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History of Friedrich II of Prussia, Called Frederick the Great was a biography of Friedrich II of Prussia written by Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle. It was first.
Table of contents

Atheist and gay, Frederick the Great was more radical than most leaders today

He introduced Friedrich d'or , a lottery , a fire insurance and to stabilize the economy a giro discount and credit bank. Frederick the Great followed his recommendations in the field of toll levies and import restrictions. When Gotzkowsky asked for a deferral during the Amsterdam banking crisis of , Frederick took over his porcelain factory, now known as KPM. Frederick modernized the Prussian bureaucracy and civil service and promoted religious tolerance throughout his realm to attract more settlers in East Prussia. With the help of French experts, he organized a system of indirect taxation , which would provide the state with more revenue than direct taxation; the French officials who would have to lease the tax failed.

Frederick was a religious skeptic , in contrast to his devoutly Calvinist father. Frederick wanted development throughout the country, adapted to the needs of each region. He was interested in attracting a diversity of skills to his country, whether from Jesuit teachers, Huguenot citizens, or Jewish merchants and bankers. Like Catherine II of Russia , Frederick recognised the educational activities of the Jesuits as an asset for the nation. We have too many Jews in the towns. They are needed on the Polish border because in these areas Hebrews alone perform trade.

As soon as you get away from the frontier, the Jews become a disadvantage, they form cliques, they deal in contraband and get up to all manner of rascally tricks which are detrimental to Christian burghers and merchants. I have never persecuted anyone from this or any other sect; I think, however, it would be prudent to pay attention, so that their numbers do not increase. Jews on the Polish border were therefore encouraged to perform all the trade they could and received the same protection and support from the king as any other Prussian citizen.

In territories he conquered from Poland, Frederick persecuted Polish Roman Catholic churches by confiscating goods and property, exercising strict control of churches, and interfering in church administration []. As Frederick made more wasteland arable, Prussia looked for new colonists to settle the land.

To encourage immigration, he repeatedly emphasized that nationality and religion were of no concern to him. This policy allowed Prussia's population to recover very quickly from its considerable losses during Frederick's three wars. Like many leading figures in the Age of Enlightenment, Frederick was a Freemason , and his membership legitimized the group and protected it against charges of subversion.

Frederick had many famous buildings constructed in his capital Berlin, most of which still stand today, such as the Berlin State Opera , the Royal Library today the State Library Berlin , St. However, the king preferred spending his time in his summer residence at Potsdam, where he built the palace of Sanssouci , the most important work of Northern German rococo. Sanssouci French for "carefree" or "without worry" , was a refuge for Frederick. As a great patron of the arts, Frederick was a collector of paintings and ancient sculptures; his favorite artist was Jean-Antoine Watteau.

The picture gallery at Sanssouci "represents a unique synthesis of the arts in which architecture, painting, sculpture and the decorative arts enter into dialogue with each other, forming a compendium of the arts. Both the wall paneling of the galleries and the diamond shapes of the floor consist of white and yellow marble. Paintings by different schools were displayed strictly separately: 17th-century Flemish and Dutch paintings filled the western wing and the gallery's central building, while Italian paintings from the High Renaissance and Baroque were exhibited in the eastern wing.

Sculptures were arranged symmetrically or in rows in relation to the architecture. Frederick was a patron of music as well as a gifted musician who played the transverse flute. The Hohenfriedberger Marsch , a military march , was supposedly written by Frederick to commemorate his victory in the Battle of Hohenfriedberg during the Second Silesian War.

What’s So Great About Frederick? The Warrior King of Prussia

His court musicians included C. Frederick aspired to be a Philosopher king ; he joined the Freemasons in and corresponded with key French Enlightenment figures. While using German as a working language in the army and with his administration, Frederick read and wrote his literary works in French and also generally used that language with his closest relatives or friends. Though he had a good command of this language, his writing style was flawed; he had troubles with its orthography and always had to rely on French proofreaders.

Frederick disliked the German language and literature, explaining that German authors "pile parenthesis upon parenthesis, and often you find only at the end of an entire page the verb on which depends the meaning of the whole sentence". Also, he was cool toward the revival of German culture in the later part of his reign, as he was unimpressed by the authors of the " Sturm und Drang " movement and remained of essentially classical taste.

