Tim Blanning, Frederick the Great: King of Prussia (New York: Random House, 2016), 688 pp., $35.00.

NAPOLEON SWIFTLY conquered Prussia in October 1806, inflicting crushing defeats at Jena and Auerstedt that humbled a realm long known for its military tradition. A bulletin announcing news of the two battles described them as expunging the fifty-year stain left by Frederick the Great’s victory over a French army at Rossbach in 1757. When he visited Frederick the Great’s tomb with a group of his generals, Napoleon purportedly instructed them, “hats off gentlemen, if he were alive we wouldn’t be here today.”

The story captures the power Frederick’s reputation held. Nathanael Greene, George Washington’s most successful subordinate during the American Revolution, considered Frederick “the greatest general of the age.” Washington himself placed a bust of Frederick at Mount Vernon alongside Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great. British officers also took his campaigns in the Seven Years’ War as an authoritative guide to the military art. Frederick’s use of rapid maneuver to concentrate force anticipated Napoleonic warfare. His victories made Prussia a great power and ensured Frederick’s later emergence as an icon of German nationalism.

Tim Blanning’s outstanding biography, Frederick the Great: King of Prussia, offers a new perspective on a familiar story. Joining appreciation of eighteenth-century culture with insight on war and diplomacy, Blanning emphasizes the contingencies that shaped Frederick’s life. Like the realm he so carefully developed, Frederick himself was a product of his own effort and imagination. Determined to spite his brutal, militaristic father by surpassing him in the sphere the old king valued most, Frederick embarked on policies that upended the balance of power. The soldier, aesthete and enlightened monarch was, at heart, Blanning shows, a gambler playing for the highest stakes. A taste for risk set Frederick’s course from the start.

Having acquired the Electorate of Brandenburg in 1415, the Hohenzollern family later gained Prussia and other territories across North Germany. Their realm lacked geographic cohesion or defensible frontiers. Even at Frederick’s accession, other states divided provinces in western Germany from the core region of Brandenburg-Prussia. Vulnerability made the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), when the electorate lost between 40 and 50 percent of its population, a near-death experience. Preferring to be predator rather than prey, the “great elector” Frederick William built a standing army that reached thirty-one thousand by his death in 1688 and a tax system to finance it. His son Frederick became “King in Prussia” in 1701. King “in” rather than “of” Prussia because West Prussia remained under Polish suzerainty, but Prussia rather than Brandenburg since its position outside the Holy Roman Empire made it unquestionably a sovereign possession. Small details mattered.

Institutions compensated for Prussia’s weakness by enabling its rulers to exploit what they had while striving for more. The Hohenzollerns carefully managed their own domains to draw income while extending crown influence through leaseholders who sublet the royal properties they oversaw. Military service made nobles crown servants, not members of an independent elite whose privilege rested on landed wealth. Cadet schools provided a good education and a path into an army career often followed by civilian administrative offices. Blanning argues that it made Prussia’s landed class “partners in autocracy” with their kings. The partnership gave Prussia the most effective local government in Europe and kept nobles from resisting or rivaling their king.

Whereas most countries had an army, in Prussia the army had a country. The quip reflected a recruiting system based on cantons that made it possible to conscript a large portion of eligible men and then release them back to civilian life after training and brief active service. Ferocious discipline, constant drill and innovations in weapons and tactics made Prussian troops highly effective. The cantonal system also provided a trained reserve to expand the army and replace losses. Its lists included a quarter of the population, enabling the army to recruit two-thirds of its soldiers domestically. Prussia’s eighty-thousand-man army in 1740, Blanning notes, outstripped that of Spain, the Dutch Republic and Sweden and placed it in the top rank of European military powers.

For all its advantages, Prussia was hardly the force it later became. Saxony was the most advanced and prosperous German principality, enjoying greater prestige than its neighbor. Bavaria and other states also carried significant weight. The balance among the German states mattered as much or more for Prussia than the wider European system. Knowledge that Prussia eventually triumphed, Blanning quite rightly insists, “should not obscure the contemporary possibility of quite a different outcome.” Prussia’s strengths stand out more in retrospect.

