CHAPTER TWO

The Historian King

WHEN THE ENGLISH MUSIC HISTORIAN and composer Charles Burney visited Prussia in 1771, he managed to get an audience with Johann Joachim Quantz, Frederick II’s instructor in flute and composition, who had been at the court since December 1741. Quantz’s position at court was unique. Frederick paid his teacher the princely sum of two thousand thalers a year—by contrast, C.P.E. Bach, the king’s harpsichordist (later clavichordist and fortepianist), received only three hundred. In retrospect, this seems odd: of the two men, Bach was the more innovative and exploratory composer and musician. He was less floral than Quantz; he used starker and leaner thematic material, expanding the sound-world of the baroque. His influence on the subsequent development of European music was immeasurably greater than Quantz’s. Yet Frederick stuck to his flute master for forty years, according him an extraordinary authority over the musical life of his court.1 Burney was astonished by the steadfastness of the king’s musical taste:

[Mr Quantz] told me that His Majesty . . . played no other concertos than those which he [Quantz] had expressly composed for his use, which amounted to three hundred, and these he performed in rotation. This exclusive attachment to the productions of his old master may appear somewhat contracted, however, it implies a constancy of disposition but rarely to be found among princes. . . . It is an indication of a sound judgement and of great discernment, in His Majesty, to adhere thus firmly to the productions of a period which may be called the Augustan Age of music; to stem the torrent of caprice and fashion with such unshaken constancy is possessing a kind of stet sol by which Apollo and his sons are prevented from running riot or changing from good to bad and from bad to worse.2

It is hard to think of a document that better conveys the steady-state quality of the culture at Frederick II’s court. The king could, like so many of his contemporaries, have chased every new fashion; instead he chose to replay and replay the same corpus of works by the same master, maintaining the rotation system for forty years. He favoured the conventionalism of Quantz over the developmental, exploratory path of C.P.E. Bach.3 The metaphor of the stet sol, a device by which the rays of the sun could be fixed and projected onto a wall through an aperture or prism, captures precisely the stasis of the frederician microcosm, a world in which time seemed to stand still and the operations of taste and fashion—of history—were suspended. And this was a direct expression and articulation of the king’s power: although, as Burney conceded, there were small avant-garde ‘schisms’ in Berlin’s musical life, anything that did not conform to the dominant taste (Quantz in instrumental music, the Grauns and Hasse in opera) was unlikely to prosper.4

The resulting stagnation should not be written off as evidence merely of the king’s cultural conservatism. There was more to it than that. It reflected a preference for recursive, nondevelopmental paradigms that can be discerned across a wide range of his activities. This chapter explores the relationship between the king’s historicity and his distinctive temporal awareness. Frederick II’s philosophical understanding of history was indebted to the fashionable linear stadialism of the late Enlightenment. But his temporality—his intuitive grasp of the felt texture of time—was strikingly recursive and nonlinear. He experienced—and helped to bring about—momentous geopolitical change during his reign, yet his sense of time gravitated towards an aestheticised stasis. The chapter explores this tension and enquires after possible reasons for it, focusing first on his historical writings and then on a range of other political and cultural practices—his reaction to processes of socioeconomic change, his preferences as a collector of paintings, and the arrangements he made for his own burial and memorialisation.

But before I turn to the king’s writings, it is worth recalling four important differences between his reign and that of his great-grandfather, the Great Elector. First, whereas the Great Elector was an institution-builder who ruled from the midst of his councillors, inhabiting a place at the centre of an executive structure he was himself gradually assembling, Frederick took up a position at one remove from the formal structures of the state. There was a royal court in Berlin, but for much of the latter part of his reign, Frederick never attended it.5 Unlike his ancestor, he had little contact with the day-to-day work of the ministries and little contact with his ministers, whose role was usurped by the king’s own secretaries. Frederick listened to officials and friends he trusted and took advice on many questions, but the kind of collective brainstorming of political options that took place around the Great Elector in the Privy Council was unknown in Frederick’s time. The building he was most enduringly associated with was not the city palace in Berlin, or the vast Neues Palais constructed outside Potsdam after his return from the Seven Years’ War, but the small summer palace of Sans Souci, which could scarcely accommodate guests, let alone support the day-to-day business of a king ruling from the heart of government. By contrast with the Great Elector, who had spoken above all of his ‘sovereignty’, Frederick often referred to ‘the state’, invoking it as a transcendent abstraction, but in reality his reign saw a marked personalisation of power. And this rhetorical self-distancing from the structures of the state left its imprint, as we shall see, on the temporal texture of his reign.

Second, whereas the Elector was a passionate adherent of the Reformed faith, Frederick, probably a Voltairean deist, adopted a sceptical, non-confessional standpoint. Although he took his scepticism to mark a civilisational advance on the blind faith and superstition of many of his more devout contemporaries, he lacked that sense of belonging to an imperilled vanguard religion that had been so important to his grandfather. Third, the struggle with the estates that had so preoccupied the Great Elector was obsolete by Frederick’s time. It was not the power and independence of the provincial nobilities that troubled this king, whose own private habitus was strikingly aristocratic, but their vulnerability to socioeconomic change. The linkage between the consolidation of state authority and the political neutralisation of domestic elites thus forfeited its utility and legitimating power.

Finally, the geopolitical settings were fundamentally different. When the Great Elector came to the throne in 1640, he inherited a monarchy broken and paralysed by the Thirty Years’ War. Berlin was so ruined and so exposed to the depredations of foreign troops that it was at first impossible to take up residence there. The army was nonexistent. The Brandenburg-Prussia Frederick II inherited one hundred years later was quite different. It faced no imminent geopolitical threats and possessed a large army that, though it had been only sparingly used, was acknowledged to be one of the best in Europe. The two reigns were thus animated by quite different logics. The Elector’s Brandenburg was still, for all its efforts and accomplishments, a small player in a world where the big players decided the important outcomes. By contrast, Frederick’s reign opened with one of the most unexpected and shocking initiatives of modern European diplomatic history—the unprovoked Prussian invasion of the Habsburg province of Silesia in December 1740. The king fought three ‘Silesian Wars’, in 1740–42, in 1744–45, and again in 1756–63, to retain this valuable acquisition. Although he was often tactically on the defensive, the reign was inaugurated and defined by Prussia’s preemptive application of overwhelming force in 1740, and again in 1756, when he launched a preemptive invasion of Saxony in order to prevent his opponents from using it as a base for their operations against him. Prussia had become a shaper of the European order.

Why Should a King Write History?

As a young man, the future Frederick II styled himself the roi philosophe, and the term has since become a kind of logo for his reign, defining a moment in Prussian and European history when power and philosophy entered into a uniquely intimate partnership. In reality, Frederick was far more influential as a historian than he ever became as a philosopher. His theoretical treatises, though elegantly composed, are light on intellectual substance and lack originality. They seem more concerned with striking poses than with solving real problems. His historical writings, by contrast, mark out a new point of departure. The Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la maison de Brandebourg, the most elegant and original of the historical texts, was and remains to this day a tour de force. This concise, artfully constructed narrative achieved such an attractive and plausible synthesis that it shaped—and continues to shape—the historical memory of Brandenburg-Prussia. It is the roi historien, not the roi philosophe, whose influence has endured.

About the seriousness of the king’s historiographical enterprise there can be no doubt. He returned to it at intervals throughout his reign, producing new texts, but also reworking old ones. The first study was the ‘History of the First Silesian War’, begun in 1742. Four years later, after the Peace of Dresden, a ‘History of the Second Silesian War’ followed; Frederick now revised the earlier piece and worked the two essays into an ensemble. They were revised once again under the new title Histoire de mon temps in 1775. The Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la maison de Brandebourg, which surveyed the history of the Hohenzollern lands and dynasty before his own accession to the throne, was the product of nearly two years of intermittent writing and research in 1746–48; parts of it were presented as papers to the Akademie der Wissenschaften in Berlin. Only in 1751 was this text—in a heavily revised and abridged version—published under the title by which it is known today. Further texts followed after the end of the Seven Years’ War, covering intervals of time spanning the period between the outbreak of the Seven Years’ War in 1756 and the aftermath of the War of the Bavarian Succession in 1778.6

Most of the writing was based on genuine documentary research, though not necessarily always the king’s own. In the early years, Frederick had key documents brought to him in Potsdam; later he used ministers and officials as ‘research assistants’—Maupertuis provided data on cultural history, Podewils, Finckenstein, Hertzberg, and others wrote compact essays on political events, Prince Leopold of Dessau reported on the old Brandenburg military establishment, the Generaldirektorium on coinage, and the Chamber of the Kurmark on demography and settlement history. The rector of the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin, Georg Friedrich Küster, provided a long chronology compiled from the most important chronicles. In short, this was a project of abiding importance that accompanied the king throughout his long life on the throne.7 The frequent redactions and reworkings show that these texts were intended not as one-off snapshots of specific moments, nor merely as works designed to manipulate specific constituencies, but as components of an ambitious, overarching history of the Brandenburg-Prussian lands whose value would endure.