Many German rulers sought to emulate the success of Louis XIV of France and adopted French tastes and manners, though often adapted to the German cultural context. On the other hand, while still considering the German culture of his time to be inferior to that of France or Italy, he did try to foster its development. He thought that it had been hindered by the devastating wars of the 17th century the Thirty Years' War, the Ottoman wars, the invasions of Louis XIV but that with some time and effort, it could equal or even surpass its rivals.

He disapproved of the luxury and extravagance of the French royal court, and he ridiculed German princes especially Augustus III, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland who imitated French sumptuousness. Also, Frederick the Great was dismissive of the radical philosophy of later French thinkers such as Rousseau though he in fact sheltered Rousseau from persecution for a number of years , and grew to believe that the French cultural golden age was drawing to a close.

However, he does not seem to have taken much interest in the work of the society. Frederick also promoted the use of German instead of Latin in the field of law, though mainly for practical reasons.

By Thomas Carlyle

The king's criticism led many German writers to attempt to impress Frederick with their writings in the German language and thus prove its worthiness. Many statesmen, including Baron vom und zum Stein , were also inspired by Frederick's statesmanship. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe gave his opinion of Frederick during a visit to Strasbourg Strassburg by writing:. Well, we had not much to say in favour of the constitution of the Reich; we admitted that it consisted entirely of lawful misuses, but it rose therefore the higher over the present French constitution which is operating in a maze of unlawful misuses, whose government displays its energies in the wrong places and therefore has to face the challenge that a thorough change in the state of affairs is widely prophesied.

In contrast when we looked towards the north, from there shone Frederick, the Pole Star, around whom Germany, Europe, even the world seemed to turn Frederick the Great was keenly interested in land use, especially draining swamps and opening new farmland for colonizers who would increase the kingdom's food supply.

He called it "peopling Prussia" Peuplierungspolitik. About a thousand new villages were founded in his reign that attracted , immigrants from outside Prussia. He told Voltaire, "Whoever improves the soil , cultivates land lying waste and drains swamps, is making conquests from barbarism". This program created roughly 60, hectares , acres of new farmland, but also eliminated vast swaths of natural habitat , destroyed the region's biodiversity , and displaced numerous native plant and animal communities.

Frederick saw this project as the " taming " and "conquering" of nature, which, in its wild form, he regarded as "useless" and "barbarous"—an attitude that reflected his enlightenment-era, rationalist sensibilities. Frederick's interest in land reclamation may have resulted from his upbringing. As a child, his father, Frederick William I, made young Frederick work in the region's provinces, teaching the boy about the area's agriculture and geography.

This created an interest in cultivation and development that powered the boy as he became ruler. The king founded the first veterinary school in Germany. Unusual for his time and aristocratic background, he criticized hunting as cruel, rough and uneducated.


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When someone once asked Frederick why he did not wear spurs when riding his horse, he replied, "Try sticking a fork into your naked stomach, and you will soon see why. In he wrote to his sister Wilhelmine that people indifferent to loyal animals would not be devoted to their human comrades either, and that it was better to be too sensitive than too harsh.

He was also close to nature and issued decrees to protect plants. Aarsleff notes that before Frederick came to the throne in , the Prussian Academy of Sciences Berlin Academy was overshadowed by similar bodies in London and Paris. During the reign of Frederick's father, the Academy had been closed down as an economy measure, but Frederick promptly re-opened it when he took the throne in Frederick made French the official language and speculative philosophy the most important topic of study.

However the Academy was in a crisis for two decades at mid-century, due to scandals and internal rivalries such as the debates between Newtonianism and Leibnizian views, and the personality conflict between Voltaire and Maupertuis. At a higher level Maupertuis, the director —59 and a monarchist, argued that the action of individuals was shaped by the character of the institution that contained them, and they worked for the glory of the state.

By contrast d' Alembert took a republican rather than monarchical approach and emphasized the international Republic of Letters as the vehicle for scientific advance. Immanuel Kant published religious writings in Berlin which would have been censored elsewhere in Europe. Most modern biographers agree that Frederick was primarily homosexual , and that his sexual orientation was central to his life. At age 16, Frederick seems to have embarked upon a youthful affair with Peter Karl Christoph von Keith, a year-old page of his father. Rumors of the liaison spread in the court and the "intimacy" between the two boys provoked the condemnation of even his elder and favorite sister, Wilhelmine , [15] who wrote, "Though I had noticed that he was on more familiar terms with this page than was proper in his position, I did not know how intimate the friendship was.

