‘A superbly wise and accomplished biographer’ Dominic Sandbrook, Sunday Times, Books of the Year
‘In Tim Blanning, Frederick has found the ideal biographer. A leading Cambridge-based historian of early modern Europe, with a particular expertise in Habsburg studies, he knows the period and the archives as well as anyone alive. Where previous lives have focused on one aspect or another of the subject, this one is as authoritative on literature and music as on the more martial arts. Blanning evokes Old Fritz in all his cold-blooded brilliance, ranging from the king’s operatic tastes to his gastronomic and erotic predilections’ Daniel Johnson, Sunday Times
‘Highly readable and deeply researched’ Andrew Roberts, Mail on Sunday
‘Magisterial and insightful … This is a remarkable portrait of an exceptionally complex man, as readable as it is scholarly’ George Goodwin, History Today
‘Tim Blanning’s Frederick the Great is as enthralling on its subject’s horribly abusive upbringing as on his bold, sometimes foolhardy military campaigns. Blanning is particularly acute in inquiring, without, prurience, into the notorious question of Frederick’s sexuality’ Ritchie Robertson, The Times Literary Supplement, Books of the Year
‘Tim Blanning, an emeritus professor of history at Cambridge University, has provided a valuable service by distilling the latest scholarship for the general reader – he does an excellent job of making sense of the intricacies of 18th-century diplomacy and subjecting the ideological zeal of earlier historians to the cool eye of modern scholarship’ Economist
‘Tim Blanning’s contribution to this literature is a grand synthesis of research and writing on Frederick that probes each and every aspect his life and reign – military, political, cultural, economic and, above all, personal. The book is long – more than 600 pages of text with maps and illustrations – but is as accessible as it is erudite … Tim Blanning’s book is a suitably rich and engaging testimony to the enduring fascination we have with complexities of Europe’s philosopher-king’ Geoffrey Roberts, Irish Examiner
‘Blanning’s mastery of the daunting complexities of central Europe, with its constellation of emperors, kings, princes, electors and margraves, is impressive, as is his lucidity when navigating them … This book is a rich, dense but accessible work of high scholarship in which Blanning’s ultimate service is less to make the case for his subject but to provide all the evidence readers might need to decide for themselves just how great was Frederick the Great’ Michael Prodger, The Times
‘Potsdam, where the founding father of Prussian autocracy built the prettiest of palaces and picked the loftiest of guardsmen, [is] freshly and fascinatingly described by Tim Blanning’ Nicky Haslam, Spectator, Books of the Year
‘Superlative … Tim Blanning is that rarest of scholars, as deft in his command of government and grand strategy as he is in his handling of philosophy and opera, and is rightly regarded as one of Britain’s (indeed Europe’s) finest historians. This biography finds him at the height of his powers … What emerges, instead, from these pages is an almost sculptural, three-dimensional rendering of Frederick, one that enables its vast and protean subject to be viewed from a multiplicity of angles … a supremely nuanced account, abounding in novel assessments and insights’ John Adamson, Literary Review
PENGUIN BOOKS
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Penguin Books is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Allen Lane 2015
Published in Penguin Books 2016
Copyright © Tim Blanning, 2015
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover image: Frederick II /J.G. Schadow/Statue/1793 © akg-images/© Alamy
ISBN: 978-0-241-21699-6
List of Illustrations
List of Maps
Introduction
PART I
The Sufferings and Greatness of Frederick
1 The Inheritance
2 The Breaking of Frederick
3 The Making of Frederick
4 The Making of Frederick (Part Two)
5 The Masterful Servant of the State
6 Culture
PART II
War and Peace
7 Peace and War 1745–1756
8 The Seven Years War: The First Three Campaigns
9 The Seven Years War: Disaster and Survival
10 The Seven Years War: Why Frederick Won
11 A Long Peace, a Short War and Double Diplomacy
PART III
On the Home Front
12 Public and Nation
13 Light and Dark on the Home Front
14 Country and Town
15 At Court and at Home
Conclusion: Death and Transfiguration
Illustrations
Bibliographical Note
Further Reading
Notes
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
For Nicky, Tom, Lucy and Harry
In his winter quarters at Freiberg in Saxony on 28 January 1760 Frederick II, King in Prussia since 1740 and already enjoying the sobriquet ‘the Great’, had a nightmare, which he recounted to his Swiss secretary, Henri de Catt, when he awoke. He had dreamed that he had been arrested on the orders of his father, King Frederick William I, and was about to be carried off to the grim fortress of Magdeburg on the river Elbe. When he asked his sister what he had done to deserve it, she replied that it was because he did not love their father enough. Although he tried to protest that this was not true, he was taken away in a tumbril.1 As we shall see, this was an understandable shriek from the subconscious mind at what was probably his darkest hour.** During the previous campaign he had come within a whisker of total defeat at the hands of his enemies at the battle of Kunersdorf (12 August 1759) on the river Oder, a disaster compounded by his own obstinate folly in allowing the Austrians to force the capitulation of a substantial Prussian corps at Maxen in Saxony three months later. Ill, exhausted, depressed and despairing, Frederick could not even find solace in an untroubled night’s sleep.
