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rheinsbergSo in the 18th and late 17th century we see a whole bunch of kids whose parents are obsessively religious, and their kids turn out the opposite: freethinkers, libertines, or both.
- We all know about FW and his free-thinking kids. Even AW, whom he was relatively nice to, had the attitude that too much religious ostentation was a bad thing, although so was mocking religion *cough* Fritz.
- We know about Cosimo III de Medici and his two libertine sons (and GG was something of a freethinker until his deathbed conversion).
- We have recently learned about Pietists Christian VI and Sophia Magdalena of Denmark and their libertine children, Frederik V and Louise the possibly-pregnant-out-of-wedlock. Frederik, incidentally, was not a Deist, there are a lot of references to God and praying in his letters...but let's just say he was not his parents when it came to religion.
- Struensee's father was Francke's successor as pastor in Halle. Struensee, talking to a pastor before his execution, said his father was much too hard on him. Winkle, the academic biographer I'm currently reading, just says that that was normal. He also says that FW was a perfectly normal father, and that nothing that happened to Fritz was unusual.
More convincingly, Barz, the romanticizing biographer, says Struensee père was the kind of authoritarian father whose children have to either turn out exactly like him or exactly opposite him, no middle ground. And sure enough, one son turned out just like him and the rest abandoned religion and became Deists or atheists. Struensee also had a reputation as a libertine; he seems to have been pretty sexually active, although rumors of his decadence in other ways may have been exaggerated.
But there are also some cases where a more liberal upbringing resulted in a child who felt the need to go in an extreme religious direction. This write-up is mostly about Ferdinand, Duke of Parma, but there's also the other obvious case: Tsarevitch Alexei, murdered son of Peter the Great. We'll cover Ferdinand's education in the first post, since I have far more detail about it, and then do a compare-and-contrast with Alexei's in the second post.
Ferdinand of Parma
Ferdinand of Parma's Genealogy
Who was Ferdinand, Duke of Parma? He was the younger brother of Isabella of Parma (ViennaJoe's wife). As you may remember, that means his mother was the favorite daughter of Louis XV, the one who kept wanting to go back to Versailles and bug Dad for money, and her father was Don Philip, the younger son of Philip V "the Frog" of Spain and Isabella Farnese of Parma. As part of the conclusion to the War of the Austrian Succession, Parma was given to Don Philip as a sort of French client state. You may remember that Isabella had been fighting for her Parma inheritance since she married Philip way back in 1714, because she wanted something to pass on to her sons (Philip the Frog already having a son from his first marriage to inherit Spain).
Ferdinand was born in 1751, died in 1802, and married MT's daughter Maria Amalia. He is thus also first cousin to butt-groping Ferdinand over in Naples, because Naples-Sicily went to Philip and Isabella's oldest son Don Carlos (future Charles III of Spain) as a result of the War of the Polish Succession.
Ferdinand's younger sister Maria Luisa will marry her first cousin, Don Carlos's son, future Charles IV of Spain, and she will become queen of Spain in 1788.
Ferdinand himself, being the only son of his parents, will become Duke of Parma at the age of 14, in 1765.
How Ferdinand's education was supposed to go
His parents wanted a modern, enlightened prince. So they made the surprising, especially in Italy, choice not to involve the Jesuits in his education. The idea was that he should be a good Catholic but not a bigot, and be prepared for ruling a principality, not for theological debates.
Instead, they got, among other people, the Abbe de Condillac, who was admired by Voltaire, and who influenced Rousseau, Diderot, d'Alembert, and the encyclopedia.
Condillac sets out to teach via a new method, which he describes as involving cooperation rather than authority. A child learns by having their natural curiosity stimulated, and the student should understand what they're learning, not just memorize and recite. They should learn to think.
Now, the philosophes of this era are big believers in education. They subscribe to a "tabula rasa" theory, in which the child is a blank slate and only their upbringing governs how they will turn out. As Leibniz says, training makes everything possible, even to teaching bears to dance.
So you can imagine the philosophes are very excited that one of them is in charge of the upbringing of a prince. They keep a close eye on developments in Parma, and all the news about young Ferdinand that comes out of there is discussed in salons in Paris.
No pressure.
How Ferdinand's education actually went
So this whole idea about an education where the teacher isn't an authority figure but more of a guide who helps the student learn to think for themselves sounds great. But what happens when the student does things that you don't want him to do, like
1) being excessively religious,
2) hanging out with the lower classes, doing lower class things,
3) speaking the Parmesan dialect of Italian,
? And worse, LIES about it, because you've forbidden all these things?
Why, you have to beat him, of course. A lot.
Ferdinand wrote a "my life so far" when he was about 20 or so. A major portion of it consisted of "Man, I was beaten a lot by my tutors. I know I deserved it, because I was always sneaking off and lying about it, but I was kicked and punched and yelled at all the time."
Mom: "My son is great, even though he needs to be beaten a lot."
