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Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 47
We haven't had a new post since before December 25, so obligatory Yuletide link to this hilarious story of Frederick the Great babysitting his bratty little brother, with bonus Fritz/Fredersdorf!
1764-1772 Foreign policy: Sweden: Gustav's coup (1772)
But French diplomacy continues to be a disaster. Vergennes' initial instructions are:
* Proceed with caution
* No inciting royalist coups
* Keep a sharp eye on Ulrike
* Reconcile the Hats and the caps
* Limit any constitutional change to going back to the way things were in 1720. No *new* changes.
At the time, Gustav says he's happy with this. This tells us that he was probably *not* planning a coup the moment he became king.
But then the French foreign minister starts to get nervous about the Polish Partition, and he starts thinking a strong Sweden is the way to go. So his new policy involves writing a letter to Gustav III in December 1771, telling him that he needs to carry out a "coup de force," because the alternative is anarchy that the Russians control (so basically what's going on in Poland, which is making both Sweden and France–like Prussia, Russia, and the Turks–nervous).
But guess who doesn't get told this? Vergennes, the ambassador! Now, he's part of the King's Secret, so he should be in on all the secret diplomacy. But now we have three diplomacies: the official one, the secret one the king wants, and the secret one the foreign minister wants.
[Chevalier d'Eon: See? Me being a woman is perfectly plausible in comparison!]
So whenever Gustav brings up to Vergennes the idea that he wants to start a coup and would maybe like some money from France toward that end, Vergennes is all, "Mmm, ah, not so sure that's a great idea," and Gustav drops it.
For example, at this time there's a little interlude in Swedish history in which the burghers make an appearance: they're willing to support Gustav's coup in return for more social equality between burghers and nobles. There is a significant layer in society during this period for whom preserving the "liberty" of 1720 (which had roots in the centuries before that) and tying the monarch's hands is less important than their social program of "stop oppressing us."
However, nothing comes of this negotiation, partly because Gustav is too much of a snob, but mostly because Vergennes doesn't know his boss (one of his bosses) would want him to provide Gustav with money for this endeavor.
The correct response to reading about French diplomacy in this period is: *facepalm*.
So finally, it's May 1772, and Gustav has decided a military coup is the way to go. The First Partition of Poland is about to be completed, and Catherine is negotiating with the Turks for an end to the Russo-Turkish War. The time for Gustav to move is while she's got her hands full with Poland and Turkey, not when she's free to focus all her attention on him.
Now, in hindsight it turned out that the war with the Turks dragged on longer than expected, and she ended up with a major rebellion, the Pugachev rebellion, in 1773, in which a Cossack was pretending to be her husband Peter III and claiming to be tsar. So she really wouldn't have had her full attention for Sweden for a couple more years. But Gustav had no way to know that.
Michael Roberts' description of the coup is gripping enough that I'm just going to quote it at length:
Vergennes at last made large sums available for bribing common soldiers and underofficers. One may question whether they were really needed For it was personality rather than gold that ensured the success of the enterprise. In the twenty-four hours between the evening of the eighteenth and that of the nineteenth Gustav III displayed a steadiness of nerve and a capacity for physical endurance of which his enemies can hardly have believed him capable, together with a talent for dissembling and a histrionic ability which they knew only too well. He believed that his life was in danger; but on the evening of the eighteenth the routine of the court proceeded with much liveliness and an appearance of perfect normality: numerous guests invited to supper, including all the Senate; a dress rehearsal of the new opera Thétis och Pélée; political friends and enemies making up their parties of quadrille; and the king gracious, affable, talking at ease, manifesting not the least symptom of nervous strain under the keen scrutiny of his enemies.
When the evening was over and the guests dispersed, he rode out to inspect the Burgher patrols: their goodwill might be valuable tomorrow. He was not in bed until 3 a.m.; rose at 6; made his last preparations and gave his last orders; and by 10 was inspecting the parade at the Artillery headquarters. Thence he went to the Arsenal; thence back to the castle, with an ever-growing number of royalist officers accompanying him. The officers and underofficers of the Guards had been ordered to attend at the orderly room in the castle courtyard, and were awaiting his arrival.