This deep commitment to historical reflection was unusual—it is difficult to think of another European monarch, in Frederick’s era or any other, who invested so much imagination, talent, and energy in the business of writing history. Why did he do it? In answering this question, we have first to distinguish between motives and justifications. The king was quite clear about the latter. First, there was the need to put his country on the historiographical map, to ‘establish Prussia’s place in history’.8 Among the European states, he declared in the 1748 foreword to the first draft of the Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la maison de Brandebourg, Brandenburg-Prussia alone lacked a history of its own. ‘Even the insects’ had been honoured with a multivolume study—this was a reference to René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur’s encyclopaedic Mémoires pour servir à l’Histoire des Insectes. Frederick adapted Réaumur’s title to his own purposes, a characteristically wry and distanciating move, but also a reminder that the relationship between the natural sciences and historical writing was closer in this era than one might suppose.9 Then there were the various conventional justifications of a more general nature for the study of history. In the Discours Préliminaire of 1751, a revised introduction to the Mémoires, the ironic playfulness of the earlier Avant-Propos made way for a more earnest appeal to familiar topoi. History was ‘regarded as the school of princes’, the king declared; in ‘pronouncing on the reputation of the dead, it implicitly judged the living’. The opprobrium it attached to base men in the past was ‘a lesson in virtue to the present generation’. For every individual, history had a cosmopolitan potential to expand the compass of experience. To know it was ‘to have lived in all ages, to become in effect a citizen of all places and of all countries’.10 Historical knowledge, he suggested, was also constitutive of identity, of meaningful participation in the culture and institutions of one’s own country. We might readily forgive an Englishman his ignorance of the regnal dates of the kings of ancient Persia, or the ‘infinite number of popes who have governed the church’, but we would be shocked to find him ignorant of the origin of his parliament, the customs of his island, or the ‘various races of the kings who have reigned over England’.11

These observations are justifications for the study of history in the most general terms. They may explain why it is a good thing for history to be written and read, but they do not account for Frederick’s own commitment to writing it. On this question the king’s testimony is more oblique, as one would expect of an individual whose texts and utterances were generally rhetorical and performative, rather than expressive.12 A central and abiding motive appears to have been the desire to establish and control the narrative of his own time, not just for the present (the Mémoires was the only text to be published in the king’s lifetime), but for posterity: ‘C’est à vous, race future, que je dédie cet ouvrage’, he wrote in the 1746 preamble to the Histoire de mon temps.13 ‘It is for posterity to judge us’, he wrote in the revised preamble of 1775, ‘but if we are wise we can pre-empt it by judging ourselves’.14 Several preoccupations were intertwined here: first there was the need to ensure that narrative authority did not fall into alien hands, such as those of some ‘future Benedictine monk of the nineteenth century’ who might otherwise be empowered to tell the king’s story.15 Linked with this concern was Frederick’s need to defend and legitimate controversial aspects of his own policy, such as his challenges to the traditional authority structures of the Holy Roman Empire, or his frequent breaches of treaty obligations.16 In general, as Jürgen Luh has shown, Frederick showed a concern for fame and posthumous reputation that was unusual in its intensity, even among his monarchical contemporaries, though in his determination to shape and control his own place in history he resembles the twentieth-century British statesman Sir Winston Churchill.17 Then there was the desire (possibly tactically motivated) to memorialise the feats of his boldest and most skilful officers: ‘I shall not fail to speak of the immortal glory that so many officers earned [in battle]’, he wrote in the 1746 preamble to the Histoire de mon temps. ‘I dedicate this feeble essay as a monument to my gratitude’.18

The orientation towards a remote posterity also underscored the king’s claim that the historical accounts of his own time represented a disinterested and truthful depiction of events. After all, a narrative addressed to future generations could not be accused of pursuing propagandist or self-interested motives, or of making concessions to contemporary sensitivities; the writer was delivered from the need to take account either of the reading public or of his princely colleagues; he could ‘say aloud what many persons think in silence, painting princes just as they are’.19 The sovereign status of the author was a further guarantee of authenticity. The king had privileged access, for one thing, to the secret archives of the state—Frederick had sought and gained permission to consult his own royal archives, he joked in the 1748 preamble to the Mémoires.20 And there was the question of the author’s personal experience. Most histories—this was a point to which Frederick repeatedly returned—consisted mainly of ‘lies and absurdities’ cooked up from rumour and dubious secondhand testimony.21 By contrast, Frederick’s history would speak of high matters of state with the authority of one who had wielded real power. The aim was to achieve in his own writing the immediacy of those passages in Anabasis where Xenophon describes the retreat of the ten thousand men under his own command, or the letters in which Cicero speaks to his friend Atticus of the political events of the day; these texts remain fresh because ‘it is one of the actors in the great scenes who speaks’.22 And this in turn ensured that works like the Histoire de la guerre de Sept Ans would be instructive to those future rulers and military commanders of his state who might once again find themselves locked in conflict with Austria.23 So crucial was the authority bestowed by the experience of power that Frederick even challenged Voltaire’s qualification to write political history—despite his otherwise warm admiration for the French philosopher’s work.24

Were Frederick’s historical writings acts of interior reflection, or were they rhetorical manoeuvres, whose purpose was to project a particular image of the monarch, or to justify specific courses of action? Frederick went to great lengths to evacuate any sense of a private subjectivity from these writings, announcing in the foreword of 1775 to the Histoire de mon temps that he would speak of himself only when necessity demanded and that when this occurred he would speak of himself, in the manner of Caesar, in the third person, ‘in order to avoid the odium of egoism’.25 In the preamble to the Histoire de la guerre de Sept Ans, he put it even more forcefully: ‘I would have found it unbearable, in a work of such length, always to speak of myself and in my own name’.26 But this erasure of his own person sits in a strained relationship with the author’s claim that his identity and experience as sovereign bestowed a privileged vantage point. The labour invested in these works may, as Johannes Kunisch has suggested, have performed a psychological function. Frederick was intermittently troubled by spasms of self-doubt, especially in relation to battles where he felt his judgements had been flawed, and the vivid dreams that he described to his confidante Catt suggest that he continued to crave the approval of his dead father.27 Perhaps the narration and re-narration of the events of his reign helped to effect an inner settling of accounts—the hypothesis is plausible, if not verifiable.

An alternative view of the historical writings emphasises their communicative and propagandistic function—an approach exemplified by Andreas Pečar’s plea for a contextual and rhetorical reading of the king’s literary works. The historical and political essays were not, Pečar argues, statements of personal conviction, or acts of psychological clarification, but political instruments designed to achieve a specific end. It is worth noting in this connection that although the Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la maison de Brandebourg was the only historical text to be published during the king’s lifetime, a number of the other essays and fragments were circulated to a more or less narrow circle of readers. Pečar reads the Réflexions sur les talents militaries et sur le caractère de Charles XII, Roi de Suède, for example, as an encoded communication between the king and his senior officers. Its purpose was to address criticisms circulating among the political and military elites of Brandenburg-Prussia during the dark years of the Seven Years’ War. Critics of the king’s drive to seize the military initiative—strategically and tactically—had often made a link between Frederick II and Charles XII, suggesting that the Prussian king’s errors—his insistence on seeking a fight at Kunersdorf, for example—derived from a desire to emulate the Swedish adventurer. The aim of the Réflexions, with their comprehensive critique of Charles XII, was to disarm these concerns without encouraging a more direct discussion of the king and his handling of the war.28

