1740 and All That

Authors: selenak, cahn
Original discussion: https://cahn.dreamwidth.org/200007.html?thread=4252999#cmt4252999

selenak: So, at fail fandom anon, they have this "am I the asshole?" meme where a fictional (usually emotionally clueless) character asks this question in universe. I thought this was made for the Hohenzollern (and many of their social circle), so, here we go:

I, m34, was just trying to look out for my bratty younger sibling, m20 - there's this hot guy, total prick tease, whom the brat is swooning about. I might have said the guy has STD and made fun of his everything, and now the brat isn't talking to me anymore, when I was just being concerned for his health! AITA?

I, f55, always wanted the best for my children, especially when it came to their marriages. Now my oldest daughter looks at me as if I'm a madwoman just because I told her she should treat her new husband like her brother and not have sex with him so we can still annul this wretched marriage she should never have agreed to in the first place! She knows how much this means to me, and yet she betrayed me this way, she should be grateful I'm still talking to her at all! AITA?

I should have known this would happen, but: here I am, making some money on the side while providing heroic beta-reading services and writing my own stuff and defending an unfairly attacked guy against a shitstorm - and what happens? The guy who's been hitting on me for 16 years before I finally agreed to move in with him all of a sudden leads the shitstorm, attacks me while he's at it, burns my latest masterpiece and has me arrested while complaining to all our mutual friends that IATA!!!!!

cahn: Now my oldest daughter looks at me as if I'm a madwoman just because I told her she should treat her new husband like her brother and not have sex with him so we can still annul this wretched marriage she should never have agreed to in the first place!

omg, lol SD! I am going to say, YTABPAC, an acronym I just now made up that means "you're the asshole but possibly also crazy" :) Because when you put it like that...

As for your third one, he got some replies:
(just to be complete, for mildred:
ESH = "Everyone sucks here"
YTA = "You're the asshole"
NTA = "Not the asshole")

RandomRedditAddict
I can't help thinking there are a heck of a lot of missing reasons here. How is that you "should have known" this would happen? It's a little hard to say without more details, but I'm leaning ESH on this one.

MyActualNameIsGreaterThanThis
YTA. RRAddict's post above has a great point, missing reasons galore. Maybe you were really mean and annoying and made fun of this poor guy behind his back, whose only crime was thinking you were amazing?? And, like, are you kidding me, people don't just get arrested for NO REASON. I bet there was totally a reason, like maybe you STOLE his stuff!!

selenak: So here I, m, am, having a long term affair with the love of my life (m), procreating in my marriage (with f), having an affair with a bimbo (f) on the side, and mentoring this guy who has admittedly exciting future job prospects in my non existant spare time - and then that utter bastard first has sex with the bimbo, then, when I complain about it, dumps me as an mentor! I'll never get over it! His mother totally agrees with me, but the jerk still refuses to apologize - I don't need to ask whether AITA, because I know I'm not!

Here I, m64, was, enjoying my retirement as a PRIVATE CITIZEN, mentoring a few promising young people both in my state of residence and state of (former) employement, when it occured to me that takingon one more young fellow as a protegé might result in a general improvement of affairs for a great many people due to the kid's future job prospects. Now I was intensely familiar with people in his future line of work and let me tell you, most of these are jerks, with a lot of people suffering for it. His father was one of the worst. Any improvement there was enough of an incentive to lure me out of my retirement. Now I might have used a few questionable methods at first, but those prostitutes could use the money, so could various male friends in his social circle, and also, the competitition did the same thing. For a while, we seemed to hit it off and he expanded his intellectual horizon by listening to my reading tips, but unfortunately, the combination of other influences and an admittedly ill advised photobombing let to an enstragement. Well, at least I got a golden knob for a walking stick out of it, but when the kid, once on the job, immediately initiated a hostile takeover of the worst type, I couldn't help but wonder: could I have prevented this? was I the asshole there?