He went in and addressed them; at first with visible nervousness, but gradually with assured eloquence. He told them of the danger that threatened himself; denounced the "aristocratic" rule of the Estates; gave them a written assurance that he had no intention of making himself absolute; and invited them to renounce their allegiance to the Estates and take an oath of loyalty to himself. There followed a dreadful minute of silence: the tension in the orderly room was so great that one officer fainted. At last someone cried "Yes! God save your Majesty!" and the crisis was over: with one single exception all the officers followed that example, and subscribed the oath which he tendered to them.
A guard was now set upon the chamber in the palace where the Senate was in session; its members were informed that they were under arrest; arrangements were made to provide them with lunch; and subsequently they were removed to comfortable confinement in the palace. With that, in the space of less than an hour, the revolution was in effect over; a revolution orderly, bloodless, and in the sequel marvellously magnanimous towards the vanquished.
For the king, the labors of the day were by no means over: the foreign ministers had to be given reassurances and explanations; elaborate care was taken to inform the wives and families of the imprisoned Senators that no harm should come to them; innumerable urgent letters had to be written–to Louis XV, to Lovisa Ulrika, to his brothers; not until the small hours was he able to retire in the conviction that the revolution was secure. For the first and last time in his life he had shown that he was everything that his most devoted admirers believed him to be.
In theory, this should have led to war. Catherine was invested in keeping Sweden weak, i.e. preserving the 1720 constitution, and Fritz was bound by treaty to help. But as we know, Fritz didn't want to go to war, and Britain, which also wanted peace after the Seven Years' War, threw its weight on the scales and told Catherine to calm down. Britain also knew that France would send a fleet to the Baltic to help Sweden out if Russia invaded, so the Brits told the French that if they tried any such thing, they would be facing the British navy, which they could count on being superior to their own forces.
Finally, Gustav was willing to be diplomatic about it and assure Catherine he meant no harm to her. He had actually been eyeing Norway (which belonged to Denmark), but the Danes (this is post-Struensee, so Juliana Maria and her ministers are ruling in Christian VII's name) were careful not to make any moves that might provoke a war, and Gustav didn't feel strong enough to start a war in which he was clearly the aggressor.
Since Britain refused to go to war and did its best to keep the peace, Denmark sat carefully on its hands to avoid provoking a war, Fritz scolded Gustav into playing nice with Catherine by acting like he, Fritz, was totally willing to go to war (though he was specifically trying to create the conditions where Gustav behaved himself so Prussia could remain at peace), and Catherine still had the Turks as well as Pugachev to deal with, war was avoided.
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Sweden: Gustav's coup (1772)
Also, that is a compelling account. I note an opera is involved even then. (As it will be when Gustav gets killed.) No wonder this is the Swedish King to end up a Verdi tenor!
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Sweden: Gustav's coup (1772)
He was! He had a very interesting life, and one of my last-minute book acquisitions as I was writing this series of posts in December was a biography of Vergennes. I haven't read the whole thing, only the parts relevant to this exact time period, but I have it saved for when we cover the 1770s and 1780s (which one day I do hope to do, though no promises).
And speaking of dimly remembered cross connections, Axel von Fersen was one of Gustav's guys, right? Or was he in the aristocratic opposition?
Well...it's complicated, because there were two Axel von Fersen's, and I'm not sure which one you're talking about, and for the father, the answer is "yes" to both of your questions. :P
Axel von Fersen the younger, probable lover of Marie Antoinette, was on his Grand Tour when the coup happened; he was only 16. He did serve Gustav, often pretty closely, after he became an adult, including as secret envoy to France. His father, Axel Fersen the elder, shows up more in my reading (e.g. Michael Roberts' British Diplomacy and Swedish Politics, 1758-1773, a major source for my Sweden installments), because I'm reading about the earlier period.
