In year 8 English I had to read a book and deliver a book report. Somehow the book I chose was a biography of Louis XIV - I must have been away when all the good books were picked. My teacher was (rightly) sceptical that I would read it. I did read the first few pages but forgot about the book for several weeks until I was unexpectedly called upon to deliver my speech. I recounted the author’s joke from those first few pages in which Louis XIII, while travelling, is forced to stop overnight with the queen and Louis XIV is born nine months later. The class appreciated my amusing and brief speech for which I got a C-.
It’s taken me fifteen years to read a proper biography (to get around to it that is, it only took me a couple of weeks to read). I recently finished Frederick the Great: King of Prussia by Tim Blanning. The key reason such a book would have been unreadable by my thirteen-year-old self is the lack of context or any understanding of its relevance. As I’ve gotten older and learned more and more about the world there has formed in my mind a scaffold of connected facts onto which new facts can be readily added. Without that – the reason to care – stories cannot stick in one’s memory.
Why do I care then about Frederick the Great? The proximal cause is that I have been playing a lot of the historical grand strategy game Europa Universalis IV which covers the period 1444 to 1821. The deeper reason is an interest in ‘greatness’: what is it? How does one come to be called ‘great’? If I’m being honest, I am interested in being ‘great’ myself.
I suspect this motivates a lot of biography reading, though successful business men and entertainment celebrities seem to be more popular at the moment. People have in mind an image of success that they want to know how to achieve so they look to people who seem to have already done so.
The first lesson from reading this book then is that to be called ‘Great’ one must be a narcissistic warmonger. This is not the whole of Frederick’s character of course but it is the key part which got him his epithet. With a desperate need to prove himself to the memory of his proto-fascistic and abusive father, Frederick invaded and conquered Silesia from the Habsburg Monarchy within a year of acceding to the throne. He then held off a coalition of powers against him and come to be a champion of the Protestant cause in Europe. Somewhat ironically because he was a giant atheist. The label itself seems to have been given to him and popularised by Voltaire (with a bit of help from Old Fritz himself).
The main thing for which Frederick was considered great then is not something I wish to emulate. Furthermore he was born a king, indeed a king of a particular country at a particular time; his father was a stingy disciplinarian who left Fritz with the most capable land army in the world and a deep war chest; also at a time of monarchic absolutism. His successes only make sense, and were only possible, in that time and in that place. Not to mention the sheer luck involved even with those advantages with other rulers dying, allies betraying each other, and armies getting lost or turned around at just the right moments.
There’s plenty more to say about the life of Frederick and I might get around to it sometime. But the first lesson: if I want to be great, the way in which I will be great, will be unique.