself constantly falling for manipulations carried out by both her favorite family members and the ministers she trusted
Lol, sigh.
Much of the reason MT and Joseph were always butting heads was that when they disagreed on something, he refused to play the game his father did of saying he agreed with her and presenting a united front to others. Joseph would ostentatiously be all, "I'm doing this under duress! You, my mother, are the Empress! You have all the real power here! I'm just your loyal subject and son. I'll do it your way, but I disagree vehemently, and I wash my hands of the outcome." And MT, who did not react well to actual honesty, was always metaphorically stomping her foot and going, "No! We are equals, co-regents! You have just as much power as I do, and you're supposed to do what I want of your own free will!"
OH HI yeah this is the dynamic between my sister and mom. (I'm more like FS.)
This, by the way, is the exact same reason Leopold refused to come to Vienna when a dying Joseph wanted him to: he didn't want to be held responsible for Joseph's decisions when his turn came to rule.
Ohhhh, interesting. I guess they were smart?
Re: MT's A+ parenting
Date: 2023-12-12 02:22 pm (UTC)Yep! And as I've noted, I'm more like Joseph: my sister would always talk really sweet to my mom and then do whatever she wanted, so my mom was like, "Well, she's just a kid. Honey, you have to do the thing." And I would always *do* the thing, but I would be full of arguments about why it was unreasonable/unfair/inconsistent. And that was perceived as a *personal attack*, so Mom and I were always at each other's throats.
I am so with Joseph here. You are the authority figure, and you can make me, but you're going to hear at great length about why you're wrong. Unsurprisingly, I'm like that at work too. Ahem.
Ohhhh, interesting. I guess they were smart?
Oh, they were both intelligent, determined, ambitious men, and both with a streak of ruthlessness. Leopold, though, had Joseph trusting him and confiding in him, and then behind Joseph's back he was all, "Argh, Joseph is ruining EVERYTHING!"
As S-R says, the system favored being two-faced. Even Isabella of Parma's "How to win friends and influence people" write-up was basically an elaboration of the exact ways in which you should be two-faced with MT, FS, and Joseph, because it was the only way to survive.
Re: MT's A+ parenting
Date: 2023-12-16 11:30 pm (UTC)Oh, they were both intelligent, determined, ambitious men, and both with a streak of ruthlessness.
Oh, yeah, but I always think of Vienna!Joe as a guy who is extremely intelligent but not always with the best people skills :) So it's interesting to me that here he absolutely knew what to do in terms of passing the buck and not being held responsible. Though in this case I'm sure it helped that he also personally probably didn't want to be held responsible for any of MT's policies he didn't agree with... like, my sister makes it very clear when she disagrees with my mom even though no one's witnessing it but me :)
Re: MT's A+ parenting
Date: 2023-12-16 11:37 pm (UTC)Well, I'm not sure if that was a people *skill* or just a personality *trait*, like his fight/flight manifesting as *fight*. It was definitely not a *skill* when teenage!me did it. :P