Frederic II of Prussia

Frederic II of Prussia , known as Frederic Large the ( Friedrich der Große ), (January 24th 1712, Berlin - August 17th 1786, Potsdam), of the dynasty of the Hohenzollern, is simultaneously Frederic IV of Brandebourg, 14 {{E}} prince-voter of Brandebourg and 3rd king in Prussia under the name of Frederic II of Prussia (1740 - 1772) then 1st king of Prussia of 1772 to its death (identical classification). He is also called affectionately DER alte Fritz (the Fritz old man).

He inserts his country in the court of the European great powers. After having a time attended Voltaire, it becomes famous to be one of the carriers of the ideal of the prince of the enlightened Age of Enlightenment as “a despotic”.

Childhood

Wire of Frederic-Guillaume I {{er}} of Prussia - known as the “King-sergeant” and of Sophie Dorothée of Hanover, it is born on January 24th, 1712, under the reign of Frederic Ier of which he is the grandson.

Frederic-Guillaume and Sophie-Dorothée already lost two wire in low-age before Frederic. In a dynastic preoccupation with a continuity, one gives him the same first name as his grandfather. In addition to these two died brothers, Frederic has a big sister, Wilhelmine born into 1709 who will be his confidante and with which it maintains a privileged relation, at least until his attempt at escape. Eight brothers and sisters will follow her birth.

His/her grandfather dies in February 1713 and his/her father goes up on the throne. It is a character austere, coleric, known to have struck men with the face with his cane or to have beaten women in the street and justifying these angry outbursts like acts of religious indignation. His/her father puts a point of honor so that the education of his/her son corresponds at his strict and rigid sights. Also it prohibits the training of Latin or the history beyond the Rebirth, not seeing the utility there. The literature, the music or the dance do not find more thanks to the eyes of the king whom animates a Protestant rigorism.

On the other hand, the queen-mother is of a gracious nature and a refined education. She is the girl of the voter of Hanover, Georges of Brunswick-Lüneburg become thereafter George Ier of Great Britain.

Hostile to France, Frederic-Guillaume entrusts to the education of his son to one emigrated French Madam de Montbail, a Huguenot E driven out like so many others by Louis XIV, and which was already its préceptrice. Without his knowledge, Frederic-Guillaume supports the first contacts of his son with the language and the French literature.

It is in hiding-place, with the complicity of its tutors that Frederic discovers poetry and philosophy.

Adolescence

The tastes of Frederic for the Philosophy, the languages (he learns Latin in hiding-place) and the French Littérature as for the Musique (he plays well of the flute) can only displease with his/her father. The confrontation is inevitable. The king treats his son of effeminate and the reprimand more and more violently. He strikes it or exerts all kinds of humiliations, forcing it, for example, to kiss his boots in front of his officers or throws himself on him at the time of meal in family.

At the sixteen years age, Frederic is caught friendship for the page of the king, Peter Christopher Keith one year his elder. Written Wilhemine, in its memories that both “quickly become inseparable. Keith is intelligent but without education. It serves my brother with a devotion real and informs it of all the actions of the king. Although I notice that with this page, it is in terms more familiar than its position requires it, I am unaware of until where their friendship went. ”
Toujours is it that the king exiles Keith and assigns near the young prince a young soldier, lieutenant Borcke. If the Frederic young person “opens to him his heart” in a letter which was preserved, one is unaware of if the opposite is true. On the other hand, a little later it meets Hans Hermann von Katte, the son of a general, then 22 years old with which, hardly 18 years old, Frederic envisages to flee in England (let us recall that Hanover, its maternal family, is assembled on the throne).

It is a crime of high treason on behalf of the young officers who are Frederic and Katte, marked to want to be combined in England to reverse Frederic-Guillaume. The capital punishment the threat both.

To punish his son, the king orders the execution of Katte and condemns the young prince to the prison. The young officer dies with dignity, the November 6th 1730, in front of the fortress of Custrin. With the prince who shouts “my dear Katte to him, thousand forgiveness! ”, he answers “not of forgiveness, my Prince, I die with thousand pleasures for you”. He is decapitated under the eyes horrified at Frederic who crumbles before do not fall the sword.

