cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 46

Background: 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*

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

luzula

Don't worry, it's still entertaining!

If there are enough Orthodox believers in Poland, Russian serfs are going to desert across the border en masse to escape their terrible lives in Russia.
Why don't they desert anyway? I mean, if enough of them do there will be more Orthodox believers in Poland...

Poor Poniatowski, he's really not having a good time!

Fritz: Austrians, don't worry about it. It's super easy to dredge up claims to neighboring territory. Dig through your archives and you'll find something!
*snorts* Why do they even bother fabricating claims?

ETA: Catherine drops the demands for dissenters to get the right to hold state office; all they get is freedom of worship. Which, as has been noted, is the most dissenters have in the rest of Europe anyway, in the most liberal countries (Britain, Netherlands)
Actually, Scotland has more than this. Although IDK if you want to count dissenters within Protestantism as actual dissenters--Scotland does not give Catholics the right to hold office. So in the 17th century Restoration, Anglicanism/Episcopalianism was imposed on the whole of Britain, and required of all state officials. Then in the Glorious Revolution the Presbyterian Kirk gained ascendancy in Scotland, so that all officials had to be Presbyterian there. But in 1712, the Toleration Act changed this (but only in Scotland!), so that it was okay for government officials to be either Presbyterian, Episcopalian, or Anglican (and perhaps further Protestant denominations, I don't know how far it stretched). Scotland having toleration but Ireland and England not having it caused some problems for example when regiments moved across borders. For example, there was an incident where a Presbyterian army chaplain was fired when his regiment was deployed to Ireland. He tried to fight this legally, but lost.

Edited Date: 2024-01-06 07:02 pm (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Why don't they desert anyway? I mean, if enough of them do there will be more Orthodox believers in Poland...

That's a good question. I expect it's like any game theory situation where if enough of a oppressed minority do something, they'll all be safer, but since it's so dangerous for the first ones to do it, and coordination is hard, it doesn't happen or else takes a long time. For example, if enough gay people come out of the closet, it becomes safer for everyone...but you can't blame individuals for not spontaneously coming out when they didn't see many other people doing it, and the stakes were so high.

Given that Russia is a big place and the serfs couldn't communicate with serfs outside their own estate, and given that Poland is a big place, my guess is there was a good chance that wherever you showed up, there wouldn't be an Orthodox priest to administer to your spiritual needs, and no one wanted to end up in that situation. Also, god knows what serfs kept ignorant on Russian estates were being *told* about treatment of Orthodox dissenters in Poland.

Plus, one of my university professors told me that if you do sociological computer modeling, you can get segregation just by programming individuals to have a desire not to be the only one of their kind where they live. If you program the black people in your script not to want to be the only black person/family in a white neighborhood, and you program the white people in your script not to want to be the only white person/family in a black neighborhood, and make neighborhood selection otherwise random, you will end up with a black neighborhood and a white neighborhood. Even if people don't mind being in a minority, if they just don't want to be the only one, risk aversion takes you the rest of the way.

*snorts* Why do they even bother fabricating claims?

Because PR-wise, there is a big, big difference between a gangster who says "I'm just following the law!" and a gangster who outright says, "I don't care about the law," even if both are equally breaking the law.

To take an example from American politics, given that election years are currently on my mind, why did Trump bother insisting so hard there was widespread voter fraud, instead of just leaning into storming the Capitol and saying he didn't care about free elections? I mean, maybe he was that delusional (Fritz he is not), idk, but at least some of his supporters had to realize that as a PR move, one claim is a *much* harder sell than the other, even if the outcome is the same: the will of the people being ignored by the ruler, contrary to all evidence.

Fritz was extremely big on good PR, he was the first modern monarch to take real advantage of the press and public opinion as his PR machine. His entire reluctance to participate in the First Polish Partition until he had his most important neighbors on board was about PR. He explicitly turned down Heinrich's first offer on the grounds that "If we're going to take a chunk of Poland, it needs to be big enough to counter the bad PR of taking anything at all."

From:

cahn

Plus, one of my university professors told me that if you do sociological computer modeling, you can get segregation just by programming individuals to have a desire not to be the only one of their kind where they live. If you program the black people in your script not to want to be the only black person/family in a white neighborhood, and you program the white people in your script not to want to be the only white person/family in a black neighborhood, and make neighborhood selection otherwise random, you will end up with a black neighborhood and a white neighborhood. Even if people don't mind being in a minority, if they just don't want to be the only one, risk aversion takes you the rest of the way.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. (And I'm thinking about college and how people tended to clump.)

He explicitly turned down Heinrich's first offer on the grounds that "If we're going to take a chunk of Poland, it needs to be big enough to counter the bad PR of taking anything at all."

Ha! That's kind of awesome, actually.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Ha! That's kind of awesome, actually.

The quote is great:

As to the question of occupying the duchy of Warmia, I ruled that out, as the whole operation is not worth tuppence. The portion is so small that it fails to compensate for the song and dance it will necessarily drum up. On the other hand, Polish Prussia would be worth the trouble, even without Danzig, as then we would have the Vistula and what would be very important, free access to the kingdom [of Prussia] … If you are too eager to snatch at trifles, it gives you a reputation for greed and insatiability which I don't want to have any more than I do already in Europe.

