Adam Storring's Reading List

"Tim Blanning’s book is both an important academic work written by a senior scholar and also exactly the kind of properly descriptive biography that the general reader is looking for. If you’re looking for one book on Frederick the Great, this is it, without any doubt. There have been a lot of very important works on Frederick produced by German authors. I’m thinking particularly of Jürgen Luh’s Der Große , Thomas Biskup Friedrichs Größe, and the biographical studies by Wolfgang Burgdorf and Peter-Michael Hahn . These all came out as part of a huge flowering of literature on Frederick, marking the 300th anniversary of his birth in 2012. Tim Blanning’s book was published just a few years afterward, and he incorporated all of this new scholarship that has been produced on Frederick in recent years. He produced a book that is very important for scholars but you can also read it without having any prior knowledge of Frederick. He tells the whole story in an entertaining and interesting way."

"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."

"On the one hand, you have new, enlightened ideas. On the other hand, you have the more traditional role of a monarch, and Frederick fulfills this down to the ground. He is personally commander-in-chief of the Prussian armies. He acts as commander in the field, which is not unprecedented at the time, but he certainly goes further than most contemporary monarchs. Many monarchs in this period are taking the field. They expose themselves to danger and encourage the troops. But they are not generally there to oversee every detail personally. But Frederick is. I have argued that this is actually a response to enlightened ideas in many ways, because the idea is now that you need to show personal merit: it’s not just about being ruler through descent. Christopher Duffy’s book is the essential description of Frederick’s activities as a general and very much accessible to the general reader. It’s 40 years old. When my own book comes out, I hope it will help us understand Frederick’s military leadership in slightly new ways. But Duffy’s is a very good book, and definitely the first stop shop for anybody who wants to understand Frederick as a soldier."

"This book is a very important example of new ways that people are looking at the history of war. Christopher Duffy’s book is very much a traditional, narrative military history. Marian Füssel’s book helps us to understand things like the perspectives of ordinary soldiers, how the violence of these wars was experienced by those caught up in them, and how people thought about who had won a battle in cases where it was indecisive. The Seven Years’ War was the titanic struggle of Frederick’s reign. It was fought in central Europe as part of an attempt by Austria and its allies to recover Silesia from Prussia. At the same time, it was fought overseas, particularly between Britain and France over their lands in the Caribbean, America, and India. Marian Füssel’s book is one of the very rare works that combines all of these different parts of the Seven Years’ War together. It’s not a detailed narrative study in the way that Christopher Duffy’s book is, but for somebody who is interested in getting different perspectives on war in this period, and who is interested in connecting what Frederick is doing with what is also happening in America and India at this period, it’s the perfect choice. Frederick started out his reign allied with France against Austria. France and Austria were hereditary enemies, and both Frederick and Prussia suffered a series of humiliations at the hands of Austria during Frederick’s youth. Frederick himself was forced to marry someone acceptable to Austria, while his father wasn’t able to get Austrian support for acquiring various territories that Prussia wanted to add to its dominions. So Frederick came to the throne very much opposed to the house of Austria. He was also aware that Austria was weak and primed for him to take some of their territories. France was a natural ally at that point. Frederick had learned, by observing French practice, that it was not helpful to get involved in long wars. You should try to keep your wars short, which he did successfully with his opening wars. But that meant making peace and leaving your allies to keep on fighting without you, which irritated the French hugely, and they came to the conclusion that Prussia was untrustworthy. In the meantime, the world outside of Europe was becoming a much bigger game. The struggle with Britain for colonies and maritime trade became hugely more important for France, and so in 1756 you have the so-called reversal of alliances: France and Austria allied together. And Prussia ultimately ended up as the ally of Britain."