Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (34 page)

If the monarch himself and the officials of the central bureaucracy were open to influences from the business community, the same applied to an even greater degree to the local agents of the state in the towns. Many tax commissioners saw themselves less as the executor of the state’s will in the locality than as conduits for information and influence from the periphery to the centre. They were easily pressed into the service of local entrepreneurs – in 1768, for example, we find Tax Commissioner Canitz of Calbe on the river Saale demanding that trade restrictions with Saxony be lifted so that local wool manufacturers can sell their wares at the Leipzig trade fair. The candour (even brusqueness) of the reports filed by some provincial officials suggests that they saw their input, based on familiarity with local conditions, as a crucial corrective to the misconceptions of the central bureaucracy.
⁸⁵

On 16 December 1740, Frederick II of Prussia led an army of 27,000 men out of Brandenburg across the lightly defended frontier of Habsburg Silesia. Despite the wintry conditions, the Prussians swept through the province meeting only light resistance from Austrian forces. By the end of January, only six weeks later, virtually all of Silesia, including the capital Breslau, was in Frederick’s hands. The invasion was the most important single political action of Frederick’s life. It was a decision taken by the king alone, against the advice of his most senior diplomatic and military advisers.
¹
The acquisition of Silesia changed permanently the political balance within the Holy Roman Empire and thrust Prussia into a dangerous new world of great-power politics. Frederick was fully aware of the shock effect his assault would have on international opinion, but he could hardly have foreseen the European transformations that would unfold from that easy winter campaign.

It is worth pausing to reflect on the man who single-handedly launched the Silesian wars and remained the custodian of the Hohenzollern territories for forty-six years – nearly as long as his illustrious predecessor the Great Elector. The persona of this gifted and spirited monarch enthralled contemporaries and has fascinated historians since. Getting a sense of who the king was is no simple matter, however, for Frederick was enormously loquacious (his posthumously published oeuvres run to thirty volumes), but rarely self-revealing. His writing and speech reflected a quintessentially eighteenth-century esteem for
esprit
– the style was aphoristic, light and economical, the tone always detached:
encyclopaedic, amused, ironic or even mocking. But behind the laboured gags of the satirical verses and the cool, reasoning prose of the historical memoirs and the political memoranda, the man himself remains elusive.

About the superiority of his intellect there can be no doubt. Throughout his life, Frederick devoured books: Fénelon, Descartes, Molière, Bayle, Boileau, Bossuet, Corneille, Racine, Voltaire, Locke, Wolff, Leibniz, Cicero, Caesar, Lucian, Horace, Gresset, Jean-Baptiste Rousseau, Montesquieu, Tacitus, Livy, Plutarch, Sallust, Lucretius, Cornelius Nepos and hundreds more. He was always reading new books, but he also regularly reread the texts that were most important to him. German literature was a cultural blind spot. In one of the eighteenth century’s funniest effusions of literary bile, Frederick, a grumpy old man of sixty-eight, denounced the German language as a ‘semi-barbarian’ idiom in which it was ‘physically impossible’, even for an author of genius, to achieve superior aesthetic effects. German writers, the king wrote, ‘take pleasure in a diffuse style, they pile parenthesis upon parenthesis, and often you don’t find until you reach the end of the page the verb on which the meaning of the entire sentence depends’.
²

So visceral was Frederick’s need for the company and stimulation of books that he had a mobile ‘field library’fitted up for use during campaigns. Writing (always in French) was also important, not just as a means of communicating his thoughts to others, but also as a psychological refuge. It was always his aspiration to combine the daring and resilience of the man of action with the critical detachment of the
philosophe
. His coupling of the two species, encapsulated in the youthful self-description ‘
roi philosophe
’, meant that neither of his roles had an absolute claim over him: he passed as a philosopher among kings and a king among philosophers. His letters from the battlefield at the lowest points in his military fortunes pretend to the true stoic’s fatalism and immunity from care. The essays on practical and theoretical matters, conversely, breathe the confidence and authority of one who wields real power.

Frederick was also an accomplished musician. His preference for the flute was entirely in character, for this instrument more than any other was associated with the cultural prestige of France. The transverse flutes that Frederick played were a recent invention of the French instrument makers who had transformed the old cylindrical, six-holed flute into the subtle and chromatically versatile conically bored instrument of the baroque era. The most renowned players of the early eighteenth century
were all French. French composers – Philidor, de la Barre, Dornel, Monteclaire – also dominated the flute repertoire. This instrument thus carried a strong note of that cultural superiority that Frederick and many of his German contemporaries associated with France. The king took his flute-playing seriously. His tutor, the virtuoso flautist and composer Quantz, was paid a salary of 2,000 thalers a year, which placed him on a par with some of the most senior civil servants in the kingdom – by contrast, Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach, a composer of infinitely greater historical significance who worked for Frederick as a keyboard player, was paid only a fraction of this sum.
³
Frederick practised and performed on the flute incessantly, with a perfectionism verging on the obsessive. Even during campaigns, his tuneful warbling could be heard at evening across the Prussian encampments. He was also a gifted composer, though his works were competent and graceful rather than brilliant.

