N In 1756, Frederick the Great invaded Saxony, triggering the first world conflict in history, the Seven Years’ War, from which he would emerge victorious. Historians have attributed the role of the “aggressor” to the ruler of Prussia, but in reality Frederick acted after he discovered that all of Europe had united against him and was preparing to demote him to Margrave of Brandenburg. It is the thesis that Claudio Guidi presents in the second volume of his tetralogy dedicated to Frederick II of Hohenzoller (published by Il Melangolo) on the basis of previously ignored or, in his opinion, deliberately neglected archival documents.
Furthermore, the author notes, Austrian Foreign Minister Wenzel Anton von Kaunitz-Rietberg made no secret of his intention to seek “a return of Prussia to its original state of a small, insignificant power.”
“The Seven Years’ War”, is the title of the recently published 544-page volume by the essayist and journalist from Abruzzo who lives in Germany, and also addresses the grandiose but conflict-ridden relationship between the ruler, admired by Napoleon and Karl Marx, and Voltaire, which is between “two Geniuses not designed to be close to each other.” And then to the misogyny of the “Maverick of Sanssouci,” an archenemy of Madame de Pompadour, Empress Elisabeth and Maria Theresa of Austria, who claimed: “To ruin a country , it is enough to let a woman rule it.” .
The man whose military genius will inspire Napoleon will always be in the front row of his men in all the battles of the Seven Years’ War, will see five horses on which he sits shot down, will stop a bullet with his snuffbox, and another who now reached his chest at the end of the race.
Federico’s private life also crops up again and again in the volume, with many strange and delightful details, from his gluttony that leads him to hire the best French chef in the world to his greed for bottarga, which he gets from Algarotti in Italy can be sent.
The man who calls himself the first servant of the state and for this reason has been working since four in the morning is disliked on a human level by Denis Diderot, who also admires him but defines him as “pancing like a parrot and mischievous a monkey”. For Johann Wilfgang Goethe it represents the Pole Star around which the whole world revolves, while Voltaire, describing the rise of this star, will say that the North jumped, the whole Olympus fell and Frederick appeared.
Frederick the Great received his final consecration as a champion of humanity for the abolition of serfdom from Karl Marx, for whom he was “the first to give the land to the peasants.”
From this second great fresco of the Prussian ruler emerges the figure of a character who was created by nature to become an artist, poet or musician, as he will later amply prove, but who immediately after his rise to become the greatest leader of the century suddenly transformed into the greatest leader of the century throne at the age of 28. This is a man who three days later abolishes the death penalty, torture and censorship, who reforms the justice system, who has the trials completed within a year, who advocates universal education throughout Prussia and, as an atheist, calls the Jesuits expelled from all over Europe Teachers welcomed, but it introduced complete freedom of religion, since “everyone has the right to ascend to heaven according to his taste.”
All in a century dominated everywhere by the darkest obscurantism, marked by the cruelest religious persecutions and in which fires are always ready to be lit. A royal flutist with an astonishing talent and sensitivity that would have made him a great soloist today, according to all his contemporaries, who also provided Bach with the theme on which the Variations of the Musical Sacrifice were to be composed. But he is also the man of unprecedented brutality, especially towards his wife, who is forced to live a widow’s life far from him, who will never have the right to enter Sanssouci Palace. His younger brother and heir to the throne, August Wilhelm, fares no better; he dies of a broken heart after being dismissed as a general for alleged mistakes in a lost battle and being showered with terrible insults. However, his literary flair remains unfailing, as he will be the first to read and re-read Voltaire’s Candide three more times, “the only novel worth reading and re-reading several times.”
