21.2.2: Frederick the Great

Frederick the Great: Early Childhood

Frederick, the son of Frederick William I and his wife, Sophia Dorothea of Hanover, was born in Berlin in 1712. His birth was particularly welcomed by his grandfather, Frederick I, as his two previous grandsons both died in infancy. With the death of Frederick I in 1713, Frederick William became King of Prussia, thus making young Frederick the crown prince.

The new king wished for his sons and daughters to be educated not as royalty but as simple folk. He had been educated by a Frenchwoman, Madame de Montbail, who later became Madame de Rocoulle, and wanted her to educate his children. Frederick was brought up by Huguenot governesses and tutors and learned French and German simultaneously. In spite of his father’s desire that his education be entirely religious and pragmatic, the young Frederick, with the help of his tutor Jacques Duhan, secretly procured a 3,000-volume library of poetry, Greek and Roman classics, and French philosophy to supplement his official lessons. Frederick William I, popularly dubbed the Soldier-King, possessed a violent temper and ruled Brandenburg-Prussia with absolute authority. As Frederick grew, his preference for music, literature, and French culture clashed with his father’s militarism, resulting in frequent beatings and humiliation from his father.

Crown Prince

Frederick found an ally in his sister Wilhelmine, with whom he remained close for life. At age 16, he formed an attachment to the king’s 13-year-old page, Peter Karl Christoph Keith. Margaret Goldsmith, a biographer of Frederick’s, suggests the attachment was of a sexual nature. As a result, Keith was sent away to an unpopular regiment near the Dutch frontier, while Frederick was temporarily sent to his father’s hunting lodge in order “to repent of his sin.” Around the same time, he became close friends with Hans Hermann von Katte.

When he was 18, Frederick plotted to flee to England with Katte and other junior army officers. Frederick and Katte were subsequently arrested and imprisoned in Küstrin. Because they were army officers who had tried to flee Prussia for Great Britain, Frederick William leveled an accusation of treason against the pair. The king briefly threatened the crown prince with the death penalty, then considered forcing Frederick to renounce the succession in favor of his brother, Augustus William, although either option would have been difficult to justify to the Imperial Diet (general assembly) of the Holy Roman Empire. The king forced Frederick to watch the decapitation of Katte at Küstrin, leaving the crown prince to faint right before the fatal blow was struck.

Frederick was granted a royal pardon and released from his cell, although he remained stripped of his military rank. Instead of returning to Berlin, he was forced to remain in Küstrin and began rigorous schooling in statecraft and administration. Tensions eased slightly when Frederick William visited Küstrin a year later and Frederick was allowed to visit Berlin on the occasion of his sister Wilhelmine’s marriage to Margrave Frederick of Bayreuth in 1731. The crown prince returned to Berlin after finally being released from his tutelage at Küstrin a year later.

A number of royal family members were considered candidates for marriage, but Frederick eventually married Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Bevern, a Protestant relative of the Austrian Habsburgs, in 1733. He had little in common with his bride and resented the political marriage as an example of the Austrian interference that had plagued Prussia since 1701. Once Frederick secured the throne in 1740 after his father’s death, he immediately separated from his wife and prevented Elisabeth from visiting his court in Potsdam, granting her instead Schönhausen Palace and apartments at the Berliner Stadtschloss. In later years, Frederick would pay his wife formal visits only once a year.Recent major biographers are unequivocal that Frederick was homosexual and that his sexuality was central to his life and character.

Frederick would come to the throne with an exceptional inheritance: an army of 80,000 men. By 1770, after two decades of punishing war alternating with intervals of peace, Frederick doubled the size of the huge army,  which during his reign would consume 86% of the state budget.

Becoming the Leader

Frederick was restored to the Prussian Army as colonel. When Prussia provided a contingent of troops to aid Austria during the War of the Polish Succession, Frederick studied under Prince Eugene of Savoy during the campaign against France on the Rhine. Frederick William, weakened by gout brought about by the campaign and seeking to reconcile with his heir, granted Frederick Schloss Rheinsberg in Rheinsberg, north of Neuruppin. In Rheinsberg, Frederick assembled a small number of musicians, actors, and other artists. He spent his time reading, watching dramatic plays, and making and listening to music, and regarded this time as one of the happiest of his life.

The works of Niccolò Machiavelli, such as The Prince, were considered a guideline for the behavior of a king in Frederick’s age. In 1739, Frederick finished his Anti-Machiavel, an idealistic refutation of Machiavelli. Instead of promoting more democratic principles of the Enlightenment, Frederick was a proponent of enlightened absolutism. It was written in French and published anonymously in 1740, but Voltaire distributed it in Amsterdam to great popularity.Frederick’s years dedicated to the arts instead of politics ended upon the 1740 death of Frederick William and his inheritance of the Kingdom of Prussia.

Prince Frederick was 28 years old when he acceded to the throne of Prussia. His goal was to modernize and unite his vulnerably disconnected lands, and he largely succeeded through aggressive military and foreign policies. Contrary to his father’s fears, Frederick proved himself a courageous soldier and an extremely skillful strategist. In fact, Napoleon Bonaparte viewed the Prussian king as the greatest tactical genius of all time. After the Seven Years’ War, the Prussian military acquired a formidable reputation across Europe. Esteemed for their efficiency and success in battle, Frederick’s army became a model emulated by other European powers, most notably Russia and France. Frederick was also an influential military theorist whose analysis emerged from his extensive personal battlefield experience and covered issues of strategy, tactics, mobility and logistics. Even the later military reputation of Prussia under Bismarck and Moltke rested on the weight of mid-eighteenth century military developments and the territorial expansion of Frederick the Great. Despite his dazzling success as a military commander, however, Frederick was not a fan of protracted warfare.

Attributions

• Frederick the Great
  • “Frederick the Great.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_the_Great. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “Enlightened absolutism.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enlightened_absolutism. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “Anti-Machiavel.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Machiavel. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “The Prince.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince. Wikipedia CC BY-SA 3.0.
  • “Antoine_Pesne_-_Frederick_the_Great_as_Crown_Prince_-_WGA17377.jpg.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_the_Great#/media/File:Antoine_Pesne_-_Frederick_the_Great_as_Crown_Prince_-_WGA17377.jpg. Wikipedia Public domain.