FREDERICK AND his father represented an especially ill-matched pair even by eighteenth-century Europe’s standards of spectacular generational conflicts. King Frederick William built an army he chose not to use despite his passion for all things military. Constant physical suffering caused by porphyria, the disease that afflicted Britain’s George III, shaped the way he forced his sensitive, aesthetically inclined heir into the same mold. An upbringing that amounted to sustained abuse transformed Frederick into a soldier without tempering his other enthusiasms or inculcating the devout Protestantism his father espoused. Blanning deftly captures the psychological trauma inflicted by episodes that included watching his best friend’s execution for aiding an attempt to escape his father’s court. Frederick only survived by melding outward obedience to his father with internal resistance by a self-fashioning that only flourished after he gained the throne in 1740.

As Blanning cleverly observes, “if the old block is hit hard enough, the chip is liable to spin off in unpredictable directions.” Beside the material legacy of a powerful army, efficient government and a treasury that could finance war without borrowing or new taxes, Frederick William left his son “a psychological burden of corresponding magnitude.” Frederick responded by attempting to surpass his father “in the royal métiers that mattered most—war and conquest.” Foreign observers expected Frederick to begin with a spectacular stroke, even at the risk of receiving one himself. Frederick saw his chance when the Habsburg Emperor Charles VI left his realm to a daughter, Maria Theresa, who lacked the military or financial means to protect it. European history’s “most famous smash-and-grab raid” followed in December as Frederick’s army captured the rich Habsburg province of Silesia.

Frederick had gambled that Austria would cut a deal accepting the loss of a province it could neither defend nor recover. Maria Theresa and her ministers determined instead to drive him out. Frederick’s victory at Mollwitz in 1741 proved costly, largely from his own inexperience, but it decided Silesia’s fate. The battle also unleashed the War of Austrian Succession. France joined the struggle against its Habsburg rival to partition Maria Theresa’s inheritance and form a balance in Germany that favored its interests. Blanning aptly describes it as “Napoleon’s plan for Central Europe sixty years early.” Not surprisingly, Maria Theresa blamed Frederick and thirsted for revenge. In his essay “Frederic the Great,” Macaulay wrote,

To recover Silesia, to humble the dynasty of Hohenzollern to the dust, was the great object of her life. . . . Nothing would content her but that the whole civilised world, from the White Sea to the Adriatic, from the Bay of Biscay to the pastures of the wild horses of the Tanais, should be combined in arms against one petty state.

The war raises questions over Frederick’s ability as a general. How effectively did he use the tools he inherited? Along with the ability to learn from setbacks and remedy shortcomings exposed in battle, Frederick showed “a capacity for taking decisions and an iron resolution in seeing them through.” Audacity and a thirst for decisive victory made him reckless, a pattern that continued throughout his career. Unity of command that joined civilian and military authority in his hands gave Frederick advantages his adversaries lacked. It also made him the pivotal decider and amplified the consequence of his mistakes. Especially when he ignored advice from subordinates, errors made successes more costly than necessary. When gambles worked, as they often did, Frederick gained more credit than he deserved. His brother Henry remarked angrily on the king’s tendency to ignore vital contributions by more able subordinates. The myth of Frederick’s genius obscured the more complex reality that Blanning draws into focus.

Renewed fighting in 1744 tested Frederick’s resolve. He struck first before a Habsburg-led bloc of German princes, joined by Britain and Sardinia, could act. Things went badly wrong after early gains. Frederick admitted in his memoirs that no general committed more faults than he did over the ensuing campaign. The Austrians avoided battle, denying Frederick the chance for the decisive engagement he needed as supplies dwindled and winter approached. France quit the fight as Frederick’s ally. Bavaria sought peace with Vienna. Frederick reorganized his own forces, determining “either to maintain my position of power or to see everything perish and be buried with me right down to the very name of Prussia.” A hard-fought victory at Schweidnitz in June 1745 saw him regain the initiative. Frederick later escaped disaster at Soor, where the Austrians nearly caught him off guard. Defeating Saxony and occupying its capital at Dresden forced Maria Theresa to accept that she could not solve the problem Frederick presented through war. Survival while retaining Silesia amounted to victory for Frederick, who had won Prussia a place in European politics.

