Frederick the Great

Frederick was born in Berlin on January 24, 1712, the son of King Frederick William I of Prussia and Sophia Dorothea of Hanover, sister of Britain's George II ^[1]. His father, often called the Soldier King, built the Prussian army into one of the most drilled forces in Europe and ran his court with barracks-room austerity. The heir, by contrast, gravitated toward French literature, philosophy, and music, tastes his father regarded as effeminate and dangerous. The result was one of the most bitter father-son conflicts in royal history, marked by public humiliations and physical beatings ^[2].

In 1730, at eighteen, Frederick attempted to flee the kingdom with his close friend Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte. The plot was discovered, both were arrested, and Frederick William had Katte executed at Küstrin while his son was compelled to watch from a window of the fortress ^[1]. Frederick was stripped of his rank and put to work in the provincial administration at Küstrin, learning the details of Prussian finance and agriculture as a condition of his rehabilitation.

A formal reconciliation followed. In 1733 Frederick married Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Bevern, a match arranged by his father, and from 1736 he lived at Rheinsberg palace. There he assembled musicians and thinkers, read voraciously, and began a correspondence with Voltaire that would last, with interruptions and quarrels, for more than four decades ^[3]. At Rheinsberg he also wrote the Anti-Machiavel, a treatise arguing that a ruler's duty was the welfare of his subjects rather than raw self-interest, published in 1740 with Voltaire's help ^[3].

Frederick William I died on May 31, 1740, and the 28-year-old prince became king. Anyone asking who was Frederick the Great at that moment would have found a slight, cultivated man inheriting a full treasury, an army of around 80,000 men, and a scattered collection of territories with no natural defenses ^[1]. Within months he showed how he intended to use those assets. When Emperor Charles VI died in October 1740, leaving the Habsburg lands to his daughter Maria Theresa, Frederick repudiated Prussia's acceptance of her succession and invaded the wealthy Austrian province of Silesia in December without a declaration of war ^[2].

The gamble opened the War of the Austrian Succession. Frederick's first battle, at Mollwitz in April 1741, nearly ended in disaster: he left the field on his advisers' urging before his infantry rallied to win it. He learned quickly. Victories at Chotusitz in 1742 and at Hohenfriedberg and Soor in 1745 secured Prussian possession of Silesia, confirmed in the treaties of Breslau and Dresden ^[2]. The province added roughly a million subjects and a productive textile and mining economy to his kingdom.

The seizure made Prussia a great power and Maria Theresa an implacable enemy. Through the later 1740s and early 1750s Frederick reorganized his finances and army while Austria rebuilt its alliances. The diplomatic revolution of 1756, which paired Austria with its old rival France and with Russia, left Prussia encircled, with Britain as its only significant partner ^[4].

Any account of Frederick the Great achievements begins with the Seven Years' War of 1756 to 1763. Judging that his enemies meant to attack, Frederick struck first, invading Saxony in August 1756. For seven years he fought Austria, France, Russia, Sweden, and most of the German states with a population base a fraction of theirs. His victories at Rossbach and Leuthen in late 1757, the first against a Franco-Imperial army and the second against a much larger Austrian force, are still studied in military academies for their use of the oblique order of attack ^[4].

The war also brought catastrophes. Frederick was beaten badly at Kolin in 1757, at Hochkirch in 1758, and above all at Kunersdorf in 1759, where his army was nearly destroyed and he contemplated abdication. Berlin was occupied twice by enemy raiders. What saved him, alongside British subsidies and the discipline of his troops, was the death of Empress Elizabeth of Russia in January 1762; her successor Peter III admired Frederick and withdrew from the war ^[4]. The Peace of Hubertusburg in 1763 restored the prewar borders, leaving Silesia in Prussian hands and Prussia's standing as a great power intact.

His achievements were not only military. In the first weeks of his reign in 1740 he abolished judicial torture in nearly all cases and curbed press censorship ^[5]. He pushed codification of Prussian law, work that culminated after his death in the Allgemeines Landrecht of 1794. He drained and settled marshland along the Oder, promoted the potato as a field crop, welcomed religious minorities including Catholics and, within limits, Jews as economically useful subjects, and rebuilt a war-shattered country after 1763 with grain stores, canals, and subsidized manufacturing ^[5]. In 1772 he joined Russia and Austria in the First Partition of Poland, annexing West Prussia and finally linking Brandenburg with East Prussia, an acquisition made by diplomacy rather than battle ^[1].