Axel Fersen the elder was one of the Hat aristocracy, which originally made him an opponent to the crown. However, while Gustav was crown prince, during the merry-go-round period that we talked about in the previous installment, when everything was in flux, Gustav managed to win him over. This was a major victory for Gustav, to have such a prominent aristocrat.
When the coup came, though, Axel Fersen (the Elder) prudently made sure he was nowhere around, and his support proved to be rather passive. After Gustav became king, Fersen the Elder put up a lot of opposition to his initiatives, and Wikipedia tells me he was even arrested in 1789.
How this played out in family dynamics, I'm not sure, but thank you for reminding me of the Fersens, because I've been keeping an eye out for another 18th century figure who's likely to have a French biography in e-book form for reading practice when I'm done, and Axel Fersen the Younger naturally has one. I suspect it will focus more on Marie Antoinette than anything else, but maybe we'll get some glimpses into the Fersens and Swedish politics.
(Don't hold your breath, though: I'm not even halfway through Philippe the Regent, and my daily reading accomplishments have slowed down since things have picked up again at work. Plus there's German handwriting practice, where I am foiled not only by capital letters but also archaic vocabulary. ;)
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Sweden: Gustav's coup (1772)
LOL! Yeah, I remember he was in Proud Destiny!
No wonder this is the Swedish King to end up a Verdi tenor!
Oh wait, this is the same guy?! Yeah, I can see it...
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Sweden: Gustav's coup (1772)
*facepalm* (which I wrote before your comment to that effect)
she ended up with a major rebellion, the Pugachev rebellion, in 1773, in which a Cossack was pretending to be her husband Peter III and claiming to be tsar
Whaaat.
All right, that is a gripping description of the coup! Although this sentence is ominous... For the first and last time in his life he had shown that he was everything that his most devoted admirers believed him to be.
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Sweden: Gustav's coup (1772)
That's because it's like I said in that comment, it's the correct response to reading about French diplomacy! In fact, when I was rereading this before posting it last night, I made a mental note to add a facepalm in that exact spot, then read a bit further and realized I had already put a facepalm there. So I put in the Chevalier d'Eon instead. :D
she ended up with a major rebellion, the Pugachev rebellion, in 1773, in which a Cossack was pretending to be her husband Peter III and claiming to be tsar
Whaaat.
Oh, you don't know about the Pugachev rebellion! Great, then I will do a write-up. I can't promise I'll post it this weekend, but I'm starting to flip through my books and compose it in my head.
The Pugachev Rebellion
Anyway, there was a lot of this in Russia during the Time of Troubles in the early seventeenth century, and the practice continued in the eighteenth century. There were people claiming to be any tsar who'd died young or disappeared: Peter II, Ivan VI, Peter III...Catherine had *already* had to deal with a number of would-be tsars claiming to be Peter III in the early years of her reign.
The difference between the Pugachev rebellion and previous impostors Catherine had to deal with was that this time, it wasn't local unrest aimed at some governor some guy was mad at; it was wide-scale revolt aimed at overthrowing the entire class system, all the way up to Catherine. Pugachev promised to free the peasants and exterminate the nobles. It was basically the Russian Revolution or French Revolution avant la lettre.
Pugachev got a lot of supporters because the 1768-1772 wars with Poland and Turkey had meant intensive taxation and forced recruitment into the army, and the Cossacks had had it up to *here* with that. Forced recruitment, btw, was no joke, it was for life and you never saw your family again. They would often hold a funeral before you left. And most recruits died on the way to the front without ever seeing combat.
Furthermore, when Peter the Great had modernized Russian society, and forcibly changed religious practices, a lot of people had refused to go along with him. They were called Old Believers, they were second class citizens even when they weren't being outright persecuted, and they believed their souls were in danger if they shaved their beards or cut their hair. (Peter used to go around forcibly shaving people's beards. Some people kept their beards in their pockets so they could, on Judgment Day, present it and say they had never been separated from their beards and hope to get off on a technicality.) Pugachev promises to end persecution of Old Believers and return to the old, Russian ways, not these new Western ways.