PEACE OPENED a different field to Frederick’s competitive spirit. Blanning emphasizes culture’s eighteenth-century political role as an expression of power and prestige. Inheriting a fortune in ready cash gave Frederick ample scope. He built Europe’s first freestanding opera house in Berlin as a temple to Apollo and the muses. The musicians, composers and performers he recruited set Prussia on the cultural map, drawing praise that further enhanced his reputation as patron. He argued for music’s centrality to a true nobleman’s existence, calling it “unique in its ability to communicate emotions and speak to the soul.” Frederick’s patronage foreshadowed a characteristically German sacralization of culture. Freed from representational or recreational function, high culture could be worshipped in itself. Before that later trend peaked in the nineteenth century, high culture expressed the magnificence and wealth of courts. It provided a potent tool for statecraft.

Frederick also worked to create “an Arcadian world in which he could recover from his father’s brutality.” Blanning deftly tackles a long controversial issue—Frederick’s homosexuality. Besides spurning a wife forced upon him, Frederick presided over a male-dominated court that kept women at a distance. Homosexuality found expression in misogyny that undermined his diplomacy. It also reinforced his veneration of Greco-Roman classicism. His contempt for religion as superstition contrasted sharply with the piety of the age. Frederick resembled his sometime-friend Voltaire on that score more than Maria Theresa and Britain’s George III.

Enlightenment complemented Prussian traditions of duty rooted in Pietism, a religious movement that shaped the kingdom’s culture. It also kept favoritism at court from corrupting the state. Frederick followed an authoritarian interpretation of social-contract theory. He believed an irrevocable and unconditional grant of sovereignty on leaving the state of nature gave subjects no right of resistance. Still, rulers had a binding obligation to serve the interest of the whole. Frederick demanded obedience to law, which he followed himself. Rather than glorifying a ruler, policy strengthened the state. That approach systematically enhanced an already-formidable military and cultivated the kingdom’s resources.

Frederick believed the social contract limited the absolute powers of kingship and prevented the arbitrary exercise of power. While he insisted on retaining an anachronistic degree of personal control over administration and treated people in a notably dictatorial manner, he did not interfere with private belief. Religious skepticism—contemporaries would have called it infidelity—fostered public toleration. Frederick even sponsored the building of Catholic churches in a Protestant realm. Enlightened progress became an early keynote of his reign, and Blanning sharply contrasts the “seductive combination of culture and power” with the tone of other German courts. It attracted many capable and ambitious men to become Prussians by choice, as they saw Frederick’s realm as a state worth serving.

PRUSSIA STILL remained a target. Losing Silesia had diminished Austrian power as much as it strengthened Prussia. Other rulers noted how the balance had changed within Germany. A poor diplomat, Frederick displayed a haughty manner reminiscent of Louis XIV at his height. He mocked foreign rulers and statesmen privately, with the sarcastic cattiness turned on his subjects. If the wit of the staircase describes a person remembering a clever retort only after they walk away, Frederick had what might be called the tact of the staircase, as he failed to appreciate the offense his jibes inflicted. Louis XV’s mistress resented them enough to help turn France against him. Frederick’s efforts to keep Germany out of a renewed overseas war by a limited defensive agreement with Britain only alarmed other powers. The French saw it as final proof he could not be trusted. A reversal of alliances came with a defensive agreement in May 1756 between France and Austria. Frederick now stood isolated as Vienna prepared for war.