However we weigh the respective validity of these two approaches—and they seem to me complementary rather than mutually exclusive—the question remains, why did Frederick become so invested in the writing of history? Other literary formats could have served the king’s psychological needs and his political purposes. Why was it history—in the sense of an impersonal, synthetic narrative of the Brandenburg state’s development over time—that absorbed so much of his talent and attention? Frederick’s admiration for the historical works of the French Enlightenment was clearly an important factor. He was deeply impressed by Montesquieu’s Considerations sur les causes de la grandeur des romains et de leur décadence (1721). It was the ‘philosophical’ quality of this work that Frederick found engaging: the power and consistency of its central animating idea (that the expansion of Rome was rooted in the temperament of the Roman ‘national spirit’), the quest for ‘useful truths’, and the ambition to rise above the specificity of the subject matter to an awareness of what was generic or universal.29

An even more important influence was Voltaire. No other individual held a comparable fascination for the Prussian king, and more than any other work, it was Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV, a sweeping, panoramic cultural and political history of seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century France, that Frederick admired. Everything in this work was outstanding, Frederick wrote to Voltaire in 1738, after he had seen parts of it in manuscript. It was brim-full of brilliant insights, impartial in its judgements, and free of anything false or tasteless; Europe had never seen such an accomplished work—it was superior to anything produced in antiquity. The Mémoires pour servir à l’histoire de la maison de Brandebourg was written during the late 1740s, at a time when the literary exchange between the two men was at its most intense; it was revised, with the Frenchman’s help, during Voltaire’s visit to Berlin 1750–51; no one who reads it alongside the Siècle could fail to see the many affinities of structure, tone, and style.30 These are so obvious, in fact, that many contemporaries believed the published version of the Mémoires had been ghostwritten by the French philosophe.

Frederick’s Historicity

To read Frederick alongside Voltaire is to situate him horizontally, within the framework of the Enlightenment’s distinctive historicising sensibility.31 And Frederick’s historical works do bear the imprint of Enlightenment. His reflections on his own vantage point as a writer of history were characteristic of the methodological self-awareness of enlightened historiography and reminiscent of the ‘perspectivism’ of the Göttingen historian Johann Martin Chladenius, whose primer on historical interpretation appeared in 1742.32 They are also trenchantly secular. The history of religion, the king implies in a passage from the Mémoires, is a subcategory of the history of culture, for religion, like manners and customs, has changed over time. ‘Everything that was added to it was the work of men; like them, it was doomed to perish’. Frederick made no effort to conceal his instrumental and coolly impartial view of the Christian confessions: ‘All the [Christian] sects’, he observed, ‘contribute equally to the wellbeing of the state’. The Christian confessions were all the same in the eyes of the civil authority, which left to each individual subject the choice of which path he would like to take to heaven. The state needed to take no interest in the religious convictions of the subject, ‘provided he is a good citizen—that is all that we demand of him’.33 In his anonymous foreword to an abridged edition of Fleury’s Histoire Écclésiastique (1766), Frederick indulged in an anticlerical mock-historical tirade of Voltairean intensity: here the evolution of Christianity was depicted as the work of fanatics, manipulators, and credulous morons. There were even flashes of that deconstructive contextualizing logic that would power the ‘Biblical criticism’ of the early nineteenth century: Frederick suggests, for example, that the dogma of Christ’s divinity was rooted in an overly literal interpretation of the phrase ‘son of God’, used by the second-temple Jews to denote a man of virtue.34

Frederick’s writings also reveal a characteristically enlightened (and Voltairean) sense of the processual character of history, its progression through stages of maturation and refinement. Reflecting on the athletic prowess of his ancestor Elector Albrecht Achilles (1414–86), a fabled participant in tournaments, Frederick reflected on how values had changed in Brandenburg and Europe since the fifteenth century: ‘in those coarse times, bodily agility enjoyed the same respect as in the times of Homer. Our century, more enlightened, accords its esteem less to military virtue than to talents of the mind and to those virtues which, in elevating a man above his condition, allow him to trample the passions beneath his feet and make him benevolent, generous and solicitous’.35 This sense of history as an inexorable advance could articulate itself in a vertiginous sense of the distance between past and present. ‘What a difference between the centuries!’ Frederick exclaims in the chapter of the Mémoires dedicated to the ‘history of morals, customs, industry and the progress of the human spirit in the arts and sciences’. Nations divided by vast oceans could scarcely differ from each other more in their customs than the Brandenburgers ‘differ from themselves, if we compare those of the age of Tacitus with those of the age of Henry the Fowler, and those of the age of Henry the Fowler with those of the time of [Elector] John Cicero, or finally these latter with the inhabitants of the Electorate under Frederick I, king of Prussia’.36

It is perfectly legitimate to view Frederick’s historical writings—and specifically the Mémoires—both as a reply to Voltaire and as an act of self-alignment with the style and values of the Enlightenment. But they should also be understood as the continuation—and modification—of a specifically Brandenburg-Prussian train of thought on the state and its history, articulated not merely in books of history as such but also, as we have seen, in the political utterances, testaments, and public performances of Frederick’s most recent forebears. Frederick was not the first person to have tackled the history of his kingdom, and not the first member of his house to ponder on the meaning of ‘history’ to a European state that had only recently emerged from impotence and obscurity.

The previous chapter argued that by the 1690s the nascent historiography of the Great Elector’s reign had begun to incorporate the notion that the state represented the forwards-moving, innovating, tradition-breaking power in Brandenburg-Prussian history. When Samuel Pufendorf devised his narrative of the Elector’s reign, he embedded his account of Brandenburg’s external relations within an unprecedentedly dynamic and subtle account of its place within the European states system, identifying the Elector as the choice maker who resolved the open-ended predicaments generated by a system in which the future behaviour of other states can never be predicted with certainty.

But Frederick II was dismissive of these antecedents: ‘I do not count a Hartknoch or a Pufendorf as historians; they were authors of great industry, it is true, who compiled facts, whose works are historical dictionaries rather than histories as such. I do not count Lockelius, whose book is no more than a diffuse chronicle in which one is forced to pay for one interesting event with one hundred pages of boredom: these sorts of authors are mere workmen, who amass, scrupulously and without discrimination, quantities of material that remain useless until an architect can shape them into the form they should have’.37 The seventeenth century, Frederick observed in one of the supplementary chapters of the Mémoires, did not produce ‘a single good historian’. ‘Pufendorf wrote a history of Frederick William in which, to be sure of omitting nothing, he left out neither his chancellery clerks, nor any of the chamber valets whose names he could find out’. Pufendorf, Frederick claimed, shared the general fault of German writers, who wrote as pedants rather than as men of genius, in a clumsy and dragging prose overloaded with inversions and epithets.38 This is, needless to say, a grotesquely unfair appraisal of Pufendorf’s De rebus gestis. But it was typical of an era in which Pufendorf was old-hat, and ‘philosophical’ historians in the manner of Montesquieu and Voltaire denounced their seventeenth-century predecessors as mere antiquarians and dry-as-dust erudites.39

All the same, Frederick did admit, in a statement setting out his method of research, that he had ‘consulted’ the chronicles of Lockelius, Pufendorf, and Hartknoch when he was preparing to write the Mémoires. We know that he used the German translation by Erdmann Uhse of Pufendorf’s biography of the Great Elector (one might add in this connection that since Frederick never read the book in the original Latin, he was in no position to criticise the author’s prose style).40 And of course the king was deeply familiar with the Political Testament of his great-grandfather, Frederick William the Great Elector. He may even have appreciated the historiographical power of the Testament—certainly he saw his own Political Testaments, which were partly modelled on the Great Elector’s, as ‘siblings’ of his historical writings.

Does Frederick’s history of the Mark Brandenburg before his accession to the throne represent a further development of the train of thought I have traced in the earlier period, or a break into something new? The answer to this question must be equivocal. One of the most striking features of the Mémoires, if we place them against the background of Loccelius, Pufendorf, Hartknoch, and the archival record from the reign of the Great Elector, is the almost complete erasure of any hint of conflict between the crown and the Estates. Loccelius’s otherwise rather naïve chronicle of the history of the Hohenzollern lands referred explicitly to the protests of the Prussian estates against the policies of the Great Elector in the aftermath of the Northern War of 1655–60 and to the Elector’s pacification of rebellious Magdeburg.41 Pufendorf, as we have seen, drew on these passages when he traced the same theme in his De rebus gestis.