Older sister Isabella (future ViennaJoe's wife), "If I were raising a child, I would not beat them up, because it just backfires, and you get a defiant child." She writes a very-modern sounding treatise on her child-rearing opinions, at the age of like 16, which you can only imagine is based on her role as surrogate mom to Ferdinand and observing how he was being treated and how that was turning out.
She denounces the dangers of that excess of power that makes children violent, impatient, and stubborn, and the dangers of intransigence, which comes from hard-heartedness and meanness. It "does not mend, inspires no respect..., arouses hatred, revenge, and distrust, encourages deceit, kills all sensibility, makes hard and callous, and capable of all malice." On the other hand, she contrasts gentleness, "which is despised these days," but capable of winning the hearts of children, begetting approval, affection, and sincerity, training their minds and feelings, and making them agreeable and docile.
Ferdinand: "The happiest time of my life was when I was inoculated for smallpox, and I had to be quarantined for a few weeks from my tutors who had never had smallpox. Happiest. Time. Ever."
Why he was so into religion
So Ferdinand grows up into someone who is absolutely obsessed with religion. He will spend as much time as possible praying, venerating holy relics and icons, traveling from church to church, talking to clergy. He writes that he has a calling in life to become a monk.
He also writes that every time something terrible or stressful happened in his life, religion made him feel better. And a lot of stressful things happen, like:
1. He struggles to learn to read.
2. His mother spends most of her time in France, then dies.
3. His older sister/surrogate mom gets shipped off to Austria about a year after his mother dies.
4. His absentee dad dies by the time he's 14, leaving him alone in Parma.
5. He doesn't say this, but he gets beaten a lot.
Also, he doesn't complain about the workload, but it's immense, and other contemporaries side-eyed it.
Here's Condillac's syllabus for a six-to-seven year-old:
A multitude of religious writings; plays by Racine, Molière and Corneille; L'art poétique by Despréaux; works by Voltaire; Des tropes by Du Marsais; De l'origine des lois (Investigations into the Origin of the Laws) by Goguet, the textbooks Grammaire and L'art d'écrire; Newton's philosophy, in Emilie's translation, especially in the phenomena of the world and their explanation, which the Marquise provides; Maupertuis's Traité de la sphère and his Voyage au Nord "and all that he wrote about the system of the world", and the second part of Voltaire's Newton.
And Condillac promises everyone that the kid totally understands this! He brags that Ferdinand grasped the basis of philosophy in one month.
Meanwhile, said kid, looking back, says he struggled to learn to read, but one day he went and prayed to a saint about it and kissed an image of the saint, and then he was able to read. Relics also helped his stomachaches.
I'm going to armchair diagnose here, and propose that we have a very stressed child (later adult) here for whom religion is one of his self-soothing techniques. And he does it to excess in the same way some people drink to excess, gamble, visit prostitutes, take out their anger on other people, etc. Any time you see someone doing something to excess, there's a good chance it's taking their mind off their incredibly stressful life, and they don't have better coping methods.
So, of course Ferdinand turns into an adult who brings back the Inquisition in the 1760s when it's becoming outmoded, and who cares more about his religious duties than his secular duties.
How everyone reacted to how Ferdinand turned out
His tutors were very upset at him being so religiously obsessive. As noted, they beat him when they caught him, and even when he was older, Condillac wrote him letters scolding him. He should be a good Christian, Condillac said, but he should go into his room and pray quietly, not visit every church in the neighborhood and prostrate himself at the altar. Even the Pope wouldn't approve if he knew, says Condillac!
The letters REEK with classism. It's amazing. Like, you want to sympathize with the "enlightened" guys, but the "lower class" people Ferdinand spends his time with are probably not BEATING him and also making him read Newton at age 6.
Meanwhile, the tutors are showing off Ferdinand to visitors and writing letters to the rest of Europe about how great the educational program is going. These letters are, of course, passed around and read aloud in salons. The philosophes rejoice! Rousseau, d'Alembert, Voltaire, all of these people believe in the power of education!
But behind the scenes, Condillac is writing to Ferdinand, "Look, I tell everyone how great you are, but I leave out all the bad parts. You need to shape up or you're never going to be a good prince."
Understandably, Ferdinand does not "shape up," and word gets out that the much-vaunted modern education produced a pious bigot who would rather join a monastery and live in the 17th century.
Awkward.
Do the philosophes question their methods? No. Of course not.
In fact, Voltaire, who started out quipping that "The Infante of Parma will be in good company. He will have a Condillac and a Leire (a renowned atheist) with him. If he still manages to be pious, God's grace must be very strong indeed," ends up saying, "I hoped for a little from the Infante, the Duke of Parma, considering the good education he had; but where there is no soul, education can do nothing either; I heard that this prince spends the day visiting monks and that his Austrian and superstitious wife will be in charge. O poor philosophy! what will become of you? Still, we must stand firm and fight to the end." (Emphasis Badinter's.)
According to Badinter, the philosophes never actually acknowledge the contradiction between the "tabula rasa" theory they've been espousing and their sudden belief that there's something in the child that cannot be shaped by a philosophe armed with the right methods.