I, m, am a good looking career guy who used to be a in a steady relationship with someone in the same profession. Okay, my superior, but not the ultimate boss. (Could have had him, too, back in the day, if I'd wanted.) Now, maybe I was a bit high-handed when treating most of my s.o.'s hangers-on as the parasites they were, but I was just looking out for him! I mean, we've been through years of a high stress situation together, and now that's over, he's dumping me for some younger bit of fluff? Am I supposed to take that lying down?!!!! Of course I raised holy hell, I mean, who wouldn't, and okay, maybe hitting on his wife wasn't the best tactic, but I know he's been wanting to divorce her for eons. Anyway, the point is: I've been transferred to the back of beyond while the himbo got a gorgeous estate, and I still don't know how that happened. AITA?

I, m, really want everyone to be happy, and can't help it if many of them hit on me. I also want a steady job. Somehow, this evolved into a situation where this woman whom I had pay my travelling expenses thinks we'll live together while the guy in whose house I lived is having a fit because I had dinner with her on my last evening in town. But did either of them get me the job I wanted? They did not! So what's to complain about? AITA?

Some years ago I, m, and my long term companion, f, agreed to put our relationship on a non-sexual footing. AT the time, I thought it was a good idea, what with me being often ill and also way older. Since then, however, I discovered that I still can enjoy sex with a different woman. This doesn't impact on my relationship with my long-term companion, right? I mean, since we agreed to go platonic anyway, and I'm still as attracted as ever by her mind? It's just, there's this good looking younger guy hitting on her these days, and it looks like she's attracted to him, and I can't see that going anywhere good, so I said so, and we had an almighty row, especially after she found out about my other relationship. Okay, maybe I shouldn't have said "it's not like we're married" or "ditch the he-man, he's just after your money", but was that a reason for calling me a love rat and an overrated hack?!? AITA?

I, m41, am a loving family man with a strong work ethic and good Christian values. All I want is for my family to share those, especially my oldest son. To that end, I appointed him the best teachers, ensured he's always supervised and thus does not feel neglected, and spared him the awful stupid lessons I had to endure as a kid. Like Latin and ancient history. All I want in return is for him to be exactly like me, is this too much to ask? But no. He keeps grimacing when I'm around, ridicules all I hold dear, keeps lying to me, gets into debts and in general shows every sign of becoming the kind of lazy slob bound to ruin my life's work! So naturally I took counter measures. Some of them might have been drastic, like sending bad influences away and dragging him in front of two armies, but they were for his own good! Anyone could see that! And now the kid has humilated me in front of Europe by trying to run away, even conspiring with my own employes in order to do so. I might have overreacted when telling his mother he was dead, slapping his sister and telling him his mother doesn't care anymore, but I don't think so. It's just, my other kid, who's usually good as gold, now doesn't want to join my favourite profession anymore. AITA?

cahn:

DerAlteD
NTA. Kid should be more grateful. Maybe the problem is that he doesn't really see how much you do for him. I bet more family time would help, bring him to your nights out with the guys or whatever you do for fun. Or find him a nice girl! That's what he needs. Bonus is that your other kid will see all this and realize that the male authority figures really do know best.

pastorb
Depends on what you mean by "bad influences" -- I hope you're not trying to totally cut him off from his friends, that would be YTA territory for sure.

BearsAreNotTheAnswer
YTA. I just feel like if someone wants to run away, then that's your answer right there, you know?

So in the 18th and late 17th century we see a whole bunch of kids whose parents are obsessively religious, and their kids turn out the opposite: freethinkers, libertines, or both.

- We all know about FW and his free-thinking kids. Even AW, whom he was relatively nice to, had the attitude that too much religious ostentation was a bad thing, although so was mocking religion *cough* Fritz.

- We know about Cosimo III de Medici and his two libertine sons (and GG was something of a freethinker until his deathbed conversion).

- We have recently learned about Pietists Christian VI and Sophia Magdalena of Denmark and their libertine children, Frederik V and Louise the possibly-pregnant-out-of-wedlock. Frederik, incidentally, was not a Deist, there are a lot of references to God and praying in his letters...but let's just say he was not his parents when it came to religion.

- Struensee's father was Francke's successor as pastor in Halle. Struensee, talking to a pastor before his execution, said his father was much too hard on him. Winkle, the academic biographer I'm currently reading, just says that that was normal. He also says that FW was a perfectly normal father, and that nothing that happened to Fritz was unusual.