Geopolitical realities and structural changes within Europe framed the context for the diplomacy leading to the Seven Years’ War (1754–63). Overseas tensions, particularly in North America, heightened the prospect of a war in ways Frederick did not see. Indeed, a smoldering determination in Britain and its American colonies to settle scores with France paralleled Maria Theresa’s desire for revenge against Frederick. Austria and Britain had different interests that made cooperation less relevant than when they had joined earlier to check French ambitions under Louis XIV. France had slipped into relative decline, living on the prestige of past victories. It could not mobilize the country’s wealth as effectively as the British. Austria had less to fear from a quondam rival, especially after the French failed to form an eastern barrier out of Sweden, Poland and Turkey. Russia’s emergence as a European power alongside Prussia, but with interests apart from it, also shifted the balance of power. Maria Theresa and her advisors had an opening to form a coalition against Prussia while Frederick had few options of his own.

Anticipating the imminent threat against him, Frederick launched a preemptive strike against Saxony in August 1756, activating France’s alliance with Vienna. The stakes could not have been higher. Prince Kaunitz, Austria’s foreign minister, had asserted the previous year “that Prussia would have to be destroyed if the Habsburg Monarchy were to survive.” Europe’s largest continental powers—Austria, France and Russia—aided by Sweden and most of the German states accordingly fought to partition Prussia. Frederick approached “the very brink of total disaster.” He emerged “in muted triumph only after six and a half long years of constant danger and anxiety.”

Survival against such odds amounted to victory. But what landed him in that predicament? Blanning calls Frederick’s invasion of Silesia in 1740 “his original sin, for which no amount of suffering could atone.” A step taken to convey his superiority to an abusive father who never would have dared it had landed Frederick in the top level of European politics. It also ensured the enmity of rivals who spent the following decades trying to beat him. Blanning quotes Talleyrand’s famous line, “it was worse than a crime, it was a mistake.” Frederick could never escape the mistake’s consequences. Heroic efforts during the Seven Years’ War conferred his reputation as a skilled strategist and general. Victory overshadowed slips and setbacks along the way, but Frederick had a far more mixed record in command than contemporaries or many later historians credited.

Frederick planned in 1756 to invade Saxony, cross into Bohemia with little opposition, occupy Prague and thus compel Austria to settle for peace. Saxon resistance delayed him long enough for an Austrian force to bring aid. Frederick won a costly, close-fought victory at Lobositz when the Austrians withdrew, but the battle showed they were not the same opponent he had beaten so many times before. Reforms had made the Austrian army more effective. More experienced commanders now led it. Instead of occupying Bohemia and denying the Austrians its resources, Frederick had to make do with Saxony as a winter base.

Hoping to knock Austria out of the war in 1757 and free his army to face looming attacks on Prussia from all sides, Frederick invaded Bohemia in April. His tactics—deploying his main field army in four divisions across a hundred mile front and concentrating them before Prague—presaged Napoleonic warfare. It did not, however, win a Napoleonic victory. Frederick’s errors at Kolin brought a complete defeat that shattered his reputation along with his army. Success would have forced Austria into a peace and kept other adversaries at home, but defeat transformed a war of movement that played to Prussian strengths into a struggle of attrition that worked against them.

Frederick had to keep Austria and France from concentrating their forces against him. He met a French army reinforced by Austrian and German troops at Rossbach that outnumbered his own strength nearly two to one. Both sides miscalculated, but Frederick realized his error first. The ability of Prussian troops to move rapidly enabled him to spring a trap that inflicted a crushing defeat. Rossbach had serious long-term consequences for France, undermining its influence in Germany and exposing deeper weaknesses. Frederick won prestige and security on his western frontier merely to face other threats. Even a stunning victory over Austria at Leuthen only staunched the bleeding. Losing would have finished Frederick; winning restored his reputation. But it did not shift the larger balance. A failed campaign ended Frederick’s final attempt to invade the Habsburg monarchy.

As the allies failed to act together effectively in the last three campaigns, Frederick could face them one after the other. He realized, however, that they now intended to act simultaneously. With enemies converging on four fronts, Frederick had to strike each “quickly and repeatedly” lest they combine to overwhelm him. His determination to win at Kunersdorf in August 1759 brought a crushing defeat by the Russians when he pressed his exhausted troops too far, despite his generals’ objections. Delay would have forced the enemy to retreat without an attack, but Frederick gambled on outright victory and lost. The Prussian army crumbled under a counterattack, leaving nothing to stop their opponents from joining the Austrians and marching on Berlin. Setbacks posed danger on other fronts as Frederick struggled to hold Saxony and Silesia.

