Evening in the Palace of Reason Read online

  While they basked in their mutual worship, the Bishop of Liege considered his options. As soon as the basking was over, in the absence of a response, Frederick’s troops moved against him. (Finally Frederick decided simply to sell Herstal to the bishop for an extortionate price.) At least when they were on good terms, Voltaire justified Frederick’s action against the Bishop of Liège and even made excuses for his later, far more serious military exploits, but the fact is that he had seen the last of his philosopher-king. And despite a lifelong regard for Voltaire’s intelligence and his gifts, Frederick had seen the last of his onetime idol as well. The next time they saw each other, two months later, Voltaire came to Potsdam as a spy.

  DURING THE FIRST MONTHS of his reign, Frederick was everything Voltaire could have wished for in an enlightened monarch. The author of the high-minded Anti-Machiavel (whose authorship was supposed to be a secret but was in fact widely known and celebrated) announced a policy of absolute religious toleration, enacted judicial reforms, abolished torture in criminal cases other than treason and murder, and greatly curtailed newspaper censorship. He set up a new office for the poor. He let it be known that he saw himself as “first servant of the state” and that he considered it his job to make his subjects “comfortable and happy.” He set loose his father’s giants, which made his senior officers happy, since they were relieved of the need to recruit them, and he emphasized actual readiness for battle over parade-ground beauty. (“The soldier polished his rifle … the cavalier his bridle … the manes of horses were dressed with ribbons,” he said. “If peace had lasted beyond 1740 we would probably now have rouge and beauty spots.”) He demanded more discipline from his officers, forbidding the customary abuse of cadets, and he made examples of those who persisted in such brutality “so that everyone can see that I will tolerate no such excesses.” He made it known that he disliked flatterers, and he treated those who had persecuted him years before without prejudice, allowing them to retain their rank and privileges. He did, however, give Katte’s father a promotion, and he brought back his old tutor Duhan from exile and gave him the salary he had promised more than twenty years before. When Duhan asked what he was to do for it, Frederick wrote, “Live happily in Berlin, my dear Duhan, and enjoy in these later years all that you deserve.”

  Frederick knew his honeymoon would be short. He came to power determined to expand his territory and make Prussia a power in Europe at least equal to Austria and the Hapsburgs, and he did not underestimate the size or danger of that ambition. He knew—every European leader knew—that when this emperor, Charles VI, died, the map of Europe would change dramatically. For one thing, he was going to die without a male heir, and while most powers had signed on to the so-called Pragmatic Sanction, which would allow him to be succeeded by his daughter through her husband, everyone knew the empire was crumbling. The leaders of its parts were expected to wrest themselves free of it whenever they could, and Frederick, who had long thought his father was mistaken to think the emperor was his ally, was first among them. He knew he needed his independence—from the Hapsburgs and anyone else—to gain the territory that would give him a nation with secure boundaries, and he knew as well that accomplishing that would require the shrewd, not to say flagrantly deceitful management of alliances, among experts in that game.

  But Frederick reveled in deception. Knowing very well that he was being closely watched for his intentions, he carefully advertised his unpredictability, offering alliance and war to all the pivotal antagonists. He sent an envoy to France, telling him that troops would be mobilized in Berlin while he was in Paris and the diplomat should use that fact to good effect. “The increase … in my troops during your stay at Versailles,” he wrote, “will furnish you the occasion to speak lively and impetuously on my behalf; you may say that it should be feared that this increase would light a fire which would set Europe ablaze, that it was the way of the young to be daring … You may say that by nature I am partial to France.…”At the same time, an envoy to London was to make a fuss over the fact that his counterpart was in Paris. “Mention with a show of jealousy that he is one of my intimates, that he possesses my confidence, and that he does not go to France to waste his time.… Speak a great deal of my inclination for [England].…”

  He was no less deceitful with his friends. When Charles died and his daughter Maria Theresa came to power, the author of the Anti-Machiavel wrote to Voltaire, as if confused by what had happened: “This death disturbs all my pacific ideas.…” To his close friend Algarotti at the same moment he wrote: “It is only a question of putting those plans into action which I have been hatching so long in my head.”

