Frederick II of Prussia

Frederick II of Prussia: The Flautist Who Invented a Great Power

On 6 November 1730, in the fortress of Küstrin, an eighteen-year-old crown prince was made to stand at a window and watch the beheading of Hans Hermann von Katte, the officer who had helped him try to escape his father. He fainted just before the blade fell. Ten years later he was king of Prussia, and within months of his accession he had invaded a neighbouring province he had no claim to and started a European war.

The Soldier King's Son

He was born on 24 January 1712 in the Berlin Palace, heir to Frederick William I, the Soldier King. The boy preferred music, literature and French, which his father regarded as effeminate and answered with what the record calls frequent beating and humiliation. The escape plot with Katte was uncovered near Mannheim on 5 August 1730. After the execution Frederick was pardoned, stripped of military rank, and put through a punishing apprenticeship in the administration of the state.

The reconciliation was transactional. Released from Küstrin in February 1732, he was required to marry Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Bevern. He wrote that "there can be neither love nor friendship between us" and threatened to kill himself; he married her in June 1733 anyway. The marriage was never consummated and produced no children. He was almost certainly homosexual, and his closest attachments were to men.

Rheinsberg

His father gave him Schloss Rheinsberg, and there he built the life he actually wanted: musicians, actors and artists in residence, days spent reading, acting in plays, and composing and playing music. He was an accomplished flautist and a working composer, and later called it the happiest period of his life.

He also wrote. The *Anti-Machiavel*, finished in 1739 and published anonymously in French the following year — Voltaire arranged its distribution in Amsterdam — was a point-by-point refutation of *The Prince*, arguing that a ruler's duty was moral and that the sovereign was properly "the first servant of the state." It is a serious contribution to political thought. It appeared in 1740, the year he took the throne.

Silesia

Frederick William I died in 1740 and Frederick became king at twenty-eight, inheriting a state that ranked twelfth in Europe by population and fourth by the size of its army, with one soldier for every twenty-eight citizens against Britain's one in 310. On 16 December 1740 he marched into Habsburg Silesia and occupied nearly the whole province in seven weeks.

His first real battle went badly. At Mollwitz on 10 April 1741 his cavalry collapsed and he left the field; his infantry won without him. He admitted the humiliation and afterwards called Mollwitz "his school" — the first evidence of the trait that made him formidable, a willingness to study his own failures. The Treaty of Breslau gave him Silesia in 1742. A second war followed, and his victory over the combined Austrian and Saxon armies at Hohenfriedberg on 4 June 1745 secured the province by the Treaty of Dresden that Christmas. He was thirty-three, and already "the Great."

Seven Years, Nearly Destroyed

In August 1756 he struck first again, invading Saxony and beginning the war that nearly finished him. He won at Prague in May 1757 at ruinous cost, then took his first major defeat at Kolín in June. The same year produced his two masterpieces: Rossbach, where he destroyed a far larger Franco-Austrian force, and Leuthen against the Austrians.

Then the arithmetic caught up. At Zorndorf in 1758 nearly a third of his soldiers became casualties. He was beaten at Hochkirch that October, and at Kunersdorf on 12 August 1759 he was routed and almost killed — a bullet smashed a snuffbox in his pocket — losing close to half his army. By 6 January 1762 he was writing about salvaging "whatever fragments of my territory we can save." What saved him was not generalship. The Empress Elizabeth of Russia died that month and her Prussophile successor Peter III pulled Russia straight out of the war; Sweden followed. The Treaty of Hubertusburg in 1763 put Europe's borders back where they had been, except that Frederick kept Silesia.

The Bill, and Poland

The war had gutted him. British subsidies of £670,000 a year stopped when he allied with Peter III, and he had financed the fighting by debasing his coinage five separate times — more than a fifth of the war's cost — producing severe inflation and a Saxony left nearly destitute. His best officers were dead.

He recovered by expansion. As early as 1731 he had described Poland as "an artichoke, ready to be consumed leaf by leaf." In 1772 he agreed with Russia and Austria to the First Partition, taking 38,000 square kilometres and 600,000 people without fighting — the smallest share but the most useful, since it created West Prussia, joined his eastern territories to the rest and gave him the mouth of the Vistula. Maria Theresa, he noted acidly, cried but took her portion. He then pursued systematic Germanization of the new province, confiscating land and taxing the Polish nobility, having described its inhabitants as "slovenly Polish trash."

Sanssouci

At home the enlightened programme was real. He abolished most judicial torture and reduced the number of capital crimes; with Grand Chancellor Samuel von Cocceji he stripped out the separate courts for different social classes, work that ended in the Prussian Law Code of 1794. He permitted religious freedom and tolerated Jews and Catholics, widened the freedom of the press, and encouraged immigrant settlement.

And he built Sanssouci at Potsdam, above its vineyard terraces — "without a care," a summer retreat he described as a Prussian Arcadia and where, the palace foundation records, he most liked to withdraw in the company of his dogs. He asked to be buried in a crypt on the highest terrace. That wish was not honoured until 1991.

Why Frederick Is Called a Genius

Frederick has the strongest claim of any eighteenth-century monarch, and it rests on three things that are separately verifiable. He was a battlefield commander of real originality — Rossbach and Leuthen were both won against materially superior armies — and, more tellingly, he analysed his own defeats: calling Mollwitz, where he ran, "his school" is the remark of a mind that treats humiliation as data. He was a working artist, a flautist and composer whose music was his own. And he was a political thinker whose formulation of the sovereign as "the first servant of the state" reframed monarchy as an office with duties rather than a possession.

The counter-case is where he becomes interesting rather than admirable. The *Anti-Machiavel* argued that rulers should not wage wars of aggression; he published it in 1740 and invaded Silesia the same year, on no legal claim at all. The gap between the philosophy and the conduct is not an inconsistency but the whole man. His enlightenment did not extend to Poles, whom he described in frankly racial terms and set about deliberately dispossessing. He debased his currency five times and wrecked Saxony's economy to pay for a war he had started. And he survived the Seven Years' War because an empress died at the right moment, not because he had outfought anyone.

He was a genius of application and analysis — in war, administration and prose — who used those gifts in service of a state's appetite, and who wrote the best available critique of exactly what he did.

Legacy

He died on 17 August 1786, aged seventy-four and childless, succeeded by his nephew. Nineteenth-century German historians turned him into a glorified warrior; the Nazis claimed him as a forerunner, which poisoned his reputation for decades after 1945. What survives the argument is measurable: the awkward, over-armed kingdom he inherited left him a great power, strong enough to contest Habsburg leadership of the German lands — with the legal code, the tolerance statutes and the palace on the vineyard as evidence of the other half of him.

Achievements

• Prince-Elector
• King of Prussia (1740–1786)
• Margrave of Brandenburg (from 1740)
• Order of the Black Eagle
• Order of the White Eagle (Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth)
• Order of Saint Alexander Nevsky
• Order of St. Andrew