# Transcript

TONY LENTIN

Frederick the Great was absolute ruler of Prussia from 1740 to 1786 he was a devotee of the enlightenment and shared many of it’s values. He was he said a king by duty and a Philosoph by inclination.

Frederick was culturally speaking a Francophile. He described Voltaire’s Candide as the only novel one can read and re-read. He called himself the Philosoph of Sans Souse. Sans Souse was the name he gave to the Rococo Pleasure Palace at Potsdam outside Berlin. He designed the palace himself and lived there for almost half a century He was a copious writer on many themes central to the enlightenment, his works extend to many volumes.

Frederick corresponded regularly with Voltaire, D’Alembert and other philosophs. Both men were guests of the king and D’Alembert recorded his impressions.

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‘He talked to me about literature, philosophy, even politics and war and peace. I would need a whole volume to give you an idea of his conversation. All I can tell you is that the king impressed me as greater even than he is by reputation’

TONY LENTIN

Frederick championed the cause of science unlike Louis the fifteenth in France he had his people inoculated against smallpox. As he wrote.

‘Of a million people who have been inoculated at Berlin not one has died. ‘

Frederick was humanitarian but also a pragmatist. Under his brutal and unenlightened father Frederick William the first a mother found guilty of infanticide was sewn in a sack, thrown in a river and drowned. Frederick did away with all this. He tried to remove the stigma attached to unmarried mothers and provided maternity homes for them. It’s true that part of the impetus behind this humanitarian gesture was Prussia’s loss of men. Like the Philosoph’s Frederick admired classical antiquity, though he never left Germany to go on the grand tour.

In the grounds at Sans Souse Frederick erected statues of Roman Emperors. There were villains like the tyrannical Nero. But also heroes like Marcus Orealius whose stoic sense of duty he strove to emulate.

Frederick was attracted by aspects of non European culture, his interest in things Chinese finds expression in the Chinese Teahouse, which he’d put up in the park at Sans Souse. RPT Although he was nominally head of the Lutheran Church in Prussia, Frederick allowed complete freedom of religion. He wrote to Voltaire,

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‘You suppose that I think that the people needs the curb of religion in order to be controlled. I assure you these are not my sentiments. On the contrary, a society could not exist without laws but it could certainly exist without religion.

This is confirmed by the experiences of the savages discovered in the Maldives Islands who had not a metaphysical idea in their heads. It is proved still more by the government of China, where Deism is the religion of all the leading men of the state. ‘

TONY LENTIN

Of all the European monarchs of the late eighteenth century Frederick was undoubtedly the most enlightened. He was a powerful ally of Philosophs and one of the few rulers who put their thoughts into action.