The Estates theme is even more strongly present in Christoph Hartknoch’s magnificent histories of the land of Prussia, which located the central meaning of the province’s history in the defence of its ancient liberties by freedom-loving patriots who had never tired of resisting despotism.42 Hartknoch insisted on the continuity between ancient rights and modern privileges. He dated the customary liberty of the Prussians back to the country’s ‘oldest inhabitants’, the Sarmatian Vends, who had governed themselves through a ‘popular republic’ founded on the acquiescence of the entire Prussian nation, of whom it was said, ‘They have no particular lord, but rather in plenary council they deliberate as they see fit upon the issues arising and when they intend to undertake something, the will of all must be in support of it’.43 And this state of freedom must have persisted, Hartknoch argued, because as late as the eleventh century, the chronicler Adam of Bremen had reported of the Prussians, ‘They will not suffer a king among them’.44 From their ethnically mixed primordial commonwealth, composed of Prussians, Poles, Lithuanians, Sarmogitians, Curonians, Livonians, Czechs, and others, the Prussians of Hartknoch’s day had inherited their modern liberties. In his history of ‘new’ or modern Prussia, Hartknoch traced this tradition into the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the Estates representing the cities and the rural hinterland of Prussia had defended their privileges by working together against the high-handed impositions of the Teutonic Knights.45 In short, Hartknoch was an exponent of the privileges and liberties of Prussia, whose history he saw exemplified in the struggle of the political elites of town and country against monarchical power, whether it came from the kingdom of Poland, the High Masters of the Teutonic Order, or their successors, the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg.46

This conflict between crown and estates was completely absent from Frederick’s narrative of the history of his lands. Frederick achieved this erasure in part by a kind of sleight of hand: he back-dated the suppression of the Estates to the reign of Georg Wilhelm, and specifically to the period in office of his powerful minister Count Adam Schwarzenberg, during the Thirty Years’ War. Schwarzenberg, the scion of an old Catholic family in the County of Mark (a Brandenburg dependency since 1614), served intermittently as a member of the Privy Council during the 1620s and 1630s. When the Elector fled war-torn Brandenburg for Königsberg in 1638, Schwarzenberg acquired almost dictatorial powers. In an effort to recover some measure of control over the territory, he attempted with not much success to raise a small Brandenburg army, using financial contributions extorted from the obstreperous nobilities of the Brandenburg-Prussian provinces.

In Frederick’s account, Schwarzenberg became the gravedigger of provincial corporate liberties. Before the Thirty Years’ War, Frederick writes, the Estates were still ‘masters of the government’; they accorded subsidies, they controlled duties, they fixed the number of troops and paid them, they were consulted on all measures necessary for the defence of the country, and the laws and policing were administered under their supervision. It was Schwarzenberg who single-handedly broke their power: ‘Schwarzenberg, all-powerful minister of a weak prince, drew to his person all the authority of the sovereign and of the Estates: he imposed contributions by his own authority and nothing remained to the Estates of that power that they had never abused, but . . . blind submission to the orders of the court’.47

What is remarkable about this portrayal of Schwarzenberg is not only its partisan character (it reproduces exactly the histrionic viewpoint of the Estates in their opposition to Schwarzenberg’s policies) but also its drastic overstatement of the minister’s impact.48 Schwarzenberg’s ‘dictatorship’, an emergency response to conditions of extreme duress during one of the worst phases of the Thirty Years’ War, lasted in reality only for scarcely two years (1638–40). This brief and unsuccessful experiment in absolutist rule by proxy did not terminate or even seriously diminish the powers of the Estates. On the contrary, it was the Great Elector (acc. 1640) and his successors Frederick III/I (1686–1713) and Frederick William I (1730–40) who gradually changed the terms of the relationship between the central authority and the rural elites, imposing new and permanent taxes, establishing and maintaining the standing army (in place of the old province-based militias), reconfiguring the legal status of noble landholding, and much else besides.

Frederick knew this perfectly well: the conflict with the Estates had been one of the central themes of the Great Elector’s reign, not to mention of his Political Testament. Pufendorf and even Lockelius had placed this struggle at the centre of their respective narratives, as had Hartknoch, whose histories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Royal and Ducal Prussia were scrupulously attentive to the domestic constraints on sovereign power.49 Yet it left no trace whatsoever on Frederick’s account of his great-grandfather’s rule. Even at those moments in his narrative when the topic was especially apposite, Frederick scrupulously avoided any mention of it. There is a passage, for example, in the Mémoires where Frederick compares the reign of the Great Elector with that of Louis XIV of France; yet even when he comments on Louis’s early struggle with the French nobilities at the time of the Fronde, he draws no parallel with the Great Elector, whose early years in power were also marked by frequent standoffs with the provincial nobilities over taxes, the raising of troops, and the power to appoint officials.

Frederick’s omissions are all the more striking for the fact that Voltaire’s historical works offered the template of a narrative linking sovereignty and conquest with the subordination of domestic elites. His Henriade (1723), which Frederick held to be one of the greatest epic poems ever composed, superior even to Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad, describes the hard-won victory of the French monarchy over an effete and self-serving elite who have exploited bigotry and religious passions to stifle the powers of the crown. The ‘Estates’ assembled at Paris against Henry IV are a playground for factions and cabals; their debates resound with ‘infernal cries’.50 In the Siècle de Louis XIV (1751), which Frederick read in manuscript, the Paris parliament is depicted as the mouthpiece of a pretentious, undisciplined, and lazy nobility who oppose the legitimate fiscal and political measures of the state in the name of a bogus appeal to ‘ancient laws’ and ‘sacred rights’. A happy state, Voltaire observes at various points, is a state in which the nobility has been brought entirely into the service of the state; only by this means can the ‘tyranny’ and ‘Gothic barbarism’ of the old seigneurial system be overcome.51 In short, Frederick’s decision to exclude from his narrative the domestic consolidation of electoral and royal power in Brandenburg marked a departure from the practice of his mentor, who celebrated absolute monarchy in France precisely for the fact that it represented the victory of a more rational and powerful form of governance over the particularist authority of the old seigneurs.

Hegemony without Conflict

Why did Frederick alter the record in this way? The answer must partly be that a narrative emphasizing the conflict between the central executive and the Estates no longer seemed opportune. The epochal process of subordinating the provincial nobilities to the central authority was now largely accomplished. All that remained of the power and autonomy of the old Estates was a ‘corporate latency’ expressed in the local power networks of the provincial elites.52 And the impact of this depletion of their political power was heightened by economic decline. During the second half of the eighteenth century, the landed nobility entered a period of crisis. The wars and economic disruption of the 1740s and 1750s–60s, aggravated by government manipulation of the grain market through the magazine system and demographic overload through the natural expansion of estate-owning families, placed the landowning class under increasing strain. There was a dramatic growth in the indebtedness of Junker estates, leading in many cases to bankruptcies or forced sales, often to commoners with cash in hand. The growing frequency with which estates changed hands raised questions about the cohesion of the traditional rural social fabric.53

Frederick was much more socially conservative than his father had been.54 Unlike his father, Frederick himself—notwithstanding his studiously managed image as a thrifty and ascetic figure—cultivated a pointedly aristocratic lifestyle.55 The nobilities were, in his view, the only group capable of serving as officers in the military; partly because they were the only social stratum with an inborn sense of honour. From this it followed that the stability and continuity of noble property were crucial to the viability of the military state. Whereas Frederick William I had deliberately set out to dilute the social preeminence of the nobility, Frederick adopted a policy of ‘conservation’ whose objective was to prevent the transfer of noble land into non-noble ownership. There were generous tax concessions, ad hoc cash gifts to families in financial straits, and efforts—largely futile—to prevent landowners from over-mortgaging their estates.56 When these measures failed, Frederick’s immediate response was to tighten state control of land sales, but this proved counterproductive. Transfer controls involved an aggressive curtailment of the freedom to dispose of property. The administration thus had to reconcile conflicting priorities. It wished to restore and preserve the dignity and economic stability of the noble caste, yet it sought to achieve this by suspending one of the fundamental liberties of the estate-owning class.