Condillac writes a summary of "the course of study for the instruction of the prince of Parma" repeating what he said in the 1740s, before Ferdinand was even born. Much like Fritz digging out his anti-German pamphlet from Rheinsberg, Condillac's post-Ferdinand summary doesn't take into account anything that happened in the intervening decades, except to comment at the end that "There are thankless situations; there is a certain ground in which it is very difficult to lay the foundations: one may even make a mistake and the building collapses altogether."
But, you know. Carry on like nothing happened.
Diderot, of course has the luxury of claiming he believed in phrenology all along, and the anatomical differences in skulls and diaphragms show that there must be some inborn differences.
Mostly the philosophes just pretend Parma never happened. Certainly no one ever entertains the possibility that a different education would have produced a different child.
Except some people who meet Ferdinand and aren't fancy philosophes prove to have common sense. The French envoy tells Ferdinand, "If I'd been your tutor, I would have made you visit 6 churches a day once you started going through this phase," and Ferdinand laughs and admits that would have totally turned him off religion.
And MT's envoy has this opinion:
The Infante had a good character spoiled by his upbringing. "He has aptitudes of mind and understanding, but under the semblance of a brilliant upbringing these aptitudes have been spoiled and this understanding overwhelmed." He even credits him with an exceptional memory and "a great desire to learn." Instead of nurturing these talents, "he was forced by undignified methods to study diligently astronomy, navigation, and mathematics... He was smothered in history full of metaphysics... which he could not mentally digest. Hence his aversion to any kind of study and his flight from all diligence. The poisoning of his original respect for the two teachers by an extremely violent, deeply felt hatred has corrupted his heart. That taught him to be evasive and false."
The Marquesa de González said he admired the work of the philosophes, but this kind of workload is how you get a ten-year-old man and a twenty-year-old child. And sure enough, Ferdinand is taking heat in his twenties for childish pranks and wanting to play rather than work (heavy dose of classism here; it's the "lower-class" guards and servants who are teaching him these pranks).
And, of course, we've seen Isabella's opinion of his education when he was still a child.
So basically, the philosophes don't come off very well in this story.
How much of it was real anyway
There's also the question of how much of Ferdinand's precociousness when he was a kid was real. When he was being shown off to visitors, was he just prepped in advance and could only handle questions he'd been told to expect in advance? How much did he understand of what he was saying?
Contemporary accounts differed, and apparently we can't actually tell. He had some interest in literature and the sciences when he got older, was willing to be inoculated (I mean, his sister had just died of smallpox the year before, and his mother had died a few years before that), supported astronomy, etc. But he remained one of the most passionate supporters of the Church in the most throwback possible way.
Tsarevitch Alexei
Comparison of Ferdinand and Alexei
So that was Ferdinand of Parma, religious fanatic of the late 18th century. Earlier in the century, there was another child who got a brutal, modernizing upbringing and turned into a religious reactionary who wanted to turn the country back to the 17th century: the Tsarevitch Alexei.
Let us remember that Peter the Great set out to single-handedly bring Russia into the modern age at the turn of the 18th century. Let us also remember that his first wife was sent to a nunnery so he could marry Lithuanian peasant Marta, future Catherine I, and that Alexei was the product of the first marriage. This is going to shape his sympathies somewhat. There are two parties in Russia: the ones who support Peter's Westernizing efforts, and the "OMG WTF are you doing Peter???!" that used to carry around their forcibly shaven off beards in their pockets so that on Judgment Day, they could show God that they had never willingly been separated from their beard. So reactionary, is what I'm saying.
It's worth noting here that there were similarly two parties in Parma: the French party, that leaned toward the Enlightenment, and the Italian party, the reactionaries. Ferdinand's mother was French, and his Spanish father was apparently on board with the more modern and liberal approach to education too. Ferdinand himself liked hanging out with Italians, both the ultra-conservative clergy, and the servants and soldiers, who were inclined to a more "simple" faith that the philosophes looked down on. As noted, I suspect these were the people who were NICE to him. And I suspect the same was true to a certain extent for Alexei.
Now, unlike Ferdinand, I'm not aware that Alexei's tutor was awful to him. His tutor, at least according to the essay I read, seems to have relatively little time and influence on him. My impression was that if anyone was awful, it was his father Peter, and in much the same way as FW: he wanted to be the fun friendly dad, but when he realized his life's work was going to be destroyed, he got harder and harder on the kid. And Peter expected his son to have 1) his commitment to a life of service to the state, 2) his exact superhuman levels of energy for physical activity. Much like FW, he could not cope with his child being different from him.
The tutor wanted to teach Alexei book learning and proper behavior, but Peter kept pulling Alexei away from him to come join Peter at the army and do practical things. And Menshikov, who is basically Peter's Old Dessauer, supposedly undermined all the tutor's efforts to teach Alexei anything, because Menshikov didn't want the heir to the throne being a threat to him after Peter died, Menshikov wanted to continue being the powerful favorite. (Selena could have told him what his odds were.) Now, I don't know that this is true, but this is what the essay author said contemporaries said about Menshikov.
