Frederick the Great

From Philosopedia

Frederick II [The Great] (24 January 1712 - 17 August 1786)

The first modern freethinking king, Frederick the Great of Prussia was despised by his tyrannical father, Frederick William I, who also was unhappy with his son’s interest in French art, literature, and a Prussian lieutenant, Hans von Katte. When the somewhat effeminate Frederick and Hans tried to escape to England, the two were arrested and imprisoned. The king then forced his son to watch as the twenty-five-year-old Katte was beheaded.

Afterwards, the king arranged his son’s marriage to Elizabeth of Brunswick-Bevern, but they separated soon afterwards and Frederick continued to show no interest in women.

Moving to Rheinsberg, he wrote Anti-Machiavel, an idealistic refutation of Machiavelli. Also, he struck up a long correspondence with Voltaire. According to A. L. Rowse in Homosexuals in History (1977), Frederick “didn’t care what anybody said or thought about him. He was a cynic on this score about others as about himself; he had told Voltaire: ‘We’ve got here a cardinal and several bishops, some of whom make love before and others behind–good fellows who persecute nobody.’ On observing a soldier he recognized, fettered in irons: ‘Why is that excellent soldier in irons?’ ‘For bestiality with his horse.’ To the officer in charge: ‘Fool–don’t put him in irons: Put him in the infantry.’ ”

Upon his father’s death and as soon as he became king, Frederick made Katte’s father a field-marshal. To the disinterested, Frederick became known as an outstanding leader, one who abolished torture and increased religious tolerance, saying “every man must get to heaven his own way.”

According to J. M. Robertson, Frederick was the great deist king of the deist age, although he disapproved of his morals and states that as a ruler he did not act up to the ideals of the school of Voltaire. Called an “enlightened despot,” according to the Columbia Encyclopedia, “he instituted important legal and penal reforms, set up trade monopolies to create new industries, forwarded education, and accomplished internal improvements such as drainage projects, roads, and canals. Though he improved the lot of his own serfs, the nobility had more control over their peasants after his reign than before. He was tolerant in religious matters, personally professing atheism to his intimates. Cold and curt, he relaxed only during his famous midnight suppers at Sans Souci, his residence at Potsdam. There he was surrounded by a group of educated men, mostly French, that included, at times, Voltaire (who broke with him in 1753 but who later resumed his friendship from a safe distance), d’Alembert, La Mettrie, and Maupertuis. . . . He failed to appreciate such men as Lessing and Goethe, who were among his most ardent admirers.”

Frederick was a gifted musician, who played flute and also composed sonatas for flutes as well as four symphonies.

In a 6 July 1737 letter to Voltaire, Frederick wrote,

• Religion is the idol of the mob; it adores everything it does not understand. . . . We know the crimes that fanaticism in religion has caused. . . .

Upon Voltaire’s death, Frederick pronounced his eulogium before the Berlin Academy, denouncing “the imbecile priests,” and declaring that “the best destiny they can look for is that they and their vile artifices will remain forever buried in the darkness of oblivion, while the fame of Voltaire will increase from age to age, and transmit his name to immortality.”

“That he was a Deist, the protector of Voltaire and other Deists,” wrote Joseph McCabe, “even a Jesuit has never questioned.” In Dante’s Inferno, Frederick II and more than a thousand followers of Epicurus are in Hell. To avoid just such a happenstance, one of Frederick’s subjects, solicitous about his immortal soul, sent him a letter full of pious advice. “Let this,” he said, “be answered civilly; the intention of the writer good.” Shortly afterwards, according to Thomas Carlyle, “For the most part he was unconscious, never more than half conscious. As the wall clock above his head struck eleven, he asked: “What o’clock?” “Eleven,” answered they. “At four,” murmured he, “I will arise.” One of his dogs sat on its stool near him; about midnight he noticed it shivering for cold: “Throw a quilt over it,” said or beckoned he; that, I think, was his last completely conscious utterance. Afterwards, in a severe choking fit, getting at last rid of the phlegm, he said, “We are on the hill, we shall go better now.”

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