18. Johann Gottlieb Glume
, Frederick the Great before the Seven Years War

The relationship between Frederick’s political writing and his practice as ruler was remarkably straightforward. At the centre of his thinking was the maintenance and extension of the state’s power. Notwithstanding its rather misleading title, Frederick’s famous early essay
The Anti-Machiavel
set out quite clearly his position on the permissibility of the
pre-emptive strike and the ‘war of interest’, in which rights are in dispute, the prince’s cause is just and he is obliged to resort to force in order to prosecute the interests of his people.
⁴
A clearer blueprint for the seizure of Silesia in 1740 and the Saxon invasion of 1756 could hardly be asked for. He was even more outspoken in the two Political Testaments (1752 and 1768) he penned for the private edification of his successor. The Second Testament spoke with remarkable
sang froid
about how ‘useful’ it would be for Prussia to absorb Saxony and Polish Prussia (the territory dividing East Prussia from Brandenburg and Eastern Pomerania), thus ‘rounding out’ its borders and rendering the eastern extremity of the kingdom defensible. There was no reference to the liberation of coreligionists or the defence of ancient right, just uninhibited fantasizing about the state’s expansion.
⁵
It is here that Frederick comes closest to the ‘foreign-political nihilism’ of which one historian has accused him.
⁶

Frederick was also a formidable and highly original historian. Taken as a whole, the
History of the House of Brandenburg
(completed in February 1748), the
History of My Own Times
(completed in a first draft in 1746), the
History of the Seven Years War
(completed in 1764) and his memoir on events during the decade between the Peace of Hubertusburg and the first Polish partition (completed in 1775) amount to the first comprehensive historical reflection on the evolution of the Prussian lands, despite a tendency to superficial judgements.
⁷
So attractive and cogent are Frederick’s historical notes and memoirs that they have shaped perceptions of his reign – and those of his predecessors – ever since. In Frederick II, the sharp awareness of historical change that one senses in the political testaments of the Great Elector and Frederick William I is raised to the level of self-consciousness. Perhaps this was because the absence of a divine providence from Frederick’s universe made it impossible for him to embed himself and his work within a timeless order of truth and prophecy. Whereas his father Frederick William I closed his Political Testament of February 1722 with the pious wish that his son and his successors might prosper until the ‘end of the world’ with ‘the help of God through Jesus Christ’, the opening passage of Frederick’s Testament of 1752 confronted the contingent and fleeting character of all historical achievement: ‘I know that the moment of death destroys men and their projects and that everything in the cosmos is subject to the laws of change.’
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Throughout his life, Frederick displayed a remarkable disregard for
the conventional pieties of his era. He was vehemently irreligious: in the Political Testament of 1768, he described Christianity as ‘an old metaphysical fiction, stuffed with miracles, contradictions and absurdities, which was spawned in the fevered imaginations of the Orientals and then spread to our Europe, where some fanatics espoused it, some intriguers pretended to be convinced by it and some imbeciles actually believed it.’
⁹
He was also unusually relaxed on questions of sexual morality. Voltaire’s memoirs recall the case of a man who was sentenced to death for engaging in sexual intercourse with a she-donkey. The sentence was personally annulled by Frederick on the grounds that ‘in his lands one enjoyed freedom of both conscience and penis’.
¹⁰
Whether or not this story is true (and Voltaire is not always to be trusted on such matters), it conveys an authentic sense of the libertinism that prevailed in Frederick’s milieu. Jules Offray de la Mettrie was a sometime star of Frederick’s court and author of the materialist treatise
Man as Machine
(
l’Homme Machine
) in which he expounded the view that man is merely a digestive tract with a sphincter at both ends. Mettrie found time during his sojourn in Berlin to write two essays on scurrilous themes:
The Art of Orgasm
(
l’Art de jouir
) and
The Little Man with a Big Prick
(
Le Petit Homme è grande queue
). Baculard d’Arnaud, another of Frederick’s French guests, was the author of a study on
The Art of Fucking
(
l’Art de foutre
); Frederick himself is believed to have written a verse (now sadly lost) exploring the pleasures of the orgasm.

Was Frederick homosexual? A contemporary
mémoire secrète
published pseudonymously in London alleged that the Prussian king presided over a court of catamites, enjoying sex with courtiers, stable hands and passing boys at regular intervals during the day. The thankless Voltaire – who had himself once professed his love for Frederick in openly erotic terms – later alleged in his memoirs that the king was in the habit after his
lever
of enjoying a quarter-hour of ‘schoolboy amusements’ with a chosen lackey or ‘young cadet’, though he added bitchily that ‘things didn’t go all the way’ because Frederick had never recovered from his father’s ill-treatment and was ‘unable to play the leading role’.
¹¹
German memoirists responded with dutiful counterblasts stressing the young Frederick’s vigorous heterosexuality. It is difficult to say which of these views comes closer to the truth. Voltaire was writing after his estrangement from the king with an eye to the lubricious tastes of the Paris reading public. The tales of early ‘mistresses’ all come from
the world of court rumour, gossip and hearsay. Frederick certainly confided to Grumbkow, one of the most influential ministers at his father’s court, that he felt too little attracted to the female sex to be able to imagine marriage.
¹²
It is impossible – and unnecessary – to reconstruct the king’s sexual history; he may well have abstained from sexual acts with anyone of either sex after his accession to the throne, and possibly even before.
¹³
But if he did not do it, he certainly talked about it; the conversation of the inner court circle around him was peppered with homoerotic banter. Frederick’s satirical poem
Le Palladion
(1749), which was read out to great amusement at the king’s
petits soupers
, offered reflections on the pleasures of ‘sex from the left’ and painted a lurid scene in which Darget, one of the Potsdam favourites, was sodomized by a band of lecherous Jesuits.
¹⁴