What *was* similar between Alexei and Ferdinand was that the tutor wrote letters to all the publishers in Europe about how Alexei's education was coming, so they could publish his updates in newspapers and books for the reading public, and the answer to how the education was coming was always "just swimmingly." While at the same time, writing Alexei letters about how he'd better shape up and learn to behave himself, because character defaults were harder to correct the older you got.
I was particularly struck by the tutor's criticism of the "grimaces" Alexei always made, and how he should have a relaxed, natural, pleasant facial expression. Isn't that exactly what FW wrote to young Fritz in one of his diatribes?
[selenak: Indeed it is, and given FW was early on raised by Danckelmann's choice of tutor before SC had her showdown with Danckelmann, and that the tutor was a Danckelmann buddy, chances are "don't make grimaces" were a Prussian dogma. This said, probably not just Prussian. Looking gracious, pleasant, relaxed in most unnatural circumstances as court etiquette inevitably produces was a constant ideal for royals to live up to in that century.]
Anyway, apparently if you look at the state of his actual education and the claims that were being published in western European countries, there was a big discrepancy. So exactly like Ferdinand.
Unlike Ferdinand, I don't have evidence that the intellectual education was super burdensome...but his father's idea of how much energy he should have for being exactly like Peter was definitely burdensome, and I suspect the Russian reactionary party, and his mother's people, and his mother when he got to see her, were much more chill. And we know that Peter drank a lot, had a vicious temper, was over 2 meters tall, and was physically violent with pretty much everyone.
So it's really not all that hard to see how Alexei got driven into a reactionary camp just like Ferdinand.
Addendum on Alexei's tutor
I don't actually know that the tutor *wasn't* awful to Alexei too, I'm just presuming innocence until he's proven guilty. What I do know about him may be of some interest to salon:
His name was Heinrich von Huyssen. He was a Protestant German from Essen (western Germany, near the Rhine). He had close ties to "Severus Snape" Danckelmann and went to university with his sons, ad he'd hoped for a position in Brandenburg, but after Danckelmann's fall in 1697, all doors were closed to him in Brandenburg. So when Peter the Great started recruiting Westerners to help modernize Russia at the turn of the century, Huyssen was all in. His application was passed to Peter by none other than Johann Patkul, whom you may remember as the guy who helped convince Peter and August the Strong to go to war against Karl XII and set off the Great Northern War, and who was brutally tortured and executed when Karl got his hands on him. That incident inspired Manteuffel to write a diatribe against monarchs.
So Patkul recommends Huyssen to Peter, Huyssen gets to come to Russia, and his initial jobs are:
1. Help recruit more Westerners!
2. Translate Peter's "come join my country!" manifest into Western languages and get them printed in the West.
3. Convince Western publishers to dedicate their books to Peter and Alexei for the good PR.
4. Improve the postal service between Russia and the West.
If you are sensing a theme here, it is indeed the driving theme of Peter's life and the thing that his son ended up being a reactionary against.
Then Peter's like, "Well, I had to fire the last German tutor I had for Alexei, but I'm sure as hell not letting my heir be raised by a Russian tutor, so how about you?"
Huyssen: "How about no? Menshikov is going to fuck this up for me. You should put him in charge and not hold me responsible for the outcome."
Peter: "No, you'll do fine, I have full confidence in you! P.S. Do everything Menshikov says."
Huyssen: *facepalm*
Menshikov: *after years of undermining Huyssen, apparently finally gets him sent on diplomatic missions to Berlin and Vienna, far, far away from Alexei*
Then Huyssen comes back, but no time for book learning, it's time to take Alexei on a grand tour and arrange an unhappy marriage with him to a princess from Brunswick! Then he's officially an adult and doesn't need a tutor any more.
Huyssen continues working for Peter in various capacities until Peter's death; then his star falls. Finally, he wants to go home, but like Suhm, he sets out sick and dies on the way.
Sources
Der Infant von Parma: oder Die Ohnmacht der Erziehung, a monograph by Elisabeth Badinter, whomselenak reminded me was the author who once wrote a biography of MT without learning German. So, you know, grain of salt about her scholarship, but at least this one isn't set in Germany. (There's not a lot of Italian in her bibliography, but a little.)
"Heinrich von Huyssen (1666–1739) als Hofmeister des russischen Thronfolgers Aleksej", an essay by Svetlana Korzun, in the collection of essays Die Flucht des Thronfolgers Aleksej: Krise in der „Balance of Power“ und den österreichisch-russischen Beziehungen am Anfang des 18 Jahrhunderts," edited by Iskra Schwarz. I was hoping for more on the flight of the crown prince Alexei from this collection, but it's more about the crisis in the balance of power and Austrian-Russian relations at the beginning of the 18th century. So a lot of stuff I already knew.
Johann Friedrich Struensee: Arzt, Aufklärer und Staatsmann; Beitrag zur Kultur-, Medizin- und Seuchengeschichte der Aufklärungszeit, a book by Stefan Winkle.