  EVERYONE KNEW THAT Prussia had long felt it had claims on the small provinces of Jülich and Berg, but Frederick’s ambition was bigger than that. He wanted Silesia, Austria’s most prosperous territory, a mineral- and trade-rich province, fifteen thousand square miles of fertile land with Poland and Hungary to the east, Bohemia to the south, Brandenburg and Saxony to the west and north. It brought in no less than a quarter of all the Hapsburg tax receipts, so Vienna could be expected to be more than a little unwilling to part with it. Frederick’s ministers once again counseled caution, and once again he overruled them. He argued (correctly) that Maria Theresa, at twenty-three and new to command, was weak and almost completely ignorant of politics and that her treasury was depleted, her revenues mortgaged long into the future. Her army was not battle-ready, her generals were old and tired, and all the powers of Europe had aims for her territories, not just him; if he waited he would lose the advantage of surprise. Beyond that, Silesia’s border with Brandenburg was completely undefended. The weakness of Prussia’s claim to the territory hardly entered the discussion. When the legal argument for it was presented to him in a brief, he wrote in the margin, “Bravo! The work of an excellent charlatan.”

  The man in whom Frederick most confided, at this time and others, was Charles Étienne Jordan, a Lutheran minister who had lost his faith and abandoned his pastorate when his wife died. The affluent son of a banker, he absorbed himself in study and travel after her death, visiting such Enlightenment figures as Voltaire and Alexander Pope, and later wrote a memoir about this period entitled Voyage littéraire. Frederick could never make a courtier of him; he lived not at the palace but with his young daughter at his own home in town. Perhaps in part because Jordan never asked anything of him, Frederick gave him a real job when he became king, making Jordan his advocate for the poor, and his letters to Jordan reflect genuine affection and respect, one of the few friends of whom that can be said. His candor with Jordan was apparently complete, sometimes horribly so. He confessed to Jordan that he was driven to the invasion of Silesia by

  my age, fiery passion, the lust for glory, curiosity even [and] if I am to be perfectly frank … the satisfaction of seeing my name in the gazettes and thereafter in the pages of history.

  Knowing Frederick’s military ambition and anxious to know his plans, France’s Cardinal Fleury thought he could use Frederick’s weakness for Voltaire to find out the new king’s intentions and so sent him to Potsdam as a spy. But Voltaire was a babe in these woods. Fleury had written Voltaire a letter in which he talked about France’s peaceful intentions toward Prussia, and Voltaire later wrote Fleury coyly that he had “obeyed the orders your eminence did not give me” by showing the letter to Frederick. Of course, that gave Voltaire away to Frederick instantly; he knew Fleury well enough—and he knew that Fleury knew Voltaire well enough—to know this was no indiscretion. Later Voltaire excitedly told the French ambassador that Algarotti had shown him a letter in which the king was clearly “in the grip of the demon of war,” but if that happened the disclosure was intentional. Frederick trusted very few people in this delicate period. Jordan was one, Algarotti was another. Voltaire could report to Fleury that Berlin was full of troops, that the river Spree was choked with boats carrying artillery and supplies, but he could not say where they were headed. Frederick’s beloved old tutor Kalkst
ein asked him one day if the march was to Silesia. “Can you keep a secret?” Frederick asked. Of course, he said. “So can I.”

  Frederick, a lover of deception in all its forms, scheduled a masquerade party for the night he set for the beginning of the war—December 13, in the first year of his reign. When the party was over he rode to a rendezvous with his main force of twenty-four thousand men for the march on Silesia. Only after the invasion was under way did his minister in Vienna present Maria Theresa’s government with his intentions and his proposal that she let him keep Silesia in return for reparations and a defense treaty. This poor minister was also saddled with the responsibility of arguing that Frederick was only taking Silesia for the good of the empire. The fact that she said no to Frederick’s terms was not surprising, but the ferocity of her response shocked Frederick and all the rest of Europe. “Never, never will the queen renounce an inch of all her hereditary lands, though she resist with all that remains to her. Rather the Turks before Vienna, rather cession of the Netherlands to France, rather any concession to Bavaria and Saxony than renunciation of Silesia.” She called Frederick the “heretic king … an enemy without faith or justice … that evil animal … that monster.” She thus gave notice of a new force on the European stage—a woman armed, as one biographer put it, “with nothing but her character.”