The quest for a less interventionist and controversial method of supporting the noble interest ultimately led to the foundation of state-capitalised agricultural credit unions for the exclusive use of the established Junker families. These institutions issued mortgages at subsidised interest rates to ailing or indebted landowning families. Separate credit unions were established for each province (Kurmark and Neumark in 1777, Magdeburg and Halberstadt in 1780, and Pomerania in 1781).57 The king wanted these measures to be known, and dedicated a long and rather fulsome passage of the Mémoires depuis la paix de Hubertusbourg to his efforts to improve the condition of the nobilities.58 It is true that many of Frederick’s pro-nobiliary measures date from the ‘second reign’, after the Peace of Hubertusburg (1763), but Frederick’s esteem for the nobility and his regard for its special social standing as the caste called to serve the kingdom as officers and commanders were in evidence throughout the reign.59

In place of the conflictual model embraced by his father and great-grandfather, Frederick saw himself as leading, as it were, from within the midst of his nobilities. This is the true meaning of his observation in the Lettres sur l’amour de la patrie, ou correspondence d’Anapistémon et de Philopatros that ‘good monarchies, whose administration is wise and gentle’, are more like ‘oligarchies than despotisms’, because those (almost all of them noblemen in Frederick’s time) who are employed in councils, in the administration of justice and finance, in foreign missions, in the armies, in domestic authorities ‘all participate in the sovereign authority’.60 In general it can be said that Frederick preferred consensual to conflict-based rationalisations of sovereignty. He thus claimed to reject Hobbes’s account of the origins of sovereignty because it posited—in his view—that subjects must have made themselves entirely rightless in order to acquire the protection of their persons through submission to a sovereign. The contrary was true, Frederick argued: the primordial signatories to the ‘social contract’ had elevated the sovereign not under duress, but only on account of his wisdom, the protection he could provide, and the achievements they expected from a ruler; in doing so, they had said to him, ‘du reste, nous exigions que vous respectiez nos libertés’.61

Frederick thus accommodated his account of the past to the priorities of his present. The past was brought into conformity with the political and social objectives of the frederician state. This was in all likelihood a conscious manipulation. He could hardly have missed the conflict theme in Pufendorf, let alone in the political testaments of the two Frederick Williams. And since the Mémoires were composed for publication, we might well view them as a rhetorical performance directed at the nobility whose young men had served him so well in the First and Second Silesian Wars. Frederick alluded openly to his own role as the selector of material garnered from the supposedly shapeless and indiscriminate narratives of Pufendorf and his fellows, who had simply dumped the raw material of their research on the page and left the reader to make sense of it all. He frequently acknowledged the crucial importance of selection to the construction of historical narratives, an idea he may have picked up from Voltaire, whose Essai sur les mœurs observes that among the plenitude of stories one could tell about the past, ‘one must limit oneself and choose’. The past, Voltaire wrote, was ‘a vast storehouse from which you must take whatever you can make use of’.62

Nevertheless, the occlusion of domestic political conflict from the king’s story created a problem, a potential aporia. The struggle with the Estates was not just an episode or a sequence of events; it had also served as a mechanism for describing and explaining the emergence and historical trajectory of the state.

The methodology exemplified in Voltaire’s Siècle de Louis XIV represented a way around this impasse. In Voltaire’s account, the military and political events of Louis XIV’s reign are recounted in some detail, but only as the preconditions for the story that is really at the centre of Voltaire’s account, namely the advancement of civilisation in France to a point of unprecedented refinement. What mattered about the reign of Louis XIV was not the king’s treaties and wars (Voltaire regarded all wars as lamentable relapses into barbarism) but the flowering of the arts and sciences in ‘the most enlightened of all eras’. Following the master’s model, Frederick appended to his brief political history of Brandenburg three cultural-historical essays that focused on the history of superstition and religion, the history of ‘morals, customs, industry, the progress of the human spirit in the arts and sciences’, and the ‘modern and ancient governance of Brandenburg’. All are informed, as we have seen, by a strong sense of stadial progression.63

Voltaire’s paradigm of the ‘era’—a secularised version of the salvational succession of ‘world monarchies’ foretold in the Bible—helped Frederick to float his account of the evolution of the Brandenburg-Prussian state free of its domestic origins in the conflict with the Estates. His narrative thereby acquired an attractive forwards momentum that derived not from an account of the consolidation of sovereign authority and power at the cost of traditional social and political formations, but from the appeal to a broader civilisational idea that Voltaire helped to establish as a commonplace of Enlightenment temporality, an idea that celebrated the present as the telos of all human striving. And yet Frederick did not simply adopt Voltaire’s model wholesale. For whereas Voltaire had subordinated affairs of state to a higher set of values embracing all domains of cultural life, Frederick, as Ulrich Muhlack has shown, reversed the priorities, placing the state and its doings at the centre of his story. ‘The state’ is not a mere enabling condition for the progress of the human spirit; it is the chief actor of the drama. Inasmuch as culture and customs receive serious consideration, they are weighed up from the vantage point of their utility to the state. Thus the religious denominations, for example, were assessed in terms of their ability to generate good ‘citizens’ (Staatsbürger). Morals, customs, and the arts and sciences were appraised for the benefits they yielded to the state.64

But this frederician ‘state’ was not itself depicted as historically emerging; its career was not defined as a progression. For the Great Elector and Pufendorf, the process by which the nascent Electoral state argued itself into existence by disputing the claims of the holders of traditional authority lay at the centre of the historical narrative of Brandenburg-Prussia. In Frederick’s writings, by contrast, the state figured as an extra-historical fact and a logical necessity.65 The result of Frederick’s idiosyncratic adaptation of Voltaire is a curiously unresolved narrative. The vectors of change so forcefully drawn in the writings of Pufendorf, Hartknoch, and the Great Elector make way for diffuse currents of change whose ultimate sources remain obscure. Change is ever present in the king’s reflections on the past, but it has become an attribute of reflective consciousness. It is not anchored in a specific historical process. The domestic setting for the exercise of power becomes shadowy and immaterial. The councils and debates that were so central to Pufendorf’s narrative disappear from view, and with them the sense that each sovereign decision represents the irreversible choice of one possible future out of many.

Whereas Pufendorf had written his biography of the Great Elector as a story about change driven by unforeseeable contingencies, Frederick insisted that history embodied the operations of certain immutable and universal laws. ‘Fragility and instability are inseparable from the works of men’, he observed, but ‘the revolutions that shake monarchies and republics have their origin in the immovable laws of nature’. By this, the king meant above all those human passions that drove successive generations of actors to alter the scenery of the great theatre of history. ‘Without these upheavals . . . , the universe would no doubt have remained the same; there would have been no new events’.66 Amidst all the destruction and transformation that attended human affairs, one could thus discern the eternal recurrence of certain motifs—the rebellious power unleashed by ambition was the one to which the king most often returned, not only in the historical essays, but also in the Anti-Machiavel, composed when Frederick was still Crown Prince in Rheinsberg. At times, it even seemed to the king that there might be a cyclical, self-repeating dimension in the unfolding of history, as in the movements of nature. Anyone who addressed himself assiduously to the study of history, he suggested in the Histoire de mon temps, would soon see that ‘the same scenes repeat themselves—one must merely change the names of the actors’.67 Perhaps, he speculated in the Mémoires, the movements of the history of states resembled those of the planets, which always return to the point from which they came.68 Such passages hint at the intimate connection between mid-eighteenth-century history and the natural sciences; they remind us of how the prestige of ‘philosophy’ pushed the historical writing of this era in the direction of generalisable principles. But the king’s reflections were also performances. Affecting the pose of the philosopher who has seen it all before, they take us a long way from that sense of hard-won historical accomplishment that animated the ‘Fatherly Instruction’ and Pufendorf’s epic overview of the Great Elector’s reign.

Times of Decision

Frederick could, to be sure, display an acute awareness of the changes wrought by the passage of historical time. If a commander from the era of Louis XII were to reappear in his own time, Frederick observed in the Anti-Machiavel, he would be shocked by the immensity of present-day campaign armies and by the ability of princes to maintain them in peacetime as well in war.69 ‘What would Machiavelli himself say, if he were to look upon the transformation of power relations in Europe, so many great princes who in his time were of no significance in the world and yet play a role today; the power of kings firmly anchored, the manner in which rulers conduct their negotiations, these plenipotentiary spies they maintain at each others’ courts, and this equilibrium of Europe, which rests upon the coalition of several weighty princes against ambitious disturbers of the peace.’70 So fundamental were the differences between his own epoch and that of Machiavelli, Frederick observed, that many of the Italian writer’s observations were now simply obsolete. The ‘fundamental transformation in large things and in small’ that had taken place since the age of Machiavelli meant that ‘most of [his] thoughts can no longer be applied to the life of states in our own time’.71

And yet there are numerous other passages in which a sense of historical development seems strikingly absent. Frederick deployed exempla from Greek and Roman antiquity in much the same way as Machiavelli himself had done. History, he argued, should be a timeless storehouse of good examples—only the lives and deeds of ‘good princes’ should be preserved; this would make history books thinner, but also more edifying.72 He applied this insight to the instruction of his young nephew and heir: ‘His memory should not be wearied with the sequence of princes’, Frederick told the young man’s tutor, ‘as long as he learns the names of the outstanding men who played a great role in their country’.73 Accounting for the great variety of state forms that could be observed in the present, Frederick appealed not to historical causation, but to the ‘fruitfulness of nature’ that could bring forth such variety, even within one species.74 The history of states, he suggested, could be likened to a biological life cycle, in which change was confined within an eternally self-repeating sequence: ‘Just as an individual person is born, lives for a time and then dies of illness or old age, so republics are established, flourish for a few centuries, and eventually fall prey to the ambition of a particular citizen or to the weapons of their enemies. Everything has its own time-frame, including all principalities, even the greatest monarchies have only their allotted time and there is nothing on earth that is not subjected to the law of change and decay’.75 For Pufendorf, the pressure of the future had imposed choices and decision-making tasks that defined the sovereign office.