More convincingly, Barz, the romanticizing biographer, says Struensee père was the kind of authoritarian father whose children have to either turn out exactly like him or exactly opposite him, no middle ground. And sure enough, one son turned out just like him and the rest abandoned religion and became Deists or atheists. Struensee also had a reputation as a libertine; he seems to have been pretty sexually active, although rumors of his decadence in other ways may have been exaggerated.

But there are also some cases where a more liberal upbringing resulted in a child who felt the need to go in an extreme religious direction. This write-up is mostly about Ferdinand, Duke of Parma, but there's also the other obvious case: Tsarevitch Alexei, murdered son of Peter the Great. We'll cover Ferdinand's education in the first post, since I have far more detail about it, and then do a compare-and-contrast with Alexei's in the second post.

( Ferdinand of Parma )

( Tsarevitch Alexei )

Sources
Der Infant von Parma: oder Die Ohnmacht der Erziehung, a monograph by Elisabeth Badinter, whom selenak reminded me was the author who once wrote a biography of MT without learning German. So, you know, grain of salt about her scholarship, but at least this one isn't set in Germany. (There's not a lot of Italian in her bibliography, but a little.)

"Heinrich von Huyssen (1666–1739) als Hofmeister des russischen Thronfolgers Aleksej", an essay by Svetlana Korzun, in the collection of essays Die Flucht des Thronfolgers Aleksej: Krise in der „Balance of Power“ und den österreichisch-russischen Beziehungen am Anfang des 18 Jahrhunderts," edited by Iskra Schwarz. I was hoping for more on the flight of the crown prince Alexei from this collection, but it's more about the crisis in the balance of power and Austrian-Russian relations at the beginning of the 18th century. So a lot of stuff I already knew.

Johann Friedrich Struensee: Arzt, Aufklärer und Staatsmann; Beitrag zur Kultur-, Medizin- und Seuchengeschichte der Aufklärungszeit, a book by Stefan Winkle.

NB: This is neither comprehensive nor anything I'm knowledgeable about. This is "stuff I figured out in two days that helped put some other stuff, especially Leopold's reforms, in context."

Mercantilism: Mercantilism was the dominant economic theory in Europe in the 17th and first half of the 18th centuries. It goes like this.

Wealth consists in the amount of money (bullion) a state has. Because this is a finite and stable quantity, economics is a zero-sum game, and a state can only expand at the expense of its neighbors. The goal is to increase exports (other states give you money--good) and reduce imports (you give other states money--bad). This means protectionism, monopolies, and high tariffs.

Physiocracy: Physiocracy was a short-lived economic theory in the 18th century. It was developed in reaction to mercantilism and its shortcomings. It goes like this.

Wealth consists in agriculture. Only farmers are producing new wealth, industry and everything else is just working with what you have. In order for agriculture to flourish, you need to facilitate trade of grain by removing monopolies and tariffs, and let competition and the balance of supply and demand work things out.

Physiocracy is the precursor to classical economics, and yes, this is exactly when Adam Smith is writing.

Specific application of physiocracy: because only agriculture is productive, only land, or alternately its agricultural yield, should be taxed. Anything else comes from the land, so taxing it would just be taxing the same thing twice.

Cameralism: Cameralism is...I have seen a bunch of definitions and scholars arguing with each other, but for purposes of this oversimplified intro, you can think of it as basically mercantilism with more bureaucracy, as developed and practiced mostly by Germans, in the 18th and first half of the 19th century. Its practitioners are also called Antiphysiocrats: they believe in a strong government controlling a centralized economy. No points for guessing this one is popular in Prussia.

In the 1760s, the school of thought that's getting the most ink spilled on it, as far as I can tell, is physiocracy, but in practice, mercantilism and cameralism are going strong by governments that care less about theory.

With that as background, we have some more context for various figures from salon.

Leopold II: Leopold's reforms have traditionally been called physiocratic. He and his advisors were well read in the works of the big physiocratic thinkers, they admired physiocractic thinkers, and one of the first things he did when taking over Tuscany was open up free trade on grain. He wrote a lot of things like "The state should only interfere with free trade when absolutely necessary," and he wiped out a lot of the mercantilist and even pre-mercantilist (a lot of Florentine laws went back to the days of the Republic) restrictions.