  For the time being, however, her military’s lack of readiness was decisive. Frederick’s forces met almost no resistance in Lower Silesia, and in mid-January he wrote:

  My dear Mr. Jordan, my sweet Mr. Jordan, my quiet Mr. Jordan, my good, my benign, my peaceable, my most humane Mr. Jordan, I announce to Your Serenity the conquest of Silesia.…

  So ended the first campaign of Frederick’s First Silesian War, which, despite several pitched battles and many thousands of casualties, he would win decisively a year later.

  DURING THE TWO YEARS after the First Silesian War, while the general European War of the Austrian Succession (which he had started) continued without him, Frederick resumed his recruitment of talent to Prussia for his rejuvenated academy, for his chamber music group, for the new Berlin Opera, and for his dinner table. Among his targets was an inventor and something of a charlatan named Jacques de Vaucanson, who in 1738 had presented to the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris an astonishing thing: a six-foot-six-inch copy of a statue known as The Marble Faun of Coyfevaux that could play the transverse flute. This wooden statue of a shepherd had precisely movable lips, throat, tongue, and fingers connected to an intricate system of levers, pulleys, and bellows; and the great Fontenelle himself, secretary of the academy, certified in his abstract of the inventor’s presentation that Vaucanson’s faun could play twelve different tunes “with an Exactness which has deserved the Admiration of the Publick … imitating by Art all that is necessary for a Man to perform in … a Café.” Even more amazing, in a way, was Vaucanson’s mechanical duck. “It stretches out its Neck to take Corn out of your Hand,” the inventor wrote in a letter to the Abbé de Fontaine, “it swallows it…[and the] Matter digested in the Stomach is conducted by Pipes, (as in an Animal by the Guts) quite to the Anus, where there is a Sphincter that lets it out.” A later model could even fart. “The smell which now spreads through the room becomes almost unbearable,” one happy witness wrote. “We wish to express to the artist-inventor the pleasure which this demonstration gave to us.”

  Vaucanson’s duck was a fraud; the “excrement” was prepared and hidden in the works, to be expelled on cue, but the flute player was very real and by all accounts a creditable performer. This raised the specter—tantalizing to some, threatening to others—that a machine might one day actually play the flute with greater technical facility than any human. Frederick’s flute teacher Quantz was cool to the idea. “With skill,” he wrote,

  a musical machine could be constructed that would play certain pieces with a quickness and exactitude so remarkable that no human being could equal it either with his fingers or with his tongue. Indeed it would excite astonishment, but it would never move you.

  His student, however, found the flute-playing automaton captivating, and when Vaucanson declined his offer to move to Berlin, Frederick built a factory so he could make them for himself.

  The relation between man and machine—which devolved to questions about the nature and existence of the soul—was very much au courant in the mid-eighteenth century, and it figured nowhere so prominently as in the debate over aesthetics. “Our manner of being is wholly arbitrary,” Montesquieu wrote for his entry on “Taste” in Diderot’s Encyclopedia.

  We could have been made as we were, or differently. But if we had been made differently, we would see differently; one organ more or less in our machine would have given us another kind of eloquence, another poetry; a different structure of the same organs would have produced still another poetry: for instance, if the constitution of our organs had made us capable of longer attention, all the rules which proportion the disposition of the subject to the measure of our attention would disappear.