A lot of these Old Believers live in remote places like the steppes of Ukraine, where the Cossacks are. The Cossacks, like the Austrian hussars, are warrior horsemen who are allergic to authority, and often get recruited as irregular cavalry (some salon members may remember Austrian Trenck, and the looting during the battle of Soor). So they're often quite good at rebellions and putting up a good fight, but they're bad at the organizational parts, with one chain of command that everyone obeys. This is one of the advantages the Romans had over the Celts, and that the English had over the Jacobites! Many individual fierce warriors are not always the best at working together as a unit.
(Of course, this can be a problem even in super disciplined armies, like the Swedish army under Karl XII. Part of what went wrong at Poltava was his top officers refusing to cooperate with each other.)
Anyway, when Pugachev announces he's Peter III in September 1773, he gets a lot of support from his fellow Cossacks. Obviously the first set of volunteers who join him know him personally, and they don't believe him, but as he roams outside the area where he was born, more and more people who have no idea who he is, or what the short-reigning Peter III looked like, join him. He gathers an army of thousands. Hilariously, he develops a replacement court where his "courtiers" name themselves after Catherine's: there's a Count Panin, a Count Orlov, a Count Vorontsov, a Field Marshal Count Chernyshev, etc.
He also marries a woman and calls her his empress…which is kind of weird, as no matter which you spin it, he already has a wife. Either he's Peter III, in which case he's married to Catherine, or he's Emelyan Pugachev the Cossack, in which case he has a wife and kids back home that he abandoned.
Oh well! None one seems to care, the important thing is rising up and throwing off your chains. What's a little spot of bigamy in the grand scheme of things? With their growing army, the Cossacks roam the land, raping pillaging, torturing, and killing:
Peasants killed landlords, their families, and their hated overseers. Serfs who had always been considered resigned, submissive to God, the tsar, and the master, now flung themselves into orgies of cruelty. Noblemen were dragged from their hiding places, flayed, burned alive, hacked to pieces, or hanged from trees. Children were mutilated and slaughtered in front of their parents. Wives were spared only long enough to be raped in front of their husbands; then they had their throats cut or were thrown into carts and carried off as prizes.
…Desperate townspeople, not knowing what their interrogators wished to hear, gave stock answers when asked whom they considered their lawful sovereign: “Whomever you represent,” they replied.
In 1773, Catherine is so occupied with the Turks she can't send more than a few troops and not her best generals to deal with this. Furthermore, she doesn't take it super seriously at first; Russian monarchs are used to uprisings in Ukraine. (There's a reason Poltava was fought here.)
Then her first attempts to crush the rebellion are defeated by Pugachev's troops. She's forced to take it seriously, stop trying to keep it a secret from the general public and issue a manifesto proclaiming that she's dealing with it, and send more troops and better generals.
Pugachev is defeated in March 1774, and he retreats into the Urals and disappears.
Catherine starts an investigation looking to find out whether any foreign powers, like France, are implicated in this. It's quite normal for foreign powers like France to instigate local rebellions, whether that's a Jacobite rising against England or a Hungarian uprising against Austria.
All her investigation, though, only finds that Pugachev was acting on his own.
The empress then wrote to Voltaire attributing “this freakish event” to the fact that the Orenburg region “is inhabited by all the good-for-nothings of whom Russia has thought fit to rid herself over the past forty years, rather in the same spirit that the American colonies have been populated.”
Having defeated *her* tax dodgers, Catherine can now breathe a sigh of relief.
…Until Pugachev rises from the ashes! It's July 1774, he's got twenty thousand troops, he's captured a town, and he's announced his intention to march on Moscow.
Catherine has to send an army. It takes two battles (or one two-day battle) to defeat him and free ten thousand people he'd been holding captive. Pugachev will never be given the chance to spread the revolt to Moscow.