That the ghost who came to haunt him was paternal was no accident. So deep was the imprint bludgeoned into Frederick by his terrifying father that it could never be erased. One episode, from the summer of 1730, when Frederick was eighteen, will illustrate their relationship. He had spent the morning, as usual, on the parade ground, his body encased in a tight uniform and tight boots, his hair crimped close to his scalp and gathered in a pigtail. Released after lunch, he could retire to his private apartment in the royal palace, where the virtuoso flautist Johann Joachim Quantz was waiting. Frederick had made his acquaintance at Dresden two years earlier on a visit to the sybaritic court of Augustus ‘the Strong’, King of Poland and Elector of Saxony. Frederick’s doting mother, Queen Sophia Dorothea, had then provided the necessary funds to bring Quantz to Prussia twice a year to give him tuition. This all had to be kept strictly secret from the king, however, for he regarded anything smacking of high culture as ‘effeminate’. Out of the royal gaze Frederick could shed the military uniform he found so distasteful and slip into something more comfortable – a sumptuous red silk dressing-gown covered in gold brocade – could let his hair down both literally and metaphorically and turn to music-making. This agreeable après-midi d’une flûte was rudely interrupted when Frederick’s intimate friend Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte burst in with the warning that the king, suspecting that something effeminate was going on, was on his way upstairs and on the warpath. Quantz was bundled into a closet together with the instruments and the sheet music, the dressing-gown was discarded, the uniform pulled on again. When he arrived puffing and panting, the short and stout Frederick William was not deceived, especially as Frederick had had no time to remove the modish chignon in which his hair was arranged. Although the hiding-place of Quantz and Katte was missed, the offending clothes were soon located and thrown straight on the fire. A cache of French-language books was confiscated and sent off to be sold.2
Although this was only one of many humiliations inflicted on the crown prince, it may have been the last straw, for almost immediately afterwards he tried to run away from Prussia to England, taking advantage of a journey with his father to the Rhineland.** That ended in disaster. Although Frederick William did not carry out his threat to have his son and heir executed for desertion, he did make him witness the beheading of his accomplice, friend and possible lover Lieutenant von Katte. A long and very arduous process of rehabilitation followed, punctuated by further acts of brutal degradation. Relief was obtained only when Frederick performed what he saw as the ultimate act of submission – marriage. Not to love a bride in an age of arranged marriages was normal; to make a secret vow to put her aside as soon as the parental match-maker died was more unusual. Frederick objected to his wife because she was unintellectual, a devout Christian and his father’s choice. It is also likely that a more fundamental objection was her sex.
Partial relief was upgraded to total release when Frederick William I died in 1740. At the age of twenty-eight, Frederick could now set about his psychological rehabilitation. This he did in three ways. Firstly, he deployed the very considerable financial assets inherited from his father to create for himself a comfortable, not to say luxurious, material environment. He built an opera house, enlarged two palaces and commissioned a new one; expanded his musical establishment; bought clothes, pictures, books, porcelain, snuff-boxes and other objets d’art, many of which he lavished on his male friends; and generally turned his father’s Sparta into Athens (or even Babylon).** Secondly, he gathered around him a French-speaking intelligentsia to provide him with intellectual stimulation and to serve as an audience for his wit, philosophical disquisitions, literary creations and musical performances. The ambience of this cercle intime was both homosocial and homoerotic and, for Frederick himself, probably homosexual too. This aspect of his life should not be seen as something peripheral. As he himself made plain,†† this cultural self-fashioning was central to his identity, aspiration and achievement.
It was also intimately related to his third route to repairing the damage inflicted by his father: to do what the latter desired most, but to do it better. This should not be seen as a separate category: the cultural and the power-political advanced not so much in tandem as dialectically, the one feeding off the other. It meant the assertion of the rights of the Hohenzollern family against the rival Wettins of Saxony, Wittelsbachs of Bavaria or Habsburgs of Austria, and the elevation of Prussia to great-power status. Frederick William I had forged the weapons but had been too timid to make use of them. His son would prove he was more of a man than his father by supplying the missing audacity, resolution and endurance. If only Frederick William could have been present when he invaded Silesia in 1740 or routed the French at Rossbach and the Austrians at Leuthen in 1757! In a sense he was, even if only in Frederick’s subconscious mind. Six months after the nightmare recounted to de Catt in January 1760, he dreamed of his father again. By this time, the desperate military situation had been stabilized. When the dream began, Frederick was at Strassburg with the Austrian Field Marshal Daun. He was then suddenly transported to the palace of Charlottenburg near Berlin where his father was waiting for him, together with his most trusted general, Prince Leopold of Anhalt-Dessau. ‘Have I done well?’ asked Frederick. ‘Yes,’ said Frederick William. ‘Then I am content,’ replied Frederick. ‘Your approval is worth more to me than that of everyone else in the universe.’3
Frederick was on the throne for forty-six years and was exceptionally active in all spheres, at home and abroad. To view his reign as a prolonged exercise in therapy would of course be absurdly reductionist. Many and powerful were the constraints and influences operating on him. Indeed, his life could be said to be a perfect illustration of Marx’s dictum that ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please.’ Obviously we shall never know how Frederick might have turned out if his father had been understanding, loving and supportive. On the other hand, there was no even trajectory from 1740 to 1786. This was not a steady-state universe; rather there was one big bang, the explosion occurring less than a year after his accession when he took the decision to seize the Austrian province of Silesia. To put it simply, he began by robbing an apparently defenceless woman and spent the rest of his life trying to hang on to his booty, a herculean effort which coloured all his foreign and domestic policies and actions. So much flowed from that primal act that his state of mind following the prolonged trauma of adolescence and early manhood is a legitimate, not to say essential, dimension to an understanding of his amazing life.