The forgiveness of his/her father is long to come. After a time of prison, Frederic is charged, under monitoring, with helping with the administration of the town of Küstrin. He receives royal forgiveness only in August 1731 by ensuring his father that he retained the lesson. It is however probable that Frederic primarily learned art from the dissimulation.

Youth

In February 1732, Frederic is finally authorized to leave his supervised residence of Küstrin. This good news for him is accompanied by the decision to marry it with a German princess, Elisabeth-Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, girl of the duke Ferdinand Albert II of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, niece of Charles VI of the Holy roman Empire and of which the brother, Antoine-Ulrich of Brunswick-Bevern east généralissime of the Russian imperial armies, husband of the regent Anna Léopoldovna and father of the transitory tsar Ivan VI. Frederic does not have an other choice to incline itself in front of the decision of his/her father and the weddings take place in June 1733. The prince written with his sister and confidante, in connection with this imposed wife “it can have neither love there nor friendship between us. ”

In August 1736, it leaves to settle with Rheinsberg. There starts for him what was can be the happiest period of its life. It is surrounded by a court which it chooses among philosophers and men of letters, it fills the gaps left by the education imposed by his father, writes French poetry. It starts a long correspondence with Voltaire which supervises and makes publish in 1740 the Anti-Machiavel where the prince exposes (anonymously!) its ideas on a contractual, concerned monarchy of many citizens. It gains thus, the year even where it succeeds his father the title of king-philosopher .

The relations between the father and the son gradually improved. The interest not-pretends that Frederic carries to the military thing is not foreign there. Called with the bedside of his/her dying father, the emotion seems sincere. Before dying, Frederic-Guillaume proclaims that he sees as a Frederic his worthy successor. Frederic as for him is impressed by the stoicism and the courage of his father vis-a-vis death.

Frederic the Large one

In June 1740, Frederic is twenty-eight years old when it goes up on the throne of a kingdom parcelled out with to the east the Eastern Prussia with Königsberg for capital, in the center the Brandebourg, the duchy of Magdeburg and the Poméranie with Berlin for capital and in the west the Duché of Clèves, the évêché of Minden, the counties of Lingen, Mark and Ravensberg. If it is parcelled out, the kingdom is strongly armed: in term of armed forces ratio/total population, Prussia is thirty times more effective than the Poland-Lithuania close and profits from a system to conscription. Prussia is then altogether only one small country but represents the third European army.

In the line of his father, it increases the manpower of its army but, contrary to this one, it hopes well to make use of it and makes use of it well.

The annexation of Silesia

The war seven year old

The riding attitude of Frederic with his allies during and after the war of succession of Austria makes him lose the alliance of France (which it was in any event replacing by British Alliance). Marie-Therese, dreaming only to take again Silesia, concludes with France a defensive alliance. Russia, on its side, lorgnant on Eastern Prussia, lines up at their sides. In August 1756, Frederic starts a preventive war against Austria, involving the intervention of France, of Russia, then of Sweden. Passer by of many times at two fingers of the disaster - the Russian armies are with the doors of Berlin - Frederic is saved by the death of the tzarina Elisabeth and the reversal of its successor, Pierre {{Romanian|III|3}} in its favor.

Prussia leaves exhausted conflict. It lost up to 10% of its population. At the end of these wars of Silesia, with the treaties of Breslau (1742), Dresden (1745) and Hubertusburg (1763), the possession of Silesia is recognized in Prussia. Frederic by three times having however concluded from separate peaces and having violated many agreements sees his reputation leaving there ruined. He is, with the eyes of the Courses of Europe, a sovereign in whom one cannot have confidence.

The first division of Poland

The war of succession of Bavaria

The statesman

At the beginning of his reign, Frederic takes a series of decisions at the same time showing that it wishes to only reign and that it intends to be placed under the sign of the reason and arts. Frederic sees himself like the first servant of the State and behaves like tel.