This was a big deal and gets a whole chapter in Peham, because when Leopold arrived, Tuscany was in the middle of its worst famine since the 14th century. As noted in the Leopold comment above, after Leopold's 1760s reforms, no more famines, not even in years of bad harvests. (Remember that in France, continuing bad harvests and famines/rising prices of bread were a proximate cause driving the Revolution.)

But! As gets pointed out a lot, including by Peham but also various other authors I'm reading, Leopold was not a doctrinaire. He did not subscribe wholesale to all of physiocracy's tenets, and especially the one where industry was inherently not productive.

His subjects like this, because even if Tuscany is now predominantly an agricultural state and its great industrial days are over, "Florentines were too well read in their own history to believe that manufacturing was really unproductive." So Leopold being flexible in his economic approach is popular.

It does, however, mean that when this one minister from Denmark sets off on an "economic Grand Tour" through Europe, hoping to see for himself how physiocracy works out in practice, he finds that of the two places where it was supposedly adopted, it wasn't really: Both in Tuscany and Baden, the implementers believed in the productivity of manufacturing and did not blindly follow what the French thinkers who'd developed physiocracy said.

Also, spoiler: attempts to implement something like physiocracy on top of the existing structures did not work in Baden and had to be abandoned.

Turgot: Famous minister of Louis XVI who tried and failed to fix the economy of France and prevent the French revolution was a physiocrat, or possibly an early classical economist (it gets fuzzy). Two of the big reforms he wanted to implement that came out of physiocracy were a single nationwide tax on land and free trade of grain.

If you look at the existing situation in France, you can see why he met with so much opposition. One, having a single tax on land means only landowners pay taxes. That means a lot of nobility suddenly has to bear the tax burden, and the whole point of being a noble was major tax exemptions. (This was not a thing in Tuscany and never had been, making Leopold's job easier.)

Two, removing limitations on the trade of grain would take power out of the hands of the rich and powerful who were able to speculate on grain and make a killing in years of bad harvests. Yes, this can happen under a free trade system too, and was one of the major objections to it by the cameralists, who thought the government should disallow capitalists stockpile grain and instead use their strong centralized power to ensure affordable prices in all years, but, the point is that the people who might benefit under the free trade system might not be the same people who are currently benefitting under the existing system, and the latter don't want to lose their existing benefits. No one ever wants to lose their existing benefits.

Note that pre-revolutionary France, like Tuscany when Leopold took over, was made up of many provinces that all had customs duties with all the other provinces, because they'd historically been separate, and they'd only agreed to be united if they could keep their own ways of doing things. So free trade of grain inside the country, never mind lifting tariffs on imports and limitations on exports, would have been a *big* step. Big enough, in the end, that it took a revolution.

Also! One of the reasons Turgot opposes French sending money to support the American Revolution is that, while he generally agrees with the principles of said Revolution, he has some issues with it, and one is the Founding Fathers deciding to have a super complicated tax system (me: *sob*) instead of a simple land tax.

Voltaire: Our antihero, who has written a scathing satire on everything, has written a scathing satire on physiocracy. It's called "L'homme aux quarante écus," or "The Man of Forty Crowns." I have not read the whole thing, but I read enough to get the gist of it: a small farmer who owns a plot of land and barely gets by (he has forty crowns a year) gets taxed under this single land tax system, but a rich minister who speculates in industry gets off scot-free, because industry is "unproductive." The man of forty crowns keeps asking what he can do to get ahead, and he's told, "Get married and have kids!" By having the guy ask increasingly penetrating questions about exactly what economic benefit he will get out of this, Voltaire skewers the proposition.

Pfeiffer: Pfeiffer, the guy who got imprisoned for embezzlement in the Kiekemal affair, was a cameralist. And not just a cameralist but a voluminously writing one. He wrote so much, and ended up founding the professorship of cameralism at Mainz, that he's one of the best known antiphysiocrats of his time and has had books written on him, one of which is a collection of essays called Physiocracy, Antiphysiocracy, and Pfeiffer, which I got for my Kiekemal research but which is heavily informing this write-up.

Pfeiffer agrees with classical economists in that he agrees that individuals act in their own self-interest, but he believes that this is as likely to lead to bad things and diminished overall utility as anything good. Because people are unaware that other people want to act in their own self-interest, and thus they behave badly toward each other. Most people don't understand why vice is bad and thus they are not capable of making good use of liberty.