  Perhaps the ultimate statement of eighteenth-century materialism was Man a Machine, a monograph by the Dutch physician Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, who argued that there really is not much difference between people and animals. If we have a soul, it must be physical, because clearly our feeling states are affected by all sorts of physical things—disease, sleep, drugs, food, age, sex, the climate. We have five senses and we have imagination and reason, but they cannot tell us what if anything may lie beyond this single, physical dimension of existence, and we should stop pretending otherwise. “Man,” he wrote, “is a machine that winds its own springs.” Years later, in a eulogy for La Mettrie, Frederick commended his mechanistic worldview this way:

  [H]e could clearly see that thought is but a consequence of the organization of the machine, and that the disturbance of the springs has considerable influence on that part of us which the metaphysicians call soul.…[H]e boldly bore the torch of experience into the night of metaphysics; he tried to explain by aid of anatomy the thin texture of understanding, and he found only mechanism where others had supposed an essence superior to matter.

  La Mettrie claimed not to be an atheist. He thought there might be a God, but since one could not possibly know whether there was a God or not because of the limitations of the machine, it really did not matter one way or the other. Such an argument was little use against his enemies’ charge of atheism, however, and La Mettrie’s book proved so scandalous—and the scandal so delighted Frederick—that La Mettrie accepted the king’s invitation to move to Prussia, where he spent the rest of his life.

  RECRUITING PERFORMERS FOR his new opera house in Berlin was a great deal easier than recruiting intellectuals for the academy, and Frederick pursued them with the same avidity his father had shown for giants. One famous Venetian dancer signed and then canceled a contract to come to Berlin, and when authorities in Venice would not act to enforce the contract, Frederick had one of their ambassadors kidnapped and held until they did. (Frederick may have had an affair with her, or she may have been a beard. Voltaire cracked that if he did want her sexually, it was because she had boyish legs.)

  Even during the war, Frederick had worked feverishly on plans for his opera company and the house itself. He had opinions on every singer and dancer, every detail of the house’s decoration and sets, even rehearsal schedules. When it opened in December 1742 it was not yet finished, but it was a marvel. There was room in the square outside for a thousand carriages, and among its mechanical wonders was its provision for balls: After the opera, diners would adjourn to a building alongside the concert hall, whose floor would then be raised to stage level by pneumatic jacks. The stage scenery would be camouflaged by columns, and the torchlit room would suddenly come alive with spouting-naiad fountains and statues of the immortals. It was said that Frederick spent a million thalers on the opera house. The fact that he spent most of that money while his treasury was being depleted by war is some measure of his commitment to it.


  SOON ENOUGH, FREDERICK saw his attention to the arts diverted once again by diplomacy and the prospect of war. No one expected the peace that ended the First Silesian War to settle the matter. By the end of it, secret treaties had been made and broken among all the players, so although Frederick’s last treaty was with Austria, it was considered very unlikely that Maria Theresa would sit quiet forever.

  Fleury once more played to Voltaire’s patriotism (but counted on his infatuation with Frederick and his love of the game of duplicity) to get him to go to Potsdam again as a spy. This time Voltaire was given cover: His new play La Mort de Caesar was “banned” in Paris to demonstrate a rupture with the court and so to make Frederick think he might actually move to Prussia. Voltaire wrote to Frederick inviting himself to Potsdam in a letter whose oozy deceit bears reading at length:

  When I am ready to weep over the decadence of the arts I say to myself: There is a monarch in Europe who loves them and cultivates them and is the glory of his century. Then I say, I shall soon see him, this charming monarch, this King who is also a man, this crowned Chaulieu, this Tacitus, this Xenophon.… You, Sire, are my grande passion. I have much to tell Your Majesty. I will lay my heart at your feet, and you will decide if it is possible for me to pass my life at your side. You will be the arbiter of my destiny … Do not forget me, my adorable sovereign.

  In this “friendship” of vipers, Frederick had the nastier bite. In one of his letters Voltaire had jokingly referred to an old nemesis, the ancien évêque de Mirepoix (former Bishop of Mirepoix), as the âne évêque (the ass bishop). Frederick sent it to his envoy in Paris with a note:

  Here is part of a letter of Voltaire, which I beg you to convey to the Bishop of Mirepoix by a roundabout way without you and me appearing in the matter. My intention is to make it so hot for him in France that he will have to come to Berlin.