For Frederick, sovereign decisions of this kind, in which the prince selected among alternative futures, carried less weight. The difference can also be discerned in Frederick’s reflections on how the prince should prepare for the future. In this connection, Frederick distinguished between what we might call incremental and stochastic modes of preparation. The former presumed continuity with the present, and the latter did not. On the one hand, Frederick argued in the Political Testament of 1752, the ruler should continue augmenting his existing assets. There were still many areas with abundant arable land on which new communities of farmers could be settled. Drainage projects would provide yet more land for cultivation. The silk ‘industry’ was still in its infancy: in six years, the kingdom’s mulberry tree plantations would be ready for the harvesting of leaves to feed masses of silkworms. The knife and scissor factory at Neustadt should at some point be expanded. The volume of trade must continue to increase, and so on.76 All these enterprises should form the strands of a single ‘project’ that lived inside the head of the prince, Frederick explained. For ‘the well-run government of a state must possess as watertight a rationale as any philosophical system. All measures must be well thought-through; finance, politics and the military must all strive towards one common goal, namely the strengthening of the state and the growth of its power. But a system can only spring from one head’.77

On the other hand, the responsibilities of the prince also included ‘political daydreaming’ focused on future scenarios completely detached from the conditions of the present. Such ‘chimerical politics’ required the sovereign to abstract himself from the reality of his own time and to wander in ‘the unending pastures of imaginary designs’. The importance of these designs lay in the possibility, however remote, that they might one day become realisable in practice.78 It might one day, for example, be possible, in the event of a war with Austria, for Prussia to conquer Bohemia and then exchange it for Saxony.79 Chimerical politics concerned itself with long-term objectives, the realisation of which was not a continuous process, but the function of unforeseeable and possibly very remote eventualities.

These reflections might appear to bring Frederick close to the kind of meticulous option selection so painstakingly recorded in Pufendorf’s history of the Great Elector’s reign. But the emphasis was quite different. In Pufendorf’s narrative, the decisional calculus involved the unpredictable behaviour of numerous other actors. Here, by contrast, it was a question of seizing the initiative through a show of force when the opportunity arose. And the driver of these speculative scenarios was not the interplay of contingency, but the will of the prince. After all, the policy, or ‘political system’, of the state was the brainchild of the prince, who must ‘draw up his system and then bring it to implementation’. Since the ideas composing the system were his alone, he alone possessed the capacity to ensure their success. But this in turn also implied a de-emphasis of the moment of decision; whereas for Pufendorf the decision was a moment of choice amidst the uncertainties of a rapidly changing environment, for Frederick the decision was an expression of will in support of an already clearly defined goal. ‘A prince who rules on his own will not be caught off guard when there is a swift decision to be made, for he links everything to his pre-conceived final objective’.80

Frederick’s reign was rich in large and perilous events. The Seven Years’ War brought Prussia to the brink of collapse and might well have resulted in the partition and destruction of the state inherited from the Great Elector. The First Partition of Poland, though less dangerous in the short term from Berlin’s perspective, was a momentous event whose consequences would reverberate into the twentieth century. Yet the shuddering, fearful vibration of great events is strangely absent from Frederick’s reasoning about past, present, and future. Contingency was crowded out by will; decisions were a function of ‘systems’ resistant to short-term shocks and disruptions.

We can only speculate about the reasons for this curious placidity. Wishful thinking and posturing surely played a role. The man who called himself the ‘philosopher king’ was inclined to picture himself as detached from the turbulence of ‘events’, stoical in his emotional life, consistent (or so he imagined) in his pursuit of his objectives. The drama of those scenes in Pufendorf where the Great Elector, gripped in a geopolitical dilemma, heard the divergent advice of his councillors and carefully weighed up the dangers of the various courses of action available to him possessed no charm for Frederick, who strove to embody absolute autonomy, both as a man and as a prince. Finally, Frederick’s intuition that history was subject to self-repeating cyclical patterns diminished the weight of the event, of the decision, and of the moment in which the decision occurred. In a world where everything that went around came around and the states were life forms passing through a cycle of maturation and decay or planets locked in circular orbits, as Frederick so often insisted, the decisions that produced victories and defeats, treaties and alliances might be quite important. But ultimately, they were products of history’s essentially repetitive structure. They could not acquire the philosophical weight they had possessed for Pufendorf or would possess in a later age for Otto von Bismarck.

The Suspension of Time

In Antoine Watteau’s Love in the Italian Theatre, eleven people, standing in a semicircle and facing the viewer, gather around a man playing a guitar. They are wearing the costumes of stock characters from the Italian commedia dell’arte: the playful Arlecchino, the pompous university doctor, the swaggering captain, the prima donna, and the seconda donna. Yet they are not standing on a stage. The light of a torch catches curving boughs and wisps of foliage. And in the top right-hand corner, a bright moon nestles among clouds. They seem out of place, these elaborately dressed figures in a nocturnal forest. Darkness looms around them, muting the pantomime jollity of their clothing. Separated from the stage, their signalling costumes take on ‘all the sadness of depleted signs’.81 And they are chronologically displaced, too. In 1716, when Watteau painted this image, the commedia dell’arte was already in decline. In 1766, when its presence in the picture gallery at Sanssouci is first recorded, it evoked an indistinct and distant past.82

Frederick II was an avid collector of the paintings of Watteau. He acquired so many of the French artist’s paintings that Berlin-Potsdam today remains, after Paris, the second most important location of his works. Watteau (1684–1721), the most celebrated painter in the fêtes galantes manner, was renowned for dreamlike pastoral scenes inhabited by archetypal costumed figures. What strikes us most about these images is their timelessness; the persons depicted in them seem to float in a shimmering world that is half theatre and half myth. They play or listen to music, engage in conversation, or simply take their ease, without any apparent purpose beyond savouring the delight of the moment. In an appreciation of the ‘universe of Watteau’, the French writer on the history and philosophy of art René Huyghe tried to capture the unique atmosphere of Watteau’s oeuvre: ‘Visible, fictional, they are there before us. In the mirror of their false presence, those symmetrical faces, of “never” and “always”, recognise each and reconcile themselves to each other. Doubtless they have always been like this; doubtless they have never existed. Are they alive? In the streams, seemingly immobile, one sees the imperceptible current flow, which carries everything away. . . . Already they are leaving us; they [Watteau’s figures] abandon us; tender and distant, unaware of our presence, they gently pivot and, step by step, depart’.83 In a posthumous critique, the antiquarian Anne Claude de Caylus, a friend of the painter, noted that Watteau’s compositions ‘neither possess a subject matter of any kind . . . nor express any passion’ and that they therefore lacked ‘one of the most piquant dimensions of painting, namely action’, the one thing capable of endowing any composition with ‘that sublime fire that speaks to, seizes and leads the spirit’.84 What troubled Caylus about Watteau, as Thomas Kavanagh has noted, was the failure of his paintings to provide a ‘springboard to narrative’. The moments conjured in Watteau refuse to be aligned with anything we could call history; they ‘fail to come together towards the evocation of a larger, more inclusive temporality embedding the now of those individual moments within some sustained story they serve to illustrate’.85