But he also doesn't want the state to grow and grow and get out of control, which he realizes an absolute monarchy is prone to doing, so he advocates for a mixed monarchy.

To quote from the author of this essay, Frambach, "What is missing from Pfeiffer's considerations, from the modern point of view, is the idea of the market as an instrument of control, although he definitely treats its elements (price, demand and supply, production and consumption)."

Bielfeld: Our Freemason friend of Fritz at Rheinsberg and tutor to and friend of the Divine Trio is also a cameralist (and his Wikipedia article cares more about his writings on this subject than about more human interest topics, like how he sensibly ran away when AW started setting trees on fire). His stance is unsurprising, as I don't think Fritz would have been a big fan of being told he couldn't control things. :P

Author: selenak, mildred_of_midgard, cahn
Original discussion: https://cahn.dreamwidth.org/185265.html?thread=3385009#cmt3385009, https://cahn.dreamwidth.org/185754.html?thread=3392410#cmt3392410

mildred_of_midgard's prompt: Poor Gundling. AU where he offs FW!

Spoilers for Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express. Don't click if you might want to read that book unspoiled someday!

( FW is murdered )

Author: selenak
Original discussion: https://cahn.dreamwidth.org/184453.html?thread=3221381#cmt3221381

Cast
🤴🏻 Fritz, a King
👨🏻‍💻 Voltaire, a writer
👩🏻‍🎓 Émilie, a lady of science
👨🏻‍🎓 König, a gentleman of science
👨🏻‍🚀 Maupertuis, an explorer, later head of the Academy
👨‍🦱 Fredersdorf, a Consigliere
👩🏻‍🦰 Madame Denis, a niece
👮🏻‍♂️ Freytag, a Prussian resident in Frankfurt
👥 Academy members; later, the rest of Europe
👩🏻‍🦱: Wilhelmine, a sister


Act 1
🤴🏻: 💌 👨🏻‍💻
👨🏻‍💻: 💌 🤴🏻
🤴🏻: 📖📝👐😇❓
👩🏻‍🎓: 🤨🗝❗️
👨🏻‍💻: 🤷🏻‍♂️
🤴🏻: 😣
🤴🏻: 💌🧳🏰❓
👨🏻‍💻: 👩🏻‍🎓❤️👨🏻‍💻🧳❓
🤴🏻: 👨🏻‍💻❗️👩🏻‍🎓❌
👨🏻‍💻: 😶
👩🏻‍🎓: 🤔
👩🏻‍🎓: ⚰️
👨🏻‍💻: 😭
🤴🏻: 🤩🧳🏰❓
👨🏻‍💻: 👣🏰
🤴🏻👨🏻‍💻: 🪢💍

Act 2
👨🏻‍🚀: 🥸👥
👨🏻‍🎓: 🖕
👨🏻‍🚀: 💪🏻🦶🏻👥
👨🏻‍💻: 😈👅👨🏻‍🚀
🤴🏻: ❗️🤐❗️
👨🏻‍💻: 🤥😇; 📝😈
🤴🏻: ⁉️📝🗞
👨🏻‍💻: 🖕🗞📕📗📘👅
👥: 😯
🤴🏻: 💥🔥📚
👨🏻‍💻: 🧳

Act 3
🤴🏻: 📖⁉️🤫
👨‍🦱: ✉️👮🏻‍♂️
👨🏻‍💻👩🏻‍🦰: 🧳🏤
👮🏻‍♂️: ⛓👩🏻‍🦰👨🏻‍💻
👥: 😱
👨🏻‍💻: 🤬📖🔙👮🏻‍♂️
🏤: 💶❗️
👨🏻‍💻: 😤💶✔️
👨🏻‍💻👩🏻‍🦰: 🧳
👨🏻‍💻: 😡💔
🤴🏻: 😡💔

Act 4
🤴🏻: ⚔️🗺😰
👩🏻‍🦱: ✉️ 👨🏻‍💻👐
👨🏻‍💻: ✉️ 😼🤴🏻
🤴🏻: ❗️😍😡📩
👨🏻‍💻: 😍😡📩
👨🏻‍💻🤴🏻: 💌👅💌👅⏳
👥: 🤯
🤴🏻👨🏻‍💻: 😎