As a result, Keith was dismissed from his service to the king and sent away to a regiment by the Dutch border, while Frederick was sent to Wusterhausen in order to "repent of his sin. Frederick's physician Johann Georg Ritter von Zimmermann claimed that Frederick had suffered a minor deformity during an operation to cure gonorrhea in , and convinced himself that he was impotent, but pretended to be homosexual in order to appear that he was still virile and capable of intercourse, albeit with men. This story is doubted by Wolfgang Burgdorf, who is of the opinion that "Frederick had a physical disgust of women" and therefore "was unable to sleep with them.

Challenged by Algarotti that northern Europeans lacked passion, Frederick penned for him an erotic poem which imagined Algarotti in the throes of sexual intercourse with a female partner referred to as Chloris. He immediately separated from his wife when his father died seven years later. He would later only pay her formal visits once a year. William Hogarth 's painting The Toilette features a flautist who stands next to a painting of Zeus , as an eagle, abducting Ganymede , which may be a satirical depiction of Frederick — thereby publicly outing him as a homosexual as early as Frederick certainly spent much of his time at Sanssouci, his favourite residence in Potsdam, in a circle that was exclusively male, though a number of his entourage were married.

Their literary correspondence and friendship, which spanned almost 50 years, was marked by mutual intellectual fascination, and began as a flirtation. Voltaire's angry attack on Maupertuis, the President of Frederick's academy, in the form of Le Diatribe du Docteur Akakia provoked Frederick to burn the pamphlet publicly and put Voltaire under house arrest, after which Voltaire left Prussia.

The revelations and language were strikingly similar to those detailed in a scurrilous pamphlet published in French, in London in In , Frederick signed a Treaty of Amity and Commerce with the United States of America , recognising the independence of the new nation. The agreement included a novel clause, whereby the two leaders of the executive branches of either country guaranteed a special and humane detention for prisoners of war.

Near the end of his life, Frederick grew increasingly solitary. His circle of close friends at Sanssouci gradually died off with few replacements, and Frederick became increasingly critical and arbitrary, to the frustration of the civil service and officer corps. The populace of Berlin always cheered the king when he returned to the city from provincial tours or military reviews, but Frederick evinced little pleasure from his popularity with the common people, preferring instead the company of his pet Italian greyhounds , [] whom he referred to as his " marquises de Pompadour " as a jibe at the French royal mistress.

On the morning of 17 August , Frederick died in an armchair in his study at Sanssouci, aged He left instructions that he should be buried next to his greyhounds on the vineyard terrace, on the side of the corps de logis of Sanssouci. His nephew and successor Frederick William II instead ordered the body to be entombed next to his father in the Potsdam Garrison Church.

The United States Army relocated the remains to Marburg in ; in , the coffins of Frederick and his father were moved to Burg Hohenzollern. On the th anniversary of his death, on 17 August , Frederick's casket lay in state in the court of honor at Sanssouci, covered by a Prussian flag and escorted by a Bundeswehr guard of honor.

After nightfall, Frederick's body was finally laid to rest in the terrace of the vineyard of Sanssouci—in the still existing crypt he had built there—without pomp, in accordance with his will. In German memory, Frederick became a great national hero in the 19th century and many Germans said he was the greatest monarch in modern history. Nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke presented Frederick as the greatest German in centuries.

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Onno Klopp was one of the few German historians of the 19th century who denigrated and ridiculed Frederick. The novelist Thomas Mann in also attacked Frederick, arguing—like Empress Maria Theresa—that he was a wicked man who robbed Austria of Silesia, precipitating the alliance against him.

Nevertheless, with Germany humiliated after World War I, Frederick's popularity as a heroic figure remained high in Germany. Frederick's place in British historiography was established by Thomas Carlyle 's History of Frederick the Great 8 vol. In —, the Nazis glorified Frederick as a precursor to Adolf Hitler and presented Frederick as holding out hope that another miracle would again save Germany at the last moment. Dorpalen says: "The book was indeed a very courageous indictment of Hitler's irrationalism and recklessness, his ideological fanaticism and insatiable lust for power".

Craig relates that to help legitimize Nazi rule Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels commissioned artists to render fanciful images of Frederick, Bismarck, and Hitler together to postulate a historical continuum between them. Frederick's reputation was sharply downgraded after in both East and West Germany. In the 21st century, his reputation as a warrior remains strong among military historians.