Frederick's marriage to Elisabeth Christine was a formality he never disguised. After his accession the couple lived apart, the queen at Schönhausen and the king mostly at Potsdam, and they had no children; his nephew Frederick William succeeded him ^[1]. Historians have long debated Frederick's sexuality, noting his exclusively male inner circle, his youthful attachment to Katte, and the frank speculation of contemporaries including Voltaire. The evidence does not allow certainty, but most modern biographers treat his orientation toward men as probable ^[6].

His real home was Sanssouci, the single-story rococo palace he built above terraced vineyards at Potsdam between 1745 and 1747, its name taken from the French for "without cares" ^[7]. There he hosted round-table suppers conducted in French, played the transverse flute in evening concerts, and composed: over a hundred flute sonatas and four symphonies survive, and he employed Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach as his keyboard accompanist. Johann Sebastian Bach's visit in 1747 produced the royal theme that Bach worked into the Musical Offering ^[7].

Voltaire lived at his court from 1750 to 1753, a residence that began in mutual flattery and collapsed in lawsuits, a satirical pamphlet, and the philosopher's brief detention in Frankfurt. The two resumed writing to each other anyway. Frederick wrote poetry, history, and political essays in French throughout his life, dismissing German as a language fit for soldiers and grooms, and his collected works fill dozens of volumes ^[3]. He preferred the company of his greyhounds to most human beings in old age and asked to be buried beside them at Sanssouci.

The decades after 1763 were devoted to repair and routine. Frederick rose before dawn, worked through reports in his cabinet, toured the provinces each summer to inspect harvests, garrisons, and officials, and answered petitions in his own cramped hand ^[5]. Peasants and townspeople took to calling him der Alte Fritz, Old Fritz, a nickname that mixed grumbling familiarity with respect. He kept the army at around 190,000 men, convinced that Prussia's survival depended on permanent readiness ^[4].

He fought once more, in the War of the Bavarian Succession of 1778 to 1779, a nearly bloodless standoff with Austria that soldiers mocked as the Potato War because the armies spent it foraging. The Peace of Teschen blocked Joseph II's attempt to exchange the Austrian Netherlands for Bavaria, and in 1785 Frederick organized the Fürstenbund, a league of German princes, to check Habsburg ambitions inside the Holy Roman Empire ^[2].

Gout, asthma, and dropsy wore him down through the 1780s. He continued working almost to the end, receiving reports propped in an armchair at Sanssouci, where he died in the early hours of August 17, 1786, aged 74 ^[1]. Against his explicit wish to lie beside his dogs on the vineyard terrace, his nephew buried him in the Potsdam Garrison Church next to the father he had hated. Only in 1991, after German reunification, was his coffin finally placed in the grave he had chosen at Sanssouci ^[7].

Every serious Frederick the Great biography confronts a double image: the enlightened reformer and the aggressor who normalized preventive war. He called himself the first servant of the state, and his religious tolerance, legal reforms, and personal frugality impressed Enlightenment Europe ^[5]. Yet his unprovoked seizure of Silesia launched two wars that killed hundreds of thousands, and his share of the partition of Poland helped erase a sovereign state from the map. Napoleon, standing at his tomb in 1806 after crushing the Prussian army, reportedly told his officers that if this man were still alive they would not be there, a story that itself became part of the legend ^[2].

His afterlife in German memory has been turbulent. Nineteenth-century nationalists claimed him as a forerunner of unification, though he had cared about Prussia, not Germany. The Nazi regime exploited his image relentlessly; Hitler kept a portrait of Frederick in the Berlin bunker ^[6]. After 1945 both German states kept their distance, and East Germany removed his equestrian statue from Unter den Linden before restoring it in 1980. Recent scholarship, including Tim Blanning's 2015 biography, has recovered the musician, builder, and writer alongside the warlord ^[6].

Among basic Frederick the Great facts, a few carry his measure: he fought and won wars against coalitions three or four times Prussia's size, doubled his kingdom's population through conquest, annexation, and settlement, composed music still performed today, and left an administrative machine that outlasted him by generations. Military theorists from Clausewitz onward have mined his campaigns, and Sanssouci, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site within the Potsdam palace ensemble, draws visitors to the terraces where a king argued with philosophers and played the flute ^[7].