- We all know about FW and his free-thinking kids. Even AW, whom he was relatively nice to, had the attitude that too much religious ostentation was a bad thing, although so was mocking religion *cough* Fritz.
- We know about Cosimo III de Medici and his two libertine sons (and GG was something of a freethinker until his deathbed conversion).
- We have recently learned about Pietists Christian VI and Sophia Magdalena of Denmark and their libertine children, Frederik V and Louise the possibly-pregnant-out-of-wedlock. Frederik, incidentally, was not a Deist, there are a lot of references to God and praying in his letters...but let's just say he was not his parents when it came to religion.
- Struensee's father was Francke's successor as pastor in Halle. Struensee, talking to a pastor before his execution, said his father was much too hard on him. Winkle, the academic biographer I'm currently reading, just says that that was normal. He also says that FW was a perfectly normal father, and that nothing that happened to Fritz was unusual.
More convincingly, Barz, the romanticizing biographer, says Struensee père was the kind of authoritarian father whose children have to either turn out exactly like him or exactly opposite him, no middle ground. And sure enough, one son turned out just like him and the rest abandoned religion and became Deists or atheists. Struensee also had a reputation as a libertine; he seems to have been pretty sexually active, although rumors of his decadence in other ways may have been exaggerated.
But there are also some cases where a more liberal upbringing resulted in a child who felt the need to go in an extreme religious direction. This write-up is mostly about Ferdinand, Duke of Parma, but there's also the other obvious case: Tsarevitch Alexei, murdered son of Peter the Great. We'll cover Ferdinand's education in the first post, since I have far more detail about it, and then do a compare-and-contrast with Alexei's in the second post.
Ferdinand of Parma
Ferdinand of Parma's Genealogy
Who was Ferdinand, Duke of Parma? He was the younger brother of Isabella of Parma (ViennaJoe's wife). As you may remember, that means his mother was the favorite daughter of Louis XV, the one who kept wanting to go back to Versailles and bug Dad for money, and her father was Don Philip, the younger son of Philip V "the Frog" of Spain and Isabella Farnese of Parma. As part of the conclusion to the War of the Austrian Succession, Parma was given to Don Philip as a sort of French client state. You may remember that Isabella had been fighting for her Parma inheritance since she married Philip way back in 1714, because she wanted something to pass on to her sons (Philip the Frog already having a son from his first marriage to inherit Spain).
Ferdinand was born in 1751, died in 1802, and married MT's daughter Maria Amalia. He is thus also first cousin to butt-groping Ferdinand over in Naples, because Naples-Sicily went to Philip and Isabella's oldest son Don Carlos (future Charles III of Spain) as a result of the War of the Polish Succession.
Ferdinand's younger sister Maria Luisa will marry her first cousin, Don Carlos's son, future Charles IV of Spain, and she will become queen of Spain in 1788.
Ferdinand himself, being the only son of his parents, will become Duke of Parma at the age of 14, in 1765.
How Ferdinand's education was supposed to go
His parents wanted a modern, enlightened prince. So they made the surprising, especially in Italy, choice not to involve the Jesuits in his education. The idea was that he should be a good Catholic but not a bigot, and be prepared for ruling a principality, not for theological debates.
Instead, they got, among other people, the Abbe de Condillac, who was admired by Voltaire, and who influenced Rousseau, Diderot, d'Alembert, and the encyclopedia.
Condillac sets out to teach via a new method, which he describes as involving cooperation rather than authority. A child learns by having their natural curiosity stimulated, and the student should understand what they're learning, not just memorize and recite. They should learn to think.
Now, the philosophes of this era are big believers in education. They subscribe to a "tabula rasa" theory, in which the child is a blank slate and only their upbringing governs how they will turn out. As Leibniz says, training makes everything possible, even to teaching bears to dance.
So you can imagine the philosophes are very excited that one of them is in charge of the upbringing of a prince. They keep a close eye on developments in Parma, and all the news about young Ferdinand that comes out of there is discussed in salons in Paris.
No pressure.
How Ferdinand's education actually went
So this whole idea about an education where the teacher isn't an authority figure but more of a guide who helps the student learn to think for themselves sounds great. But what happens when the student does things that you don't want him to do, like
1) being excessively religious,
2) hanging out with the lower classes, doing lower class things,
3) speaking the Parmesan dialect of Italian,
? And worse, LIES about it, because you've forbidden all these things?
Why, you have to beat him, of course. A lot.
Ferdinand wrote a "my life so far" when he was about 20 or so. A major portion of it consisted of "Man, I was beaten a lot by my tutors. I know I deserved it, because I was always sneaking off and lying about it, but I was kicked and punched and yelled at all the time."
Mom: "My son is great, even though he needs to be beaten a lot."
Older sister Isabella (future ViennaJoe's wife), "If I were raising a child, I would not beat them up, because it just backfires, and you get a defiant child." She writes a very-modern sounding treatise on her child-rearing opinions, at the age of like 16, which you can only imagine is based on her role as surrogate mom to Ferdinand and observing how he was being treated and how that was turning out.