First of all, with the great disappointment of those, it does not name any the members of its Court of Rheinsberg at an important station. Those are appreciated for their spirit and their conversation, not for their political councils. Frederic is not man to let itself influence.

The tolerance with the religious minorities (mainly catholic) and the opening to the immigrants (the such Huguenot S) mark the reign of Frederic II and are not stripped of economic thinking backs on behalf of Prussia.

“All the religions are worth and are good when the people who claim themselves some publicly are honest people and if the Turks and the pagan ones came and populated the country, they would like to build Mosques and churches. ” (extracted from a letter of 1740).

It makes a clear distinction between its personal convictions and the good of the State.

“each one must be able to find safety as it wishes it” ( Jeder ground nach seiner Façon selig werden ), affirms the king in his tinted French German.

Also, if, in its private life, it is without pity for the Catholic church, in its trade of King, it must obtain the attachment of the catholics: it thus does not remove the colleges Jésuite S of Silesia when well even (or because?) the pope Clément XIV abolished their order. The catholics of Berlin are indebted for him erection of the Holy-Hedwige Cathédrale.

It does not carry the Juif S in its heart and continues the discriminatory policy compared to the Jews of its predecessors, writing, in his political Legacy “I did not persecute anybody of this sect nor of some other, I think however that it is advisable to pay attention so that their number does not increase. ”

As a good economist, it shows mercantilist. By abolishing the Granting S inside the territory, it develops the Commerce and the industry of its country which it protects by high tariff barriers. Transport (with, inter alia, the construction of the Channel of Bydgoszcz between Oder and the Vistula) is improved. Marshes are drained to increase the agricultural surface and of new species (potato and turnip) introduced.

With the assistance of French experts, the systems of the tax S is revised in favor of the more painless and more effective indirect taxes for the royal cases. It introduces a monetary reform made necessary into a State made bloodless by the war. Under its reign, the administration is reformed thanks to its War and Minister for Finance, Adam Ludwig von Blumenthal which its Joachim nephew succeeds until the end of the reign of Frederic and beyond.

Frederic founds an Academy of Science and makes come Leonhard Euler, the largest mathematician of his time; with Königsberg, Emmanuel Kant, in the field of philosophy makes that Prussia does not have to redden of Paris of the Lumières. The Prussian education system is then looked like one of best of Europe. One built hundreds of schools then there. Sometimes but in the schools of countryside the training of the teachers leaves something to be desired because one often calls upon warrant officers who often cannot perfectly read, write or count.

It abolishes the Torture and reorganizes the legal apparatus.

According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the founders of the Great East asserted the membership of Frederic II, although that is not at all proven. On the other hand according to the Dictionary of the freemasonry of Daniel Ligou, it would have been initiated on August 14th, 1738.

There are judges in Berlin!

This expression that the Germans quote only in French, is famous. It comes from a poem of Andrieux which tells us that Frederic II, wanting to increase his field, asked the miller close to Without-Concern of selling his mill to him. In front of its refusal he threatened it to confiscate this good purely and simply, but the subject answered the sovereign proudly:

" Oui, if there were no judges in Berlin! "

In front of the confidence which one had in the impartiality of his justice, the king preferred to yield; the poem was a long time given to learn and establishes the reputation of Frederic II like model of enlightened monarch. There is undoubtedly a share of legend in this anecdote. Always it is that it is possible for all the citizens in Prussia of Frederic II to address themselves by letter or even personally to the king. And sometimes its ministers see themselves recalling to the order:

" That displeases to me much that the poor implied in legal affairs in Berlin are also badly treated and that one threatens to stop them as that was the case with Jacob Dreher of Eastern Prussia which remained in Berlin because of a lawsuit and which the police force wanted to stop. I already prohibited that and I already indicated you that a poor peasant is as important as a count and than a rich person gentleman. The right is worth same manner for important people as for simple the " (Letter with its Minister for Justice, 1777).

In accordance with his famous currency “the king is the first servant of the State”, he tries to limit excesses of the feudal system.

