The War of the Spanish Succession was one of the defining events of the Versailles Century (1682-1789).  Today on the blog we’ll examine the background of the conflict.

In the late 1690s, Europe was preoccupied by the question of who was to succeed Spain’s childless king, Carlos II, who was feeble of both mind and body.  Still only in his 30s, he was nonetheless thought to be on his last legs.  Unfortunately for him, his house, the Spanish branch of the Habsburgs, was the most inbred dynasty in the history of Europe.  His own parents, for instance, were uncle and niece.  The most visible outcome of this inbreeding in Carlos II was his deformed jaw, which made it difficult for him to speak and eat.

Charles II of Spain (1661-1700).  Credit: Wikipedia.

At last!  It’s taken decades, but my Mitford collection is now complete.  I’m referring to Nancy Mitford’s 4 historical biographies, rather than her novels.  In order of publication, the biographies are: Madame de Pompadour (1954), Voltaire in Love (1957), The Sun King (1966), and Frederick the Great (1970).

Attentive readers might remember this photo from an early post on this blog:

Madame de Pompadour and The Sun King, both by Nancy Mitford.  These are the lavish American editions published by Harper & Row.

At the time, these were the only items in my Mitford collection.  They’ve followed me from home to home through 4 countries over the last 30-odd years, which is why the dust jackets are slightly the worse for wear.  I had once owned a hard cover copy of Frederick the Great, but I donated it to a library that one of my former professors was setting up at Western University (my alma mater, formerly known as the University of Western Ontario).  It’s called the Pride Library.  You can visit its website here: http://www.uwo.ca/pridelib/.

Today we have the final instalment of Frederick II’s incognito visit to Strasbourg in the summer of 1740, soon after his accession, as remembered by the Marquis de Valfons in his memoirs.

Frederick has now definitely been recognized and the local military governor, the Maréchal de Broglie, wants to entertain him.

In this instalment of our tale, translated by me from the memoirs of the Marquis de Valfons, Frederick, traveling as ‘Count Dufour,’ realizes that his cover has been blown:

‘Count Dufour was not yet in bed when I called at the Maréchal (Marshal) de Broglie’s to tell him what I had seen and what the innkeeper, in the know despite the silence of the count’s suite, had told me.  The Maréchal sent M de Laigle, his wife’s nephew, to offer the noble foreigner lodgings in his own house and everything that he could desire.  Count Dufour, afraid of being recognized, was very annoyed by this message and thanked M de Laigle, then Colonel d’Enghien, who let him go to bed.

François-Marie de Broglie (1671-1745), Marshal of France, created Duke in 1742. Credit: Wikipedia.

Frederick II (1712-1786) of Prussia, called the Great, was avowedly francophile.  Raised by a French governess and always more comfortable speaking French than German, he read and wrote almost exclusively in the language of Molière.  It’s perhaps surprising, therefore, to realize that he only ever set foot in France once in his long life.

In August of 1740, a few months after his accession to the throne, he went on a tour of his Rhenish possessions, tantalizingly close to the French frontier.  He couldn’t resist slipping into Strasbourg incognito.  Not only was Strasbourg a French city, it was a garrison town, thus allowing Frederick to combine business with pleasure: he could visit the fabled country of which he’d heard so much and at the same time gather military intelligence. Fortunately for us, a young French officer who encountered the King left an eyewitness account of this unofficial visit in his memoirs.  More fortunately still, I picked up a copy of the newly issued edition of these memoirs, Souvenirs du Marquis de Valfons, in the bookshop at Versailles on my visit there in late March, 2016.

I had never heard of this Valfons before.  Born in 1710, he served in Louis XV’s army for several decades.  Apparently very handsome, he also cut a swathe through the court and high society in Paris.  In 1740, he was serving in the Piedmont regiment, which at that time was stationed in Strasbourg.  As far as I can make out, his memoirs have never been published in English.  What follows, therefore, is my own translation of the pages about Frederick’s brief sojourn in Strasbourg.

If you look for Prussia on a map of Europe, you won’t find it.  It’s gone.  In the 18th century, however, it was very much there, and growing.

This map illustrates Prussia’s expansion before, during, and after the Versailles Century (1682-1789).

Map of Prussia, 1600-1795. Credit: Wikipedia.

In the beginning, two different branches of the House of Hohenzollern ruled Brandenburg (centre) and Prussia (right, in green).  The Margrave of Brandenburg, as you might remember from the previous post, was one of the 9 electors empowered to select the Holy Roman Emperor.  He was generally called the Elector (German: Kurfürst) of Brandenburg.   Berlin was his capital.  Prussia up to the mid-17th century was a vassal duchy of Poland.  Its capital was Königsberg, nowadays known as Kaliningrad.  In 1618, the Elector of Brandenburg married his last surviving Prussian cousin, the Duchess Anna, and henceforward the two states were in personal union.  In other words, the same man was both Elector of Brandenburg and Duke of Prussia, but the two states were administered separately.  A similar situation happened in Britain, with the personal union of England and Scotland after the death of Elizabeth I and the accession of James VII of Scotland as James I of England.