FIGURE 2.1. Antoine Watteau, Love in the Italian Theatre (1718); engraving by Charles Nicolas Cochin père, 1734. Source: © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Frederick never set down in writing the reasons for the unusual ardour with which he pursued works by Watteau, but his writings reveal beyond doubt that he saw in them something that captured the texture of his own lived existence. ‘Paint yourself in Watteau’s brush strokes’, he urged his friend and former tutor Jordan in 1742, ‘not in Rembrandt’s!’86 In an erotic homage to his lover Count Algarotti, Frederick declared that the spirit of the handsome young count (addressed in this context as ‘the beautiful swan of Padua’) seemed to transport him into a picture gallery, where ‘the enchanting spectacle of the most beautiful paintings never ceases to vary’ and where ‘the last are the most beautiful of all’. The last painter named in the list that followed was Watteau, as if he were the painter whose scenes best captured the momentary intensity of the orgasm, a subject to which he also dedicated a poem.87 Writing to his sister Amélie in April 1761, in the darkest year of the Seven Years’ War, he observed that ‘the true painting of our situation is not by Watteau, but in the Spanish style that uses dark colours and paints only the most gloomy subjects’.88

It is true that Frederick’s interests as a collector broadened during his reign. In the years 1755–79, he began to bid internationally for monumental paintings of the courtly representative type—during this period he acquired paintings by Rubens, van Dyck, Raphael, Correggio, and Titian, among others. But these purchases did not imply a fundamental break in the king’s personal taste; rather they marked, as Astrid Dostert has noted, his transition from a ‘royal private collector’ to a ‘collecting king’.89 Works in the fêtes galantes style continued to dominate in the rooms privately frequented by the king at Sanssouci.90

That the king should have taken such an interest in Watteau might not seem especially surprising—the artist was expensive in the 1730s and 1740s precisely because a craze for his works was sweeping Europe. But even against this background, the determination with which Frederick collected Watteau and other fêtes galantes painters was unusual, especially for a monarch—the fêtes galantes style was associated by contemporaries with the artistic preferences of Parisian financial circles.91 Particularly interesting is the intensity of Frederick’s identification with these images, his inclination both to project himself into their timeless landscapes and to imagine his own existence as ‘painted’ in Watteau’s brushstrokes, as if the painter had not merely grasped a specific iconography, but evoked a kindred form of consciousness. Watteau’s paintings portioned out time in suspended moments, cut adrift from the recent past and the imminent future. In this way they captured Frederick’s own sense of the texture of time. In an Ode on Time, first published in an edition of 1761, Frederick remarked that there was ‘no power on earth so firm / as not to be swept away [by time]’:

Nothing stops your violence

And the very moment in which I think

Has already fled far from me.

 . . .

And like an indivisible point

Or an unconscious atom

[Time] passes, and I pass with it.92

Henri de Catt, the Swiss scholar who was for a time the king’s tutor in French oral and written expression, recalled a conversation with Frederick in the summer of 1758. He found the king engrossed in a numerical calculation. The following dialogue ensued:

Frederick: ‘Ah good day, dear fellow, guess what I am calculating’.

De Catt: ‘Your treasure— . . .’

F: ‘Alas, I no longer have any and the little I have will soon be spent, so take a guess’. [This exchange took place during the third year of the Seven Years’ War.]

De C: ‘Perhaps you are calculating what you have already spent during this war?’

F: ‘I know only too well, I don’t need to calculate it: go on, don’t be scared, guess!’

De C: ‘Your Majesty could be calculating so many things that it would be difficult to happen upon what you are calculating right now’.

F: ‘So you won’t hazard a guess? Monsieur, I am calculating how many minutes I have lived. And I’ve already been working away at this calculation for an hour. What a sum—and how many lost minutes! This time that flies without ceasing, this time that drags with it days, hours, minutes, is received with indifference and often without paying the slightest attention, and nature cries out to us at every moment: “Mortals, use your time; don’t ever forget the value of that moment on which rests the immensity of time and don’t let trifles accelerate the flight of your days” ’.93

That reference to the moment ‘on which rests the immensity of time’, that paradoxical conflation of the instant with the entire expanse of eternity, is surely the clue to Watteau’s meaning for the king. And if Watteau captured the fleetingness of all human experience, it was the idealised heritage of Greco-Roman antiquity that anchored these momentary units of experience within a larger timescape. A good literary education, Frederick insisted in a memorandum of 1760, must pleat the study of antiquity together with readings of the moderns, establishing an understanding of poetic beauty by comparing passages from the authors of antiquity with modern authors who had treated the same subjects.94 For Frederick, the ‘classical’ was not historically or chronologically bound; it was a treasury of images and attitudes that could live as vividly in the present as in the past.95 In a letter to Voltaire of April 1737, he unfolded a fantasy about Rheinsberg, the palace where he spent the years before his assumption of the throne in 1740. Contrary to widespread belief, he proposed, Remus had not been killed by his twin brother, Romulus, mythical founder of Rome, but had fled into northern exile on the banks of the Grieneckersee, the future site of his own palace. Monks sent by the Vatican had searched in vain for Remus’s mortal remains, but in the course of constructing the palace, builders had happened across stones marked with ancient inscriptions and an urn full of Roman coins. Hence the name ‘Rheinsberg’, which was in fact a corruption of ‘Remusberg’. When Voltaire wrote back taking the Crown Prince to task for indulging in such implausible fancies, Frederick was offended—he had only been joking! And yet, from this moment onward, he signed all of his Rheinsberg letters (excepting only those addressed to his father) ‘Remusberg’.96

From early youth, Frederick cultivated an intense relationship with the great historical personae of ancient Rome. ‘From time to time Marius, Sulla, Cinna, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, Augustus, Antonius und Lepidus come by for a chat’, he told Grumbkow, one of his father’s ministers, in January 1732.97 The sociability cultivated by the king at Sanssouci was modelled on the Roman country-house parties celebrated by Horace, at which meals consisted of ‘a simple repast enlivened by clever conversation and mockery of the stupid’.98

This intensely felt elective affinity with ancient Rome implied a historicity that was analogical and recursive rather than linear and developmental. Portals opened between the present and an antique past; time was pleated around the analogy between one era and another; the tyranny of the recent past over contemporary experience, so axiomatic to Pufendorf and the Great Elector, was relativised, if not entirely suspended. We can discern the imprint of this timescaping in Frederick’s highly distinctive plans for his own burial. His interment was not to take place within the usual dynastic ritual framework. Instead of arranging to be laid in the mausoleum of the House of Hohenzollern, he chose for himself a plot in the terraced gardens of Sanssouci. He was, he wrote, to be burned in the manner of the ancient Romans and his ashes were to be buried alone, away from his father and ancestors.99 Instead, Roman emperors, whose busts would be erected on columns around the grave, were to keep him company—the most important being Marcus Aurelius.100 Frederick had read Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, which relates that the Roman emperors were buried in beautiful gardens, but another model was the poet Horace, whose name occurs more than 180 times in Frederick’s published oeuvre and whose Carmina 2.6 closes with these strophes:

Here where gracious Jupiter grants long springs

And warm winters, and Aulon’s hillside

scarcely envies the Falernian grapes

of fertile Bacchus

 

These blessed valleys will summon us two

To that place and there you will scatter the warm ashes

Wet with due tears

Of your friend the poet101

What made this easy travel between remote historical eras possible was the transtemporal circuitry of fame. The fame of the Romans was like an elevated freeway that connected antiquity with the present, passing over the squalid, violent suburbs of the Middle Ages and the Thirty Years’ War. Fame was also the bridge to a remote future and the only form of immortality Frederick was able to believe in. To live again in the memory and admiration of posterity may have been one of this king’s most deeply held desires.102 The quest for fame, he proposed in an ‘Ode on Glory’ penned in 1734, had been the chief motivation of the great heroes of antiquity. The fame to which they aspired had been the ‘desire’ that ‘smoothed and polished’ the metres of Homer, Virgil, and Voltaire, just as it was a consuming passion for the king himself.103 Addressing himself to fame, the prince begged this secular deity ‘in spite of cruel death’ to

Save one feeble spark

Of the spirit that resides in me

Let your hand open the barrier,

And, ready to run your course

I will live and die for thee.104

A striking feature of these fantasies of fame—which accompanied the king throughout his life—is that they focused solely on the person of the king himself. In ordering that his body be burned in the ancient manner and then deposited in the garden of his ‘villa’, Frederick distanced himself from the conventional practice of European dynastic representation in his era, which tended not to foreground the individuality of the monarch, but to embed him or her in the succession of the family’s generations, focusing attention not on the person of the monarch, but on the dignity of his office and his family. By contrast, Frederick chose to be buried not as a king but as a ‘philosopher’, a pose that separated him from all of his ancestral predecessors, but also from his royal contemporaries. The same observation can be made of the palace at Sanssouci, on whose terraces he wished to be buried. As Andreas Pečar has pointed out, Sanssouci was not a ‘residence’—it did not project ‘kingly magnificence and dynastic greatness’, but was focused rather on ‘personal cultivation and private taste’.105 In these ways, too, Frederick resisted incorporation into a narrative larger than himself, seeking refuge instead in the timeless renown owed by posterity to a unique personality.