To the social status, however, it does not go until removing the Servage or the privileges of the nobility. The Aufklärung has its limits… On the matter, the softening of the serfdom which it wishes and which it impelled fails because of the massive resistance of the Prussian land aristocracy ( Landadel ). But its abolition is imposed gradually in the fields of the crown. On the new cultivated grounds, one establishes villages and there one installs freed peasants. It is frequent to ask the farm laborers, with the maidservants and with the farmhands how they are treated and, at the time of the prolongation of the beams of tenant farming of the grounds belonging to the State, in the event of abuse on behalf of the farmers, the beams are not renewed even when the grounds were well managed from an economic point of view. He likes to direct itself until in depth. He gives instructions to his ministers by letter but never convenes them in council. It follows the files, enquiert of their advance. It makes many displacements in order to judge by itself the situation of its provinces. It is particularly being wary compared to its own civils servant to which it allots a very particular sufficiency coming from their statute of privileged compared to the poorer classes. Its devotion to Prussia had like annoying consequence that with its death, its nephew and successor Frederic Guillaume II only little will have been associated with the capacity.

The art lover

Opinion of Frederic II on German

In 1747, in the History of my time , the famous sovereign considers the language German “as barbarian as Goths and Huns which corrupted it; most of Germanic freedoms consists of what each small State and each small territory affect a particular language, which diversifies, multiply and change so considerably the idioms that the same ideas are expressed with words and different sentences in Berlin, in Leipzig, in Vienna, in Stuttgart, in Cologne, and in Holstein… One completely misses these Academies which serve of witnesses with the use of the words, which fix their true direction and their employment with precision, and as there comes that the authors, not knowing neither rules nor laws, gives up oneself with their whim, and writes without purity, elegance and concision in a coarse language and an unequal and wild style. ”

In 1780, it is always also severe and writing in its book Of the German literature; defects which one can reproach him; which are the causes; and by which means one can correct them :

“I find a language with half-barbarian, who is divided into as many different dialects Germany contains provinces. Each circle is convinced that its patois is the best. There still does not exist of collection provided with the national sanction, where one finds a choice of words and sentences which constitutes the purity of the language… It is thus physically impossible that a gifted author of the most beautiful genious can supérieurement handle this rough language well… I hear a jargon deprived of approval that each one handles according to its whim, of the terms employed without choice; the clean words most expressive neglected… It is necessary to start by improving the language; it needs to be filed and planed. ”

It does not return from there to be obliged to find “only at the end of one whole page the verb from which the direction depends on all the sentence. ”

All sentences on which the nationalist Germans threw the coat of Noë.

End

Towards the end of his life, Frederic slips towards the misanthropy. With that of the men, he prefers the company of his greyhounds which he calls his “marchionesses of Pompadour” in reference enjouée to Madam de Pompadour, the famous mistress of the king Louis XV. He does not enjoy it less than one sympathy on behalf of the people which call affectionately it DER alte Fritz , “the Fritz old man”.

Its health is degraded gradually. It however keeps its extraordinary capacity of work until the end. He dies the August 17th 1786, 74 years old, sitted with his work table to the palate of Sanssouci.

Its will, written in 1757, precise:

Im übrigen will ich, was meine Persson anbetrifft, in Sanssouci beigesetzt werden, ohne Prunk, ohne Pomp und EIB Nacht…
“besides that, with regard to my person, I wish buried being with Sanssouci without splendor, pump and of night…”

Its successor, however, orders that one buries it near his father in the church of the garrison of Potsdam. During the Second world war, the royal tombs are transferred in a bunker, in sure place. In 1945, US Army the place in the vault of the Protestant University of Marbourg from where they then left to join the cradle of the dynasty, the Château of Hohenzollern not far from Stuttgart. After the German Reunification, the body of Frederic Guillaume is deposited in the Kaiser Friedrich Mausoleum of the church of the Peace located in the Marly garden of the park of Sanssouci. A debate rises on the other hand with regard to the fate of that of Frederic II, this king de Prusse if not very peaceful and whose memory was exploited at ends of propaganda as well by the Third Reich as by GDR.