Write-up by selenak:

Trying to get to meet Voltaire was a must for European travellers not just in his old age, but pretty much since his thirties. It was easier once he had settled down in exile near Geneva, though. If the would be visitor in question was a young unknown like James Boswell, you got encounters such as this one; if, on the other hand, the other party was an 18th century superstar himself, well, then you get volume 15th of Casanova's memoirs. Background the first: Casanova's encounter with Voltaire takes place in 1760 (though he gets Voltaire's age wrong); at this point, Casanova is moderately famous for having managed to escape the The Leads, the notorious Venetian state prison, but he's by no means as universally known as he is today, as his memoirs have not yet been written. Some might even know him as a con man of the Saint Germain and Cagliostro type from his adventures in France. He's decades younger than Voltaire, true, but hitting middle age himself, and about to feel it soon. Voltaire, on the other hand, has been the most famous (French) writer of the age for good while, despite competition; his claim to literary fame is unquestioned, nor is his ability to piss off governments and authorities all over Europe (which is why he has ended up in Switzerland). Background the second: Also worth keeping in mind: by the time old Casanova writes his memoirs, stuck in a dead-end job as a librarian in Bohemia, Voltaire has died decades ago (being controversial even in death, due to the church's unwillingness to bury him in Paris), and the French Revolution has happened, irrevocably changing the world they had both known. For which Voltaire got, depending from your pov, some credit/blame.

On to the first encounter, which has Voltaire doing that thing people still do today, which is meeting someone from a place and automatically assuming they must know someone else from the same place. In other words, Voltaire is playing Six Degrees of Algarotti. To understand Casanova's attitude, bear in mind that while Casanova is, uncontestedly, the most famous 18th Century Venetian now, back then he wasn't; it was none other than, you guessed it, Francesco Algarotti.

( So did Casanova know Algarotti, and if so, how well did he know him? )

( Which is when a discussion of Italian literature becomes mutual show-off in declaiming by heart: Voltaire vs Casanova, it's on! )

(This gets Casanova an invitation to stay for three days chez Voltaire. Sidenote re: Ariosto: given Voltaire uses a simile from Orlando Furioso, from which they've just quoted, in his memoirs when talking about his hate/love relationship with Frederick the Great - who gets called "my Frederick-Alcina", casting Friedrich as the sorceress bewitching men into staying at her palace, I'm completely willing to believe he warmed up to Ariosto. As for everyone's tears, that was the custom of the day. 18th Century: when everyone, especially the men, cried a lot. Bless.)

( Voltaire advises budding author Casanova on booksellers )

(Sidenote: Voltaire was indeed one of the few writers with independent wealth. Which he had not inherited. As a young man, he'd decided that while money without talent was stupid, talent without money was a drag, and thus contrived by various deals, some of which shady, some legal, to make himself a fortune. More about where his income came from - indeed not from his writings - here.)

Casanova finds the time in between Voltaire audiences to have an adventure with three ladies, because of course he does. Then he tries his charm on Madame Denis, about whom he has a far more positive impression than your average 18th century memoir writer:

( Wherein we learn how Madame Denis feels about Frederick the Great and that Voltaire doesn't like losing at backgammon )

Casanova then has more adventures with the three ladies, and proceeds to spend the last of his three days with Voltaire. Alas, though, first they disagree about a book Casanova lent Voltaire, and then they argue politics. Specifically, whether or not humanity is ready for liberty, and what liberty means anyway. Three guesses as to who takes which attitude....

( Game on, Voltaire! )

And thus ended the meeting between two of the most famous pre-French Revolution people of the 18th century.

The Diderot biography I'm writing up here is Diderot and the Art of Thinking Freely, by Andrew Curran.

I chose it because it was available on Kindle, cheap, and Amazon recommended it to me. ;) It was not as scholarly as I would have liked, but it was as good a starting point as any.

I haven't finished writing up the most important part, his work on the Encyclopédie, but that requires a little more precision, so I'm still working on it [ETA: I'll get to it someday. ;)]. For now, you can have the rest.

( Personal life )

( The Art of Thinking Freely )

( Diderot and Catherine )