Frederick the Great
David Fraser
Allen Lane £25, pp700
Buy it at BOL
Frederick the Great fascinated Europe. To his contemporaries, the King of Prussia looked like not just the fulfilment of the Enlightenment, but the embodiment of what Western civilisation had dreamt of for millennia, the Philosopher-King.
He was formidably intelligent, cultured, a great soldier and a supreme player of world politics. He lived simply, had little time for the superstitions of organised religion, preferred the company of philosophers to dukes and defended the rights of the poor and the rule of law. He built well, turned Prussia into a major European power and wrote about every subject under the sun. For heaven's sake, he wrote flute sonatas. Wasn't this, after all, what the eighteenth century was waiting for?
Samuel Johnson wasn't so sure, commenting that Frederick's writings were only remarkable because they were by a king. And perhaps we, too, are less dazzled by Frederick than his European contemporaries were. He set an ideal of kingship in Prussia which his successors were hardly likely to live up to; that astonishing combination of military genius, low cunning in diplomacy and high intellectual cultivation is not one that you could expect to find very often in the random selections of a hereditary monarchy.
What they settled for, usually, was to emulate one aspect of Frederick's kingship - the parade-ground martinet - and, attempting to return to the ideal Spartan culture of Frederick's Prussia, succeeded in paving the way only for brutality, cruelty and excess. Probably what the nineteenth century most admired in Frederick was his innovative military genius, and his textbooks on battlefield tactics have gone on being read and admired. Paradoxically, the Prussian ascendancy meant that his weaker successors had to deal with the effects of great power and pomp, temptations few of them could resist abusing.
Frederick's legacy is not an attractive one and it is possible to understand how Thomas Mann came to call him 'a bad man with a bad heart'. But that is not quite fair; his legacy is not his fault. He simply set an unforgivingly high standard for his successors to live up to. If we make an effort to see him through eighteenth-century eyes, there is a great deal to admire.
Frederick was both made and destroyed by his father. It is difficult to regard Frederick Wilhelm as anything but a cruel lunatic. He was given to extraordinary whims, such as assembling, by bribery and kidnap, a platoon of guards all of whom were taller than 6ft 10in. His upbringing was utterly brutal and based on the militaristic ideal of ancient Sparta. Almost crushed, he ran away with a fellow cadet, Hans Hermann von Katte, whom he certainly loved. They were recaptured; Frederick Wilhelm considered executing both of them, but settled merely for beheading poor Katte. Frederick was required to watch the execution; he fainted.
After that, he had no emotional life. He was almost certainly homosexual, though it is unlikely that he indulged his tastes extensively. He married, but his poor queen turned out to be insignificant in his life (she merits just 11 passing mentions in this 700-page biography). There were no children.
Instead of that, he had the life of the intellect and, above all else, that of statecraft. From an early age, he was corresponding with Voltaire. This was not the usual ostentatious practice of princes; they had a real intellectual relationship. Voltaire wrote to the king with amazing frankness, addressing him as 'Votre Humanité', seeing in him the Godless ruler the Enlightenment dreamt of. In the end, he overstepped the mark, by meddling in state affairs and asking Frederick to intercede when a disreputable old friend found himself in trouble. Frederick did not answer.
Later, Voltaire engaged in a vitriolic, anonymous, but public exchange of pasquinades with the king on the subject of a tiff between scholars. Finally, Frederick had had enough and wrote, chillingly, to Voltaire that: 'Your effrontery astonishes me.' But it says a great deal about Frederick and his regard for the philosopher that things were allowed to get so far.
In diplomacy and on the battlefield, his ingenuity and demonic application take the breath away. No king has ever devoted more energy to foreign affairs, and Frederick's endlessly creative mind put Europe in a ferment, balancing the ambitions of France and his old enemy, Maria Theresa, the Empress of Austria, entering into the ceaseless squabbles of the participant German states which made up the Holy Roman Empire with considerable relish.
Often, Frederick's most startling diplomatic coups have an almost camp playfulness; only he would have taken care to have cheerily concluded a letter to his cousin, George II of England: 'I forgot! I've made a defensive alliance with Russia!'
This is a good, readable biography. It focuses, quite rightly, on Frederick as a diplomat and, especially, as a choreographer of battles. Personally, I found Fraser's exposition of military tactics before Clausewitz particularly instructive. It's often a difficult subject for modern readers; the little European wars of the eighteenth century lack the epic dimension, and the War of the Austrian Succession, the War of the Spanish Succession and the War of Jenkins' Ear tend to merge into one baffling squabble. Even a really geopolitical war such as the Seven Years War often seems to appear to modern readers as a strange, baroque sort of bicker, which sorted nothing much out and had an undecided sort of end.
Fraser sorts it all out very agreeably and leads us through a dense tangle with something approaching relish. There's plenty of enjoyable detail here - I never knew just how macaronically awful Frederick's German was. Of course, there are other books to be written about Frederick, as a builder, for instance; the palace complex in Potsdam is the single most coherent statement of his strange personality, alternately austere and flirtatious.
But this biography, surely, shows the king which his contemporaries would have seen, and Fraser shows us why they all admired him so much. In the case of a king whose successors too often seemed to blot out his achievements, that, surely, is worth a great deal.