She denounces the dangers of that excess of power that makes children violent, impatient, and stubborn, and the dangers of intransigence, which comes from hard-heartedness and meanness. It "does not mend, inspires no respect..., arouses hatred, revenge, and distrust, encourages deceit, kills all sensibility, makes hard and callous, and capable of all malice." On the other hand, she contrasts gentleness, "which is despised these days," but capable of winning the hearts of children, begetting approval, affection, and sincerity, training their minds and feelings, and making them agreeable and docile.
Ferdinand: "The happiest time of my life was when I was inoculated for smallpox, and I had to be quarantined for a few weeks from my tutors who had never had smallpox. Happiest. Time. Ever."
Why he was so into religion
So Ferdinand grows up into someone who is absolutely obsessed with religion. He will spend as much time as possible praying, venerating holy relics and icons, traveling from church to church, talking to clergy. He writes that he has a calling in life to become a monk.
He also writes that every time something terrible or stressful happened in his life, religion made him feel better. And a lot of stressful things happen, like:
1. He struggles to learn to read.
2. His mother spends most of her time in France, then dies.
3. His older sister/surrogate mom gets shipped off to Austria about a year after his mother dies.
4. His absentee dad dies by the time he's 14, leaving him alone in Parma.
5. He doesn't say this, but he gets beaten a lot.
Also, he doesn't complain about the workload, but it's immense, and other contemporaries side-eyed it.
Here's Condillac's syllabus for a six-to-seven year-old:
A multitude of religious writings; plays by Racine, Molière and Corneille; L'art poétique by Despréaux; works by Voltaire; Des tropes by Du Marsais; De l'origine des lois (Investigations into the Origin of the Laws) by Goguet, the textbooks Grammaire and L'art d'écrire; Newton's philosophy, in Emilie's translation, especially in the phenomena of the world and their explanation, which the Marquise provides; Maupertuis's Traité de la sphère and his Voyage au Nord "and all that he wrote about the system of the world", and the second part of Voltaire's Newton.
And Condillac promises everyone that the kid totally understands this! He brags that Ferdinand grasped the basis of philosophy in one month.
Meanwhile, said kid, looking back, says he struggled to learn to read, but one day he went and prayed to a saint about it and kissed an image of the saint, and then he was able to read. Relics also helped his stomachaches.
I'm going to armchair diagnose here, and propose that we have a very stressed child (later adult) here for whom religion is one of his self-soothing techniques. And he does it to excess in the same way some people drink to excess, gamble, visit prostitutes, take out their anger on other people, etc. Any time you see someone doing something to excess, there's a good chance it's taking their mind off their incredibly stressful life, and they don't have better coping methods.
So, of course Ferdinand turns into an adult who brings back the Inquisition in the 1760s when it's becoming outmoded, and who cares more about his religious duties than his secular duties.
How everyone reacted to how Ferdinand turned out
His tutors were very upset at him being so religiously obsessive. As noted, they beat him when they caught him, and even when he was older, Condillac wrote him letters scolding him. He should be a good Christian, Condillac said, but he should go into his room and pray quietly, not visit every church in the neighborhood and prostrate himself at the altar. Even the Pope wouldn't approve if he knew, says Condillac!
The letters REEK with classism. It's amazing. Like, you want to sympathize with the "enlightened" guys, but the "lower class" people Ferdinand spends his time with are probably not BEATING him and also making him read Newton at age 6.
Meanwhile, the tutors are showing off Ferdinand to visitors and writing letters to the rest of Europe about how great the educational program is going. These letters are, of course, passed around and read aloud in salons. The philosophes rejoice! Rousseau, d'Alembert, Voltaire, all of these people believe in the power of education!
But behind the scenes, Condillac is writing to Ferdinand, "Look, I tell everyone how great you are, but I leave out all the bad parts. You need to shape up or you're never going to be a good prince."
Understandably, Ferdinand does not "shape up," and word gets out that the much-vaunted modern education produced a pious bigot who would rather join a monastery and live in the 17th century.
Awkward.
Do the philosophes question their methods? No. Of course not.
In fact, Voltaire, who started out quipping that "The Infante of Parma will be in good company. He will have a Condillac and a Leire (a renowned atheist) with him. If he still manages to be pious, God's grace must be very strong indeed," ends up saying, "I hoped for a little from the Infante, the Duke of Parma, considering the good education he had; but where there is no soul, education can do nothing either; I heard that this prince spends the day visiting monks and that his Austrian and superstitious wife will be in charge. O poor philosophy! what will become of you? Still, we must stand firm and fight to the end." (Emphasis Badinter's.)
According to Badinter, the philosophes never actually acknowledge the contradiction between the "tabula rasa" theory they've been espousing and their sudden belief that there's something in the child that cannot be shaped by a philosophe armed with the right methods.
