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mildred_of_midgardSo 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 )
( Tsarevitch Alexei )
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 )
( Tsarevitch Alexei )
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.