To a remarkable degree, this detachment from grand narrative remained a feature of the cult that sprang up around the memory of the king after his death in 1786. The 1780s and 1790s saw a wave of publications commemorating the dead monarch. But the most famous and successful by far was a two-volume compendium of anecdotes about the dead king edited by Friedrich Nicolai, the most influential publisher of the Berlin Enlightenment.106 In these apparently random tatters of memory (and Nicolai’s was only one of many such volumes of anecdotes) the king appeared falling from his horse, responding to impertinence with an indulgent witticism, forgetting someone’s name, prevailing over adversity through sheer nerve.107 Being compact and memorable, anecdotes circulated as swiftly in oral as in literary culture, much as jokes do today. Charged with the humanity of the king, they appeared innocent of politics and history. Like the paintings of Watteau, the anecdotes of the frederician memory wave offered unique moments suspended in time that resisted integration into the grand narrative of history.

Conclusion

The contrast with the dynamic historicity of the Great Elector and his court historian Samuel Pufendorf could hardly be starker. Pufendorf had urged his contemporaries to leave aside the ancient Greeks and Romans and focus on the history of their own times. He had imagined the state as something that had to argue and fight its way into existence. For Frederick, the ancient Romans remained the salient authority and source of inspiration in past and present, infinitely superior to the centuries of zealotry and error that had followed their demise. When he contrasts his present with the ‘barbarism’ of the Middle Ages, he looks like a linear stadialist, but this is an optical illusion, like the apparent flatness of the earth’s surface, made possible only by the vast scale of time’s curvature. He thought of the state as a timeless, logical necessity—he was not interested in the historical circumstances under which it had come to acquire its modern form. Pufendorf was the theorist of discontinuity, Frederick sought to embed even the most traumatic change into the timeless continuum of unchanging laws and principles. The conflict with powerful provincial elites dominated the domestic horizons of the Great Elector and supplied one of the driving themes of the histories composed by Pufendorf, Loccelius, and Hartknoch. Yet Frederick erased this strand of his country’s history in his own retelling, eviscerating the discursive framework adumbrated by Pufendorf and supplanting it with a narrative whose core was impervious to the perturbations of history.

We have already reflected on the reasons for these choices. The solipsistic, almost pathological vanity that Jürgen Luh and Andreas Pečar have identified as a central and dominant attribute of this king was clearly one important factor. No one who insisted so vehemently on his own uniqueness could wish to be embedded in the interdependencies of ‘history’. Frederick prized the past above all as the storehouse of shining exemplars that spoke to and resonated with his own achievements—the rest was dust and junk, a catalogue of human follies unworthy of memorialisation or emulation. And these preferences resonated with a social politics of stasis and conservation—especially in respect to the territorial nobilities, who no longer figured as the provincial antagonists of royal power, but as the indispensable social spine of the frederician military state.

The deepest reasons for making such choices doubtless lie within the realm of what Judith Butler has called the ‘psychic life of power’. We are accustomed to thinking of power as something that presses in on us from outside. But what if we ourselves are actually ‘initiated through a primary submission to power’—the power, for example, of our parents? If, Butler suggests, we understand power as a force in our own formation as subjects, ‘then power is not simply what we oppose, but what we depend on for our existence and what we harbour and preserve in the beings we are’.108 The potential relevance of this line of thought to Frederick hardly needs pressing. For a man who had endured a traumatic childhood and youth at the hands of a brutish and sadistic parent, the encounter with power began with the terror of a boy cowering before his father, a king who was himself the son of a king. In the setting of a dynastic clan, where power was a function of birth and inheritance, ‘history’ manifested itself in the ‘line of flight’ that stretched back into the past from father to father to father.109 In refusing to be buried with his male ancestors, in refusing to sire a son upon the woman imposed on him by his father and shutting her out from his presence, in setting himself at one remove from the state structure his father had built, in associating himself with the remote rather than the recent past, in imagining himself as a unique figure unbound by time, Frederick was plotting his escape from these personal entanglements, whose psychological grip on him never loosened.

Frederick’s homosexuality is pertinent to these reflections. Frederick delighted openly in the physical beauty of the men he loved, composed poems celebrating heroes ‘responding both actively and passively to their lithe and obliging friends’, described Jesus as the ‘Ganymede’ of the Apostle John, and adorned his parks with statues of Antinous and pairs of male lovers from classical antiquity.110 And these signals were coupled with a clear rejection of heteronormative expectations, as exemplified in his theatrical humiliations of the unwanted wife he described as that ‘incorrigibly sour subspecies of the female sex’. The pastoral literary tradition that Frederick prized had long been inflected with a homosexual longing for the enactment of desire free from patriarchal and heteronormative constraints, in a space withdrawn from time and history.111 Frederick pointedly rejected the reproductive futurity of dynastic succession, preferring instead to invest in perfecting an idyll in which the personal freedom and candid sociability of early adulthood might be sustained and deepened indefinitely.112

These not-so-private inclinations merged seamlessly with a broader vision of the state and of his own power that was ahistorical, suspended in the zero gravity of eternal laws and cyclical motions. And this vision resonated in turn with the political economy of a reign in which the need to curtail the authority of the traditional agrarian elites had made way for a regime of ‘conservation’ designed to protect them against the effects of rampant social change. The king’s detachment from the conflictual domestic narratives of an earlier era enabled him to suspend his state like a heavenly body in the gravitational field of an international system whose movements, notwithstanding repeated recalibrations of an always precarious balance of power, were fundamentally unchanging.113 The result was an unresolved tension between the ambient stadial historicity of the late Enlightenment and the king’s own strikingly undynamic view of his place in time.

It is doubtless true that Frederick, as a historian, anticipated in some respects the political historiography of the ‘Borussian School’ whose works would refashion the history of Prussia for nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germans.114 To a much greater extent than his mentor and teacher Voltaire, he assigned clear priority to political and military history. And his most famous essay, the Memoirs of the House of Brandenburg, left a deep imprint on the memory of subsequent generations. The mordant elegance of the king’s aphorisms (‘men of genius are rarer in Denmark than everywhere else’)115 and the memorability of his pen portraits ensured the king’s writings a vivid afterlife. Of August III, king of Poland and Elector of Saxony, for example, he wrote, ‘laziness made him gentle, vanity wasteful, [he was] incapable of any thought that required combinations; though he lacked all religion, he was obedient to his confessor and though he was incapable of love, he was a submissive husband’.116 His pen portraits of the Great Elector, the first Prussian king and his own father, among many others, resonate across the nineteenth- and twentieth-century historiography of Prussia.

Yet it would be going too far to suggest that the king’s historical works anticipate or exemplify the historicist revolution that transformed German and European historical awareness in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Rather they represent a sideways step. The philosophically consequential train of thought inaugurated by the Great Elector and his court historian and sustained in different ways by Frederick III/I and Frederick William I was left to one side because it appeared politically and culturally obsolete. In its place, Frederick embraced a diffuse and derivative historical paradigm, adapting it to his own preferences in ways that undermined its coherence. It was the details of the frederician edifice—the portraits and aphorisms—that exercised an enduring influence, not the underlying logic of his narrative. Frederick cannot easily be incorporated into a sequence in which modern, linear forms of historicity inexorably displace older recursive ones.

At the core of the new historiography that emerged in mid-nineteenth-century Prussia was a constellation of arguments that owed less to Frederick than to his predecessors, and specifically to Pufendorf’s Hobbesian construction of the Brandenburg-Prussian state’s trajectory through history. Ranke and Droysen, two of the greatest nineteenth-century founders of Prussian historiography, both placed the protracted struggle between the Electoral executive and the Estates at the centre of their respective Prussian histories, highlighting the interdependencies between the inner and outwards projection of state power. And for Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose influence on the development of historical thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was not unimportant, the antagonism between the princely executive and the corporate holders of traditional power, between the universal and increasingly abstract authority of the state and the traditional, particularist appurtenances of provincial privilege, appeared to capture in paradigmatic fashion the very movement of history itself.