Germany as we know it today did not exist in the Versailles Century (1682-1789).  The second German Empire (1871-1918), which brought the various German states together into the single national structure that we now call Germany, did not come into being until many decades after the final departure of Louis XVI and his family from Versailles in October, 1789.

In the Versailles Century, Germany was more a geographical region than a country.  It was part of the Holy Roman Empire, which also included the territory of the countries that we now know as Belgium, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Slovenia, as well as parts of present day France, Italy, and Poland.

Here is a map of the Empire in 1789:

The Holy Roman Empire in 1789. Credit: Wikipedia.

By this time, the Emperor had little authority outside his own hereditary territories.  As Voltaire quipped, the Holy Roman Empire was neither holy, nor Roman, nor even a real empire.

On this day in 1796, Catherine the Great, Empress and Autocrat of all the Russias, died in St. Petersburg at the age of 67.

Catherine the Great a few years before her death.

She had been found sprawled on the floor of her bathroom on the morning of 16 November.  She was moved to her bedroom, where her doctor examined her and determined that she’d had a stroke.  Having slipped into a coma, she never recovered consciousness and died on the evening of the 17th.

Known to history as Catherine the Great, she’d been born in 1729 as Princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, one of the most insignificant of the numerous insignificant German statelets at that time.  The Empress Elizabeth (r. 1741-1761) summoned her to Russia in 1744 to marry her nephew and heir, the future Peter III.  The marriage was unhappy and remained unconsummated for years.  Both parties were unfaithful and the paternity of their son, the future Emperor Paul, has always been in doubt.  On Elizabeth’s death at the end of 1761, Peter became emperor, but made himself unpopular in short order.  Within months of the late Empress’s funeral, Catherine organized a coup d’état, assumed the throne — to which she had no actual claim, of course — as empress regnant, not merely regent for her young son, and eliminated all her rivals, including Peter.  She ruled with great energy, enlarging Russia’s territory by a third, building enthusiastically, collecting art on a grand scale, corresponding with the great thinkers of the day, writing voluminously, and taking numerous lovers.  Her last lover, Platon Zubov, later helped to assassinate the Emperor Paul, who had done all he could to undo his mother’s work, even going so far as to decree that no woman should ever again sit on the Russian throne.

I first read Catherine’s memoirs when I was a teenager.  She had written them in French, but my local library had a copy of the English translation edited by Dominique Maroger and translated by Moura Budberg.  I later found and purchased a copy at a local secondhand bookstore (see below).  I believe it’s the original Canadian edition.  It has followed me through 4 countries and sits on a shelf in my bedroom to this day.  It’s a very lively book and Catherine’s voice comes through very clearly.  Unfortunately, she stopped writing, literally in mid-sentence, just as she was beginning to describe a conversation with the Empress Elizabeth shortly before her death which started with that monarch saying, “I insist that you tell me the truth about everything I am going to ask you.”

Cover of Catherine the Great’s memoirs, published in Canada by Hamish Hamilton, Ltd, in 1955.

Have you read this book?  If so, what did you think?  Please comment below, on the Versailles Century Facebook page, or in the Versailles Century gallery on Instagram.

While wandering in the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO), I came across this miniature portrait of Magdalena Wilhelmine of Baden-Durlach (1677-1742).  Born a princess of Württemberg, she married a Margrave of Baden-Durlach, for whom she is wearing mourning here.

Magdalena Wilhelmine of Baden-Durlach (1677-1742) in widow’s weeds, ca. 1740.  Miniature watercolour on vellum framed in gilded metal; on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).

Having never heard of her, I was intrigued.  A quick search on the English and German Wikipedia revealed that she was the widow of that Margrave of Baden-Durlach, Karl Wilhelm (r. 1709-1738), who founded the eponymous new city of Karlsruhe and built its spectacular Versailles-inspired palace.

One of the handsomest pieces of 18th-century furniture in the New France collection at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) is this butternut and pine commode from the Montréal area, dated 1740-1760.  As mentioned in the two previous posts, Louis XV styles in New France only took hold around 1740 and persisted for decades after the British conquest in 1759.

A commode from New France/Québec in the ROM.

Although obviously provincial in style when compared to the work of the great ébénistes active in Paris at the same time, it’s a very fine piece.  As with provincial furniture in France itself, the furniture in New France was simpler in design and execution and used humber materials than that of the capital and the court.  In this case, the fancy floral moulding at the bottom, the sophisticated serpentine front, and the elaborate hardware indicate that it was a high-end piece for its time and place.  Very likely it was commissioned by a well-off family.