The pivotal moment came on August 15, 1760, at Liegnitz, a battle Frederick could not afford to lose. Defeat would have been more catastrophic than at Kunersdorf. Instead, Frederick coerced a much larger Austrian force into retreat after a short, sharp engagement. Liegnitz broke an almost-two-year-long pattern of defeats, saving Prussian morale and Frederick’s prestige. The Austrians and Russians knew they had lost their best chance to end the war swiftly and they never regained the strategic initiative.

Frederick won enough battles to avoid defeat until the coalition against him broke apart. Russia defected when Peter III, who admired Frederick, became czar. France opened negotiations with Britain, and Austria finally realized it could not defeat Prussia alone. The Treaty of Hubertusburg ended hostilities on the basis of the status quo antebellum, which effectively confirmed Frederick’s earlier gains. As a shrewd Dane remarked, by not losing Frederick had gained everything he sought. The double-or-nothing gamble started in 1740 and ended with Frederick keeping Silesia in 1763. It transformed Germany by establishing dualism within the Holy Roman Empire, with Prussia alongside the Habsburg monarchy as a garrison state in the north that could hold the balance among Europe’s great powers.

The Seven Years’ War taught a lesson, as the more cautious policies that followed it suggest. Frederick later told a British visitor that war for such high stakes was not a game to be played often. Instead, force backed diplomatic efforts to build on past gains. He maneuvered among the other great powers to secure advantages and deflect threats. Carving up Poland to resolve differences between Russia, Prussia and Austria also rounded out Prussian borders. Frederick justified it to Voltaire—sincerely or otherwise—as necessary for avoiding war. When Austria sought to annex Bavaria, the now elderly poacher turned gamekeeper, rallying German states to resist a step that would have shifted the balance of power within Germany to Habsburg advantage. The short War of Bavarian Succession (1778–79) cost more money than lives and concluded without major fighting when rulers of the continental powers drew back from a protracted struggle. It also revealed a shortfall in the Prussian army’s effectiveness that pointed to future dangers. Frederick died in 1786 before their impact could be felt.

BLANNING DESCRIBES Frederick as “an indifferent general but a brilliant warlord.” The king’s “indomitable will and ruthless determination to keep going no matter how desperate the situation” carried him through the most dangerous setbacks of two wars. Frederick’s army and the generals commanding it—along with institutions of the Prussian state—deserve more credit for the result than they received. Success brought lasting acclaim. While German nationalism emerged much later, Blanning points out how Frederick’s victories anchored it in a heroic episode that gave a powerful twist toward Prussia. Victory against France, resistance to the Habsburgs and recovering from seemingly insuperable setbacks forged a narrative that influenced German history no less than Frederick’s accomplishments at home and abroad.

The narrative also made Frederick’s Prussia the standard of military best practice, especially among soldiers who shared his commitment to the offensive. It provided an attractive alternative to the prudential art of war taught by much of the period’s professional literature. The spirit of Frederick’s campaigns inspired. The substance of his approach matched new ideas on strategy that emerged before the French Revolution—hence the prestige Frederick enjoyed. The collection of his artifacts that Napoleon carried to Paris for public display, Blanning writes, demonstrated the importance the French emperor set on defeating Prussia. Ironically, Frederick’s example and legacy also set the foundation for a national revival that enabled Prussia to contribute disproportionately to the final coalition against France in 1813–15. The Prussia he had shaped again sprang back against the odds to help beat Napoleon at his own game.

William Anthony Hay, an associate professor of history at Mississippi State University, has recently completed a biography of Lord Liverpool, Britain’s prime minister in the early nineteenth century.

image: Portrait of Frederick the Great/Wikimedia Commons