Condillac writes a summary of "the course of study for the instruction of the prince of Parma" repeating what he said in the 1740s, before Ferdinand was even born. Much like Fritz digging out his anti-German pamphlet from Rheinsberg, Condillac's post-Ferdinand summary doesn't take into account anything that happened in the intervening decades, except to comment at the end that "There are thankless situations; there is a certain ground in which it is very difficult to lay the foundations: one may even make a mistake and the building collapses altogether."
But, you know. Carry on like nothing happened.
Diderot, of course has the luxury of claiming he believed in phrenology all along, and the anatomical differences in skulls and diaphragms show that there must be some inborn differences.
Mostly the philosophes just pretend Parma never happened. Certainly no one ever entertains the possibility that a different education would have produced a different child.
Except some people who meet Ferdinand and aren't fancy philosophes prove to have common sense. The French envoy tells Ferdinand, "If I'd been your tutor, I would have made you visit 6 churches a day once you started going through this phase," and Ferdinand laughs and admits that would have totally turned him off religion.
And MT's envoy has this opinion:
The Infante had a good character spoiled by his upbringing. "He has aptitudes of mind and understanding, but under the semblance of a brilliant upbringing these aptitudes have been spoiled and this understanding overwhelmed." He even credits him with an exceptional memory and "a great desire to learn." Instead of nurturing these talents, "he was forced by undignified methods to study diligently astronomy, navigation, and mathematics... He was smothered in history full of metaphysics... which he could not mentally digest. Hence his aversion to any kind of study and his flight from all diligence. The poisoning of his original respect for the two teachers by an extremely violent, deeply felt hatred has corrupted his heart. That taught him to be evasive and false."
The Marquesa de González said he admired the work of the philosophes, but this kind of workload is how you get a ten-year-old man and a twenty-year-old child. And sure enough, Ferdinand is taking heat in his twenties for childish pranks and wanting to play rather than work (heavy dose of classism here; it's the "lower-class" guards and servants who are teaching him these pranks).
And, of course, we've seen Isabella's opinion of his education when he was still a child.
So basically, the philosophes don't come off very well in this story.
How much of it was real anyway
There's also the question of how much of Ferdinand's precociousness when he was a kid was real. When he was being shown off to visitors, was he just prepped in advance and could only handle questions he'd been told to expect in advance? How much did he understand of what he was saying?
Contemporary accounts differed, and apparently we can't actually tell. He had some interest in literature and the sciences when he got older, was willing to be inoculated (I mean, his sister had just died of smallpox the year before, and his mother had died a few years before that), supported astronomy, etc. But he remained one of the most passionate supporters of the Church in the most throwback possible way.
Tsarevitch Alexei
Comparison of Ferdinand and Alexei
So that was Ferdinand of Parma, religious fanatic of the late 18th century. Earlier in the century, there was another child who got a brutal, modernizing upbringing and turned into a religious reactionary who wanted to turn the country back to the 17th century: the Tsarevitch Alexei.
Let us remember that Peter the Great set out to single-handedly bring Russia into the modern age at the turn of the 18th century. Let us also remember that his first wife was sent to a nunnery so he could marry Lithuanian peasant Marta, future Catherine I, and that Alexei was the product of the first marriage. This is going to shape his sympathies somewhat. There are two parties in Russia: the ones who support Peter's Westernizing efforts, and the "OMG WTF are you doing Peter???!" that used to carry around their forcibly shaven off beards in their pockets so that on Judgment Day, they could show God that they had never willingly been separated from their beard. So reactionary, is what I'm saying.
It's worth noting here that there were similarly two parties in Parma: the French party, that leaned toward the Enlightenment, and the Italian party, the reactionaries. Ferdinand's mother was French, and his Spanish father was apparently on board with the more modern and liberal approach to education too. Ferdinand himself liked hanging out with Italians, both the ultra-conservative clergy, and the servants and soldiers, who were inclined to a more "simple" faith that the philosophes looked down on. As noted, I suspect these were the people who were NICE to him. And I suspect the same was true to a certain extent for Alexei.
Now, unlike Ferdinand, I'm not aware that Alexei's tutor was awful to him. His tutor, at least according to the essay I read, seems to have relatively little time and influence on him. My impression was that if anyone was awful, it was his father Peter, and in much the same way as FW: he wanted to be the fun friendly dad, but when he realized his life's work was going to be destroyed, he got harder and harder on the kid. And Peter expected his son to have 1) his commitment to a life of service to the state, 2) his exact superhuman levels of energy for physical activity. Much like FW, he could not cope with his child being different from him.
The tutor wanted to teach Alexei book learning and proper behavior, but Peter kept pulling Alexei away from him to come join Peter at the army and do practical things. And Menshikov, who is basically Peter's Old Dessauer, supposedly undermined all the tutor's efforts to teach Alexei anything, because Menshikov didn't want the heir to the throne being a threat to him after Peter died, Menshikov wanted to continue being the powerful favorite. (Selena could have told him what his odds were.) Now, I don't know that this is true, but this is what the essay author said contemporaries said about Menshikov.