In spite of many protests, for the 205e birthday of its death, the coffin of Frederic is exposed on a catafalque in the Main courtyard of the Palate of Sanssouci, covered with a flag Prussian and escorted by a guard of honor of the Bundeswehr. After fallen the day, the body is deposited, according to its last wills, close to its greyhounds, on the terrace of the vineyard of the castle,

without splendor, pump and of night…

Heritage

During his reign, Frederic II unifies a parcelled out kingdom territorialement and manages to sit Prussia with the table of the five European great powers of the 18th century (France, England, Austria, Russia and Prussia). Contrary to many its pars, he does not regard as a monarch of divine Droit but like a servant of the State and, for him, the crown is only one “hat which lets pass the rain”. With the gibes in vogue in Versailles, he prefers the simplicity of the uniform and none of its portraits represents it in great pageantry but, generally, as a soldier.

Its ceaseless wars against Austria weaken the Holy roman Empire Habsbourg. If it is false to make of him the precursor of the German Unité and of Otto von Bismarck, it is right to affirm that it made difficult, even impossible, that it is done under the imperial sceptre and catholic-Roman of Habsbourg. The Austria competition - Prussia will find its outcome with Sadowa. And it is finally around Prussia and not of Austria that will be made the German unit.

The III {{E}} Reich will recover also the figure of the Large Frederic by occulting his francophilia carefully. Consequently, after the Second world war, Frederic II, is perceived like the symbol of militarist Germany , expansionist Prussia and the precursor of Adolf Hitler.

Paradoxically, it is perhaps still too early to take stock of the too rich heritage which Frederic leaves us, refined strategist, lit despot, soldier in love, diplomatic without scruples, tortured prince, servant autocrat of the State very as much as king-philosopher.

Genealogy

Frederic II of Prussia belongs to the first branch of the Maison of Hohenzollern. This line gave voters, kings, emperors with the Prussia, the Germany.

Internal bonds

Frederic Ier of Prussia (paternal grandfather)

Georges Ier of Great Britain (maternal grandfather)

Works

Foreword of the Summary of the ecclesiastical History of Fleury
Foreword of the Extract of the historical and critical Dictionary of Bayle
Foreword on Henriade of Voltaire.
Comment on Bore-Blue
Considerations on the state of the Body politic of Europe.
Correspondances
From what did without more important to Europe since the year 1774 until the year 1778

From the German Littérature, of the defects which one can reproach him, which are the causes, and by which means one can correct them.
Of manners, the habits, industry, progress of the human spirit in arts and sciences

Dialog of morals for the use of the young nobility
Speech of the utility of sciences and arts in a State

Discours on the war
Discours on the Makes out S
Discours on satyric the

Discours on the ecclesiastical History
Dissertation on the reasons to establish or repeal the Laws

Dissertation on the innocence of the errors of the spirit
Of the soldier, the superstition and the religion

Praises
Epistles

Epistles familiar
Test on the self-esteem under consideration like principle of morals

Test on the shapes of government and the duties of the sovereigns
critical Examination of the entitled book: System of nature
Examination of the Test on the prejudices

Exposed Prussian government, principles on which it rolls, with some political reflections
Histoire of the Guerre Seven Year old

Histoire of my time.
Instruction with the Academy of Noble for their education

Instruction with the Major Borcke
Reserve training of Frederic II for his generals

the Antione, or Examination of the Prince of Machiavel
the Art of the war, poem

Palladion, poem engraves
Lettre on the love of the Fatherland

Lettre on the education, addressed to Mr. Burlamaqui
Lettres with the avid Public of news

Lettres in worms and prose
Mémoires of the War of 1778

Mémoires since the peace of Hubertsbourg, 1763, until the end of the Division of Poland, 1775
Memories to be used with the History of the House of Brandebourg

Mirror of the Princes
Odes

various Parts
Poetries various and very varied

Poetries of the Philosopher of Without-Concern
Reflections on the reflections of the geometricians on poetry

Reflections on the military talents and the character as Charles XII, king de Suède
Refutation of the Prince of Machiavel

Stanzas, paraphrase of the Ecclésiaste

Three Dialogs of Dead the

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