Emphasis mine. :P

From:

cahn

Lolololol! Friiitz!

From:

luzula

Yeah, that makes sense with the serfs.

Re: the fabricated claims, I guess I had the impression that declaring war just because you wanted to conquer a piece of land was more okay in the 18th century than today? I mean, European countries definitely did it all the time in the colonies, but the rules are probably different when making war within Europe. Sweden grew enormously in the 17th century and then shrank again--I don't suppose they could have motivated that growth with prior claims. How about Russia taking Crimea, was that just pure conquest or did they motivate it with prior claims?

Perhaps this is something that changed with the growth of the public sphere, when it became more important with good PR?

From:

selenak

I guess I had the impression that declaring war just because you wanted to conquer a piece of land was more okay in the 18th century than today? I mean, European countries definitely did it all the time in the colonies, but the rules are probably different when making war within Europe.

They sure were after the Thirty Years War. Part of the Treaty of Westphalia was saying that wars of conquest against another Christian monarch were just not cool and not to be done and both Sweden and France were supposed to guarantee these conditions were listened to in the HRE. Now, obviously the wars for a landgrab still happened (long before Fritz invaded Silesia), but even 800 Pounds I Do What I Want gorilla of European might Louis XIV bothered with the justifications - it's his inheritance via his Spanish wife, or he's only fighting to push his sister-in-law's claim on her inheritance (this made Liselotte furious because she certainly did NOT want him to invade the Palatinate) ; what he doesn't claim he's doing is invading because he wants some more glory and land. Even though obviously that's what he does. And less powerful monarchs than Louis XIV have to bother even more with justifications.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

both Sweden and France were supposed to guarantee these conditions were listened to in the HRE

Foreign policy side note her: remember when I said Fritz kept offering mediation between Austria and Turkey for non-benevolent reasons? It's not only because mediating means you consider yourself militarily capable of intervening to support a treaty you guaranteed, it means you now have an excuse if you want to intervene in the future. If you can half-convincingly spin something another country does as a violation of a treaty (or constitution) you're supposed to guarantee, hey presto! you can invade and occupy and (attempt to) do whatever you want to enforce that treaty/constitution.

It's why Russia and at least some of the Poles are at odds over whether Russia should continue being the "guarantor" of Polish territorial integrity and the Polish constitution (i.e. can Russia invade any time it can find a convenient excuse, which not all the Poles want). It's why Catherine made Russia a guarantor of the Treaty of Westphalia in 1779, when she intervened to mediate in the War of the Bavarian Succession. Guaranteeing the Treaty of Westphalia gave Russia major intervention rights in Germany. Just add one semi-plausible excuse!

it's his inheritance via his Spanish wife

As flimsy an excuse as it gets, because the Spanish had required that she formal renounce her claims in the marriage contract specifically to avoid this scenario, but Louis XIV hand-waved it as "But the marriage contract also says they will pay X amount as her dowry, and they're so bankrupt they haven't managed that, so obviously the whole treaty is invalid, which means I can do what I want!"

Notice "The whole treaty was invalidated by them first!" is also the excuse Catherine used when annexing the Crimea. It's a popular one in our period.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

How about Russia taking Crimea, was that just pure conquest or did they motivate it with prior claims?

Not prior claims, but there was definitely some handwaving of excuses! Prior claims was only one way of justifying conquest. Another was "the other side started it, and this is just war damages!" Another was "But the locals *want* us instead of their current rulers!"

The Ottoman Empire being an empire, the original detachment of the Crimea from the Ottoman Empire was justified as a war of "liberation" (sound familiar?). The Russians were just rescuing the Crimean khanate from Ottoman oppression and restoring it to a state of independence! Then for almost ten years, there was local infighting and revolts, and their puppet khan kept getting overthrown, and finally, in 1783, again quoting from Madariaga:

In March Potemkin returned to St Petersburg and threw his influence into the scales in favour of outright annexation. A trumped-up excuse was found--an alleged incursion by the Porte in Taman'--and on 8 April 1783, Catherine signed the manifesto proclaiming her intention of annexing the Crimea. She justified the decision on the grounds that Russia had already spent twelve million rubles in defending the khanate's independence, and that the Porte had destroyed the mutual treaty obligations between Russia and Turkey by its attack on Taman'. The manifesto undertook to respect the persons and property of the Tartars, to grant them the free exercise of their religion, and to extend to them the rights enjoyed by Russians.

So as you can see, even with a non-Christian monarch, you still need an excuse if you don't want such bad PR that all your neighbors gang up on you. You want at least enough plausible deniability that at least some of your neighbors can decide it's fine to care more about their own self-interest and about the balance of power.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Thank you for writing up these details! I think I knew Presbyterians could hold office in Scotland (or at least I would have been shocked to hear otherwise, given what I know about Scottish demographics), but I didn't know the history in this much depth. Cool!

Actually, Scotland has more than this. Although IDK if you want to count dissenters within Protestantism as actual dissenters--Scotland does not give Catholics the right to hold office.

Since the examples Fritz gave were of Catholics, I suspect he 1) didn't know this about Scotland, 2) would think the point still held: Catholics are oppressed in Britain the same way Protestants are oppressed in Poland, and we can hardly invade to force that change.