What *was* similar between Alexei and Ferdinand was that the tutor wrote letters to all the publishers in Europe about how Alexei's education was coming, so they could publish his updates in newspapers and books for the reading public, and the answer to how the education was coming was always "just swimmingly." While at the same time, writing Alexei letters about how he'd better shape up and learn to behave himself, because character defaults were harder to correct the older you got.
I was particularly struck by the tutor's criticism of the "grimaces" Alexei always made, and how he should have a relaxed, natural, pleasant facial expression. Isn't that exactly what FW wrote to young Fritz in one of his diatribes?
[
selenak: Indeed it is, and given FW was early on raised by Danckelmann's choice of tutor before SC had her showdown with Danckelmann, and that the tutor was a Danckelmann buddy, chances are "don't make grimaces" were a Prussian dogma. This said, probably not just Prussian. Looking gracious, pleasant, relaxed in most unnatural circumstances as court etiquette inevitably produces was a constant ideal for royals to live up to in that century.]Anyway, apparently if you look at the state of his actual education and the claims that were being published in western European countries, there was a big discrepancy. So exactly like Ferdinand.
Unlike Ferdinand, I don't have evidence that the intellectual education was super burdensome...but his father's idea of how much energy he should have for being exactly like Peter was definitely burdensome, and I suspect the Russian reactionary party, and his mother's people, and his mother when he got to see her, were much more chill. And we know that Peter drank a lot, had a vicious temper, was over 2 meters tall, and was physically violent with pretty much everyone.
So it's really not all that hard to see how Alexei got driven into a reactionary camp just like Ferdinand.
Addendum on Alexei's tutor
I don't actually know that the tutor *wasn't* awful to Alexei too, I'm just presuming innocence until he's proven guilty. What I do know about him may be of some interest to salon:
His name was Heinrich von Huyssen. He was a Protestant German from Essen (western Germany, near the Rhine). He had close ties to "Severus Snape" Danckelmann and went to university with his sons, ad he'd hoped for a position in Brandenburg, but after Danckelmann's fall in 1697, all doors were closed to him in Brandenburg. So when Peter the Great started recruiting Westerners to help modernize Russia at the turn of the century, Huyssen was all in. His application was passed to Peter by none other than Johann Patkul, whom you may remember as the guy who helped convince Peter and August the Strong to go to war against Karl XII and set off the Great Northern War, and who was brutally tortured and executed when Karl got his hands on him. That incident inspired Manteuffel to write a diatribe against monarchs.
So Patkul recommends Huyssen to Peter, Huyssen gets to come to Russia, and his initial jobs are:
1. Help recruit more Westerners!
2. Translate Peter's "come join my country!" manifest into Western languages and get them printed in the West.
3. Convince Western publishers to dedicate their books to Peter and Alexei for the good PR.
4. Improve the postal service between Russia and the West.
If you are sensing a theme here, it is indeed the driving theme of Peter's life and the thing that his son ended up being a reactionary against.
Then Peter's like, "Well, I had to fire the last German tutor I had for Alexei, but I'm sure as hell not letting my heir be raised by a Russian tutor, so how about you?"
Huyssen: "How about no? Menshikov is going to fuck this up for me. You should put him in charge and not hold me responsible for the outcome."
Peter: "No, you'll do fine, I have full confidence in you! P.S. Do everything Menshikov says."
Huyssen: *facepalm*
Menshikov: *after years of undermining Huyssen, apparently finally gets him sent on diplomatic missions to Berlin and Vienna, far, far away from Alexei*
Then Huyssen comes back, but no time for book learning, it's time to take Alexei on a grand tour and arrange an unhappy marriage with him to a princess from Brunswick! Then he's officially an adult and doesn't need a tutor any more.
Huyssen continues working for Peter in various capacities until Peter's death; then his star falls. Finally, he wants to go home, but like Suhm, he sets out sick and dies on the way.
Sources
Der Infant von Parma: oder Die Ohnmacht der Erziehung, a monograph by Elisabeth Badinter, whom
selenak reminded me was the author who once wrote a biography of MT without learning German. So, you know, grain of salt about her scholarship, but at least this one isn't set in Germany. (There's not a lot of Italian in her bibliography, but a little.)"Heinrich von Huyssen (1666–1739) als Hofmeister des russischen Thronfolgers Aleksej", an essay by Svetlana Korzun, in the collection of essays Die Flucht des Thronfolgers Aleksej: Krise in der „Balance of Power“ und den österreichisch-russischen Beziehungen am Anfang des 18 Jahrhunderts," edited by Iskra Schwarz. I was hoping for more on the flight of the crown prince Alexei from this collection, but it's more about the crisis in the balance of power and Austrian-Russian relations at the beginning of the 18th century. So a lot of stuff I already knew.
Johann Friedrich Struensee: Arzt, Aufklärer und Staatsmann; Beitrag zur Kultur-, Medizin- und Seuchengeschichte der Aufklärungszeit, a book by Stefan Winkle.
