Thou shalt not commit adultery: On this chapter there would be much to say with reference to the German and other princes, but firstly old Vehse in his History of the German Courts has already sufficiently elaborated this chapter. The whole 40-odd volumes contain hardly anything but princely adultery stories. And then one must ask, why should one hold against a prince a forbidden pleasure that every philistine allows himself with impunity and without embarrassment? If there are emperors who have passed on syphilis to their wives (F[ranz] J[oseph] of Austr[ia]), there are likewise aristocrats, bourgeois and even petty bourgeois enough who can boast of the same heroic deed. And besides, long before the French Revolution, not all princes went as mad as the old Margrave of Baden-Durlach, who had some hundred and thirty of the most beautiful maidens rounded up or bought, shut them up in his harem on the Bleiberg near Durlach, and there also kept a corporal who, in the event of insubordination or other disciplinary offences on the part of the fair ones, counted out for them the well-known 25 strokes.

Yet in this respect, too, the great Hohenzollern Frederick II made an honourable exception. A man, he said to himself, can commit adultery only with the help of a woman. If therefore I take a man instead of a woman, I am not committing adultery.

Slander, base slander, cries the worthy Prussian. That was a lie of the infamous godless Voltaire! — Let us hear.

Herr Dr. Anton Friedr. Büsching, “Royal Prussian Senior Consistorial Counsellor, Director of the United Berlin and Cologne Gymnasium and of its Schools”, had a work printed in Hamburg in 1790: Reliable Contributions to the History of the Reign of King Frederick II of Prussia etc., which book is “respectfully dedicated to my gracious Lord and Patron”, Minister Frederick II’s and Frederick William II’s Count Hertzberg, and thus surely may contain only matters that were agreeable to the government. In a historical appendix to this book  the Consistorial Counsellor crosses swords with the well-known Hanoverian physician Dr Zimmermann (“On Solitude”), and there says, on p. 20: “I expressed myself (in an earlier work) as briefly, cautiously and carefully as possible when I wrote: the King, by avoiding intercourse with women, lost much sensual pleasure, but procured the same for himself again through intercourse with male persons.” No, says Zimmermann, “the cause of his intimate intercourse with certain male persons” was another — a piece was missing. And thereupon the Consistorial Counsellor, solemnly and with the utmost indignation, has the physician who cleansed the King’s corpse certify that indeed no piece was missing and that the matter of the intercourse with male persons therefore stands in full correctness.

How early and how generally this non-adultery of the King was known in his day is proved not only by the satirical poem on him that Choiseul sent to Voltaire in 1759, which ends with the words:

Peux-tu condamner la tendresse,
Toi, qui n’en as connu l’ivresse
Que dans les bras de tes tambours?

An earlier example from the year 1745 is furnished by Trenck’s Memoirs, Vol. I, p. 36. “A lieutenant of the Foot Guards, who was at the same time a public Ganymede, … attacked me on account of my secret love with gibes. I called him an et cetera — we went for our swords and I gave him a cut in the face. At the church parade on the Sunday immediately following this occurrence, the King said to me in passing: Sir, thunder and lightning will strike his heart, let him beware!”

Like a true philosopher, Frederick founded a school. The King of Sweden, Gustavus III, was his sister’s son. Of him, a Swedish count’s manuscript used by Schlosser says: “Sodomy was unknown in Sweden until his time.” (Schlosser, History of the 18th Century, 4th ed., III, p. 134.)

Prince Henry, the brother of Frederick II, seems to have been no less teachable. “I have lived to see,” writes Mirabeau, Secret History of the Court of Berlin, German edition of 1789, vol. II, p. 69, “how a former servant of Prince Henry, by his skill in serving his master’s boy-love, first became a kind of favourite, and afterwards however a canon in Magdeburg, where the Prince is provost.”

Frederick’s successor, Frederick William II, was already less embarrassed than his uncle. He took the wife into the bargain along with the man. Mirabeau, op. cit., II, p. 133, says: “Rietz (the King’s valet), the money-grubber, buffoon, and such a base fellow that the King,

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Thou shalt not commit adultery

when he was still Prince of Prussia, used him in the bed of his wife, who was his mistress, as a Ganymede”, etc.

Let us break off here, without for the present examining more closely whether subsequent Hohenzollerns committed adultery or not. But how clumsily our National Liberal Brauns, Kapps and consorts go about it! They cannot cry out loudly enough about the adulterous depravity of the petty German princes of the 18th century. They cannot, on the other hand, praise the virtue of the Hohenzollern stock to the skies enough. But they forget the main thing, namely: that at least of One of this stock, the

greatest, it is positively established that he kept the commandment inviolably: Thou shalt not

commit adultery.

Nota bene. So that you understand the story with the French poem correctly, here are the details: In 1759, during the Seven Years’ War,  when Voltaire was living near Geneva on Swiss territory, he received a package, broken open en route, containing manuscripts by Frederick II. Among them an Ode to the French, in which L[ouis] XV and La Pompadour were attacked

Quoi, votre faible monarque
Jouet de la Pompadour,
Flétri par plus d’une marque
Des opprobres de l’amour etc

After consultation with the French resident in Geneva, Voltaire, to protect himself from persecution, sent this ode, signed Frédéric, to the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Duc de Choiseul. The latter then sent him that reply ode, in which it said:

Jusque-là, censeur moins sauvage

Souffre l’innocent badinage

De la nature et des amours.

Peux-tu condamner la tendresse etc etc as above

Quoted in Voltaire, Mon séjour à Berlin, (to be had cheaply at the Bibliothèque Nationale, rue de Valois 2, Paris: Romans de Voltaire, vol. V. 1876: Histoire de Jenni etc etc. Mon séjour à Berlin costs 25 c.)

How little Frederick II minded the accusation of pederasty raised here in detail emerges from the following. The Berlin bookseller, who had received a number of copies of the Séjour à Berlin, had enquiry made of Frederick what was to be done with them. The latter answered, as far as he was concerned he could simply sell the book, it was all right with him if the man made a couple of talers by it (Schlosser, 18th cent.) This was in 1783, 5 years after Voltaire’s death had the thing appeared.