The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660-1789

"The crucial thing in understanding Frederick is to see a person who is operating both within traditional structures and traditional value sets of what monarchs should be doing, but also operating in very new circumstances, where people are thinking about what monarchs should be doing in very new ways. This book explains how monarchs across Europe in the 18th century were affected by the huge growth in the number of people who were reading, and the huge growth in written publications, starting from the 17th century and then continuing exponentially on into the 18th century. This period sees the development of public opinion as we nowadays understand it. That meant that monarchs were being judged in different ways, and so they had to legitimize their rule in different ways. Blanning describes how a number of rulers, including Frederick, did this. The book helps us understand how Frederick worked. He produced a huge number of writings, and Blanning explains this as Frederick engaging directly with the public sphere, becoming a producer of culture in his own right. This is a very, very important reason why his reputation stood so high at the time, and why he has been seen positively by many people since then. Blanning’s book takes a very positive view of Frederick and how he related to the public sphere. The German scholar Andreas Pečar has recently published a book that does similar things, but shows how you can be more critical of Frederick, seeing him as somebody who quite cynically worked to promote his own image. But certainly you can’t really understand Frederick without understanding the context of a reading public that is learning about monarchs and making judgments about them. All sorts of things. Firstly, he was his own historian. He wrote a history of his dynasty up to his own accession. And then he wrote histories of his own reign in chunks. As soon as a portion of his own reign was finished, he quickly wrote its history. These have very substantially shaped the way in which we’ve seen Frederick and, indeed, Prussian history as a whole. He also produced a lot of poetry. He even published it as the Works of the Philosophe of Sans-Souci . On top of that, he produced extensive military writings, which seem primarily to have been addressed to his military officers, to emphasize to them that he understood war. His correspondence was not just about conveying information. He maintained a long correspondence with Voltaire, as well as other important intellectual figures, such as D’Alembert. And he’s not just writing to them in a private capacity. He expects them to share the letters, or certainly discuss the contents, with other people. This is a major way in which he engaged with the literary world and shaped public opinion."