Instead, he, and his followers, learn that Catherine has finally made peace with the Turks, after 6 years of war, and there will suddenly be a lot more troops and experienced generals free for dealing with the Cossacks.
His troops start to desert, and he's forced to turn back. He keeps trying to raise new recruits, but now he's running into a PR problem:
In turning south, Pugachev was returning to his childhood home, the land of the Don Cossacks. But few impostors can be successful among people with whom they have been raised. “Why does he call himself Tsar Peter?” the Don Cossacks asked. “He is Emelyan Pugachev, the farmer, who deserted his wife Sophia and his children.”
Oops. After enough of this, and after Russian troops start to roll in in larger and more experienced numbers, Pugachev's men finally start thinking about saving their own skins. They turn on him, hand him over to the Russians on September 15, 1774, and beg for mercy.
Catherine still found it hard to believe that this illiterate peasant had come so close to overthrowing the state, but despite intensive questioning, she couldn't turn up any evidence he was doing anything but acting alone. To her credit, she refused to use torture during the interrogations.
She also had him beheaded first, then quartered, during his January 1775, execution, despite the huge disappointment this caused the eager spectators. Some of his supporters, though, were quartered first, then tortured.
In the end, this failed rebellion had huge implications for Russian history: Catherine, who had been trying to find a way to free the serfs, took away the lessons that the peasants had turned on her and the nobility had supported her. So she abandoned any further talk of ending serfdom, and though she tried to encourage more humane treatment, she considered her hands tied by the need to keep the nobles on her side. She also did not stop the nobles from severe reprisals against any serfs who were even believed to have been guilty of supporting the rebellion. All this means that very little changed in Russia in terms of the conditions that had led to this uprising, and class relations continued to play a major role for centuries to come.
Fritz faced this same problem when trying to end feudalism and by and large came to the same "keep myself in power by supporting the nobles" conclusion; Joseph made opposite choices and had to claw back most of his reforms. Leopold died too soon.
ETA: Forgot to cite my sources: all quotes from Massie, although I did have a look at Madariaga to ensure the basic outlines were correct.
Re: The Pugachev Rebellion
Much as I appreciate the shout out to my stupor mundi, I will add that this phenomonon has a much earlier precedence - as much as three fake Neros showed up after Nero's death, claiming to be him. Given that at least one of them was fairly successful in Rome's Eastern provinces for a while, it probably says something about Nero's image in the Hellenic world versus how he was perceived in Rome and Italy. (I mean, Nero's not the Emperor you would think would rally the people around him, but there you go. Titus, the second Flavian Emperor who was Emperor at the time, supposedly said re: the most succesful Nero impersonator and the trouble he caused, "who would have thought that such a little fish could stink this much".)
I would also be very surprised if there weren't a few fake Alexanders around after Alexander the Great's death. Now possession of his dead body/mummy was important to his generals and Ptolemy staged that daring body steal which is why dead Alexander ended up in Egypt and could be visited for centuries to come, but given the sheer size of his former Empire, surely in some realm or the other belonging to it a fake Alexander or two showed up? I'm speculating, though, Alexander isn't my expertise.
Re: The Pugachev Rebellion
I still find this hilarious! And thanks for the write-up. : )
Er, the rest of the comment will be about your off-hand Jacobite reference!
This is one of the advantages the Romans had over the Celts, and that the English had over the Jacobites! Many individual fierce warriors are not always the best at working together as a unit.
I think you mean "Highlanders" here instead of "Jacobites"? I mean, some Jacobites were English, many were Lowland Scots, and many were Irish. Conversely, many Highlanders were not Jacobites.
I don't actually think "Highlanders are individually fierce but not always the best at working together as a unit" was a large contributing reason why Jacobite rebellions failed. In the '45, for example, the difficulties people had working together were, I think, mainly caused by the different actors having different goals. (BPC: I want to conquer the whole of Britain! Many of the Scots: We want to dissolve the union and have Scotland for ourselves! France: We want to cause dissension in Britain!)
