Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 47

[cahn]

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!

Comments

Re: Hohenzollern/Habsburg: The Origin Story

[selenak]

You could in theory start with the last two episodes, since they begin a new era and resume the historical narrative, and return to the Teutonic Knights or the Hanse seasons at a later time. Also, do you think Fritz had any feelings about a (Hohen)Zollern being instrumental in bringing the Habsburgs to the throne? Did MT?

I'm idly browsing the list of books owned by Peter and catalogued after this death, and whoever was cataloguing them decided that they should compose an entry this way:

Antimachiavel par Voltaire, Hage, 1746.

LOL. That's how good libraries die, archivist! Well, not quite, but yeah, clearly not the brightest bulb among cataloguers. I mean, even the year is wrong. Unless there was another, illegal edition? (Since I can't imagine Fritz authorizing a reprint in 1746.)

BTW, long shot in the dark, but: does Peter own the Antifritz pamphlet Heinrich wrote under the nome de plume "Marechal Gessler" about all Fritz did wrong in the Silesian Wars?

Peter's library

[mildred_of_midgard]

You could in theory start with the last two episodes, since they begin a new era and resume the historical narrative, and return to the Teutonic Knights or the Hanse seasons at a later time.

That's actually what I was thinking of doing, yeah. (Ugh, though work might be crazy again for the next 2-3 weeks. We'll see.)

Also, do you think Fritz had any feelings about a (Hohen)Zollern being instrumental in bringing the Habsburgs to the throne? Did MT?

No idea, really!

I mean, even the year is wrong. Unless there was another, illegal edition? (Since I can't imagine Fritz authorizing a reprint in 1746.)

Well, like you once explained to cahn, once a book was released, the cat was out of the bag; you couldn't reliably control its publication thereafter. And The Hague was one of the places people went to get their books published where censorship would have prevented it back home.

In this case, Blanning tells me:

Even by the convoluted standards of eighteenth-century bibliography, the publishing history of Anti-Machiavel is complicated. For an exhaustive account see Charles Fleischauer (ed.), L’Anti-Machiavel par Frédéric II, édition critique, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 5 (Geneva, 1958), passim. There were at least 50 editions published during Frederick’s lifetime, 34 in French, 15 in German, 4 in English, and 1 each in Italian, Dutch, Latin, Russian and Swedish—

So there could easily be a 1746 one. I did go back and inspect the handwriting closely, to make sure it wasn't me misreading a 0 that wasn't perfectly aligned at the top...but no, it's pretty clearly a 1746.

BTW, long shot in the dark, but: does Peter own the Antifritz pamphlet Heinrich wrote under the nome de plume "Marechal Gessler" about all Fritz did wrong in the Silesian Wars?

Lol, I wasn't going to read several hundred handwritten titles of books mostly in French and not in the best handwriting line by line, but SINCE you asked...two days of deciphering later...no, he did not. :P

However, other books Peter had that might be of interest to salon: at least a couple by Gundling, including the house of Brandenburg one that you were going to read for us at some point, selenak; a Reflexions sur l'Anti-Machiavel, par l'Abbe de St. Pierre that came out in 1742 (so a commentary on Fritz's commentary after Fritz's invasion); one of those "famous dead people talk to each other in the afterlife" dialogues: Charles VI and FW debating the Pragmatic Sanction in 1742!; La Pucelle, par Voltaire; and, of course, the anonymous pamphlets and other drama surrounding Fritz, Voltaire, Maupertuis, König, etc. (I don't think I saw a Doctor Akakia, though, now that I think of it.)

Lots of surprisingly specific architecture books, too, or at least surprisingly until I realized that he got Knobelsdorff's library. Maybe they were his originaly, given his interests! But I suspect at least one was K's.