So do I agree that "Highlanders are individually fierce but not always the best at working together as a unit"? Well, yes and no. On the yes side, it's true that the clansmen 1) were bad at sustained and boring military work, such as siegework, 2) would go home with their spoils and then come back again later, 3) had personal loyalty to their chief, so if their chief fell they would lose morale, 4) didn't want to be far away from home for extended periods of time.
But there are also ways in which they were great at working together as a unit. The clan was a ready-made regiment with an officer structure already in place, which had great cohesion and great loyalty to the officers. Many Highlanders also had experience from modern military units abroad and in other parts of Britain and were not some sort of primitive warriors. The clans which kept traditional structures in place (like the Camerons) could mobilize much faster and with better results, compared to clans like the Campbells which began to let land to the highest bidder, thus weakening the loyalty of the tenants to the chiefs and making it less likely that they would want to serve them as soldiers. And in the Highland charge, they are working together, just working together with a different tactic than holding the line and shooting.
The Jacobite army in '45 was in some ways better coordinated than their opponents, particularly in the way that they could divide into two divisions, decide on a place to go, and then move in coordinated units and actually converge on that place in good time.
Re: The Pugachev Rebellion
Yeah, I actually typed "Highlanders" first, then figured that might confuse
Many Highlanders also had experience from modern military units abroad and in other parts of Britain and were not some sort of primitive warriors.
Indeed, indeed.
But there are also ways in which they were great at working together as a unit. The clan was a ready-made regiment with an officer structure already in place, which had great cohesion and great loyalty to the officers.
Oh, yeah, *within* a clan was great! I was thinking more of the "My clan will fight on the right!" "No, mine!" type thing. But like I said, that can happen in more impersonal armies too.
There are always trade-offs when you compare organizations where more of the relevant bonds are between individuals and where they're more between abstractions like "the employee" and "the state". The early modern period is very much a transitional time along that continuum. But in pretty much any time, you'll see some elements of both, which is why I say "continuum".
Thank you for elaborating on the nuance that it was irresponsible of me not to elaborate on!
Re: The Pugachev Rebellion
No worries, that elaboration was probably my job! *g* I mean, I could not resist when you brought it up.
There are always trade-offs when you compare organizations where more of the relevant bonds are between individuals and where they're more between abstractions like "the employee" and "the state".
Yeah, that's very true.
Re: The Pugachev Rebellion
The thing is, I would not have been able to resist either, if someone had come in saying what I said there! I used to rant about people's sloppy language around Jacobites vs. Highlanders vs. Scots vs. Catholics when I was a teenager! It was only because it was an aside this time that I forgot to go back to it. :D
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Re: The Pugachev Rebellion
Voltaire found it hilarious too!
When she passed along the information that the impertinent fellow was actually claiming to be Peter III, Voltaire picked up her airy, dismissive tone, mentioning to d’Alembert “this new husband who has turned up in the province of Orenburg.”
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Wow! Although it seems like it never really got all that far...
The empress then wrote to Voltaire attributing “this freakish event” to the fact that the Orenburg region “is inhabited by all the good-for-nothings of whom Russia has thought fit to rid herself over the past forty years, rather in the same spirit that the American colonies have been populated.”
I laughed!
“Why does he call himself Tsar Peter?” the Don Cossacks asked. “He is Emelyan Pugachev, the farmer, who deserted his wife Sophia and his children.”
Well then!
Fritz faced this same problem when trying to end feudalism and by and large came to the same "keep myself in power by supporting the nobles" conclusion; Joseph made opposite choices and had to claw back most of his reforms. Leopold died too soon.
Hm. Was there anyone who didn't come to this conclusion (besides Leopold)?
Re: 1764-1772 Foreign policy: Sweden: Gustav's coup (1772)
The correct response to reading about French diplomacy in this period is: *facepalm*.
LOL forever. Like
That is a gripping description of the coup!
For the first and last time in his life he had shown that he was everything that his most devoted admirers believed him to be.
Again like