Augustus the Strong (1670-1733), Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, is often labelled one of the worst monarchs in European history. His reign is billed by Tim Blanning’s publishers as ‘a study in failed statecraft, showing how a ruler can shape history as much by incompetence as brilliance’. Yet this thorough and often hilarious study of Augustus’s life and times reveals these harsh headline words to be exaggerated. Indeed the man comes across as quite a good egg, as much sinned against as sinning. With disarming immodesty, Augustus described himself as:
A lively fellow, carefree, showing from a young age that he was blessed with a strong body, a robust constitution, an amiable, generous disposition, equipped with everything that makes up an honourable man, more devoted to physical exercise than book learning and a born soldier.
Compared with his psychotic contemporaries, the violent incel Charles XII of Sweden and the enthusiastic amateur dentist Peter the Great of Russia, I’d take Augustus’s bumbling ineptitude over alleged greatness any day.
In the maelstrom of 17th-century Europe, Augustus bobbed around helplessly like a plastic duck
Augustus was, by turns, a mid-ranking military incompetent, an averagely vain spendthrift and a moderate libertine. The great political project of his life – the reckless purchase of the crown of Poland – did indeed prove, in his own words, ‘a crown of thorns’. By the time of his death he left the Polish polity so damaged that it would disappear as an independent state until the 20th century. On the other hand, his public relations were effective – at least to the extent that his sobriquet, ‘the Strong’, based on a fiction of physical strength and sexual athleticism, stuck. And his insatiable desire to show off, combined with driving energy, exquisite taste and considerable resources, led to the creation of the baroque jewel of Dresden, his Saxon capital.
The nutshell version of his life was the unexpected smallpox-related inheritance of Saxony from an elder brother; rounds of Grand Touring that included trips to Versailles, Madrid, Venice and London; some inept experiments in military leadership on campaign against the Turks; the mad, impulsive bid for the vacant crown of Poland; and several bouts of beat-downs by the great bullies of the age, Peter the Great and Charles XII. ‘In this turbulent maelstrom embracing almost all of Europe, Augustus bobbed about helplessly like a plastic duck,’ writes Blanning. He was ‘often submerged, but never quite sunk’.
Of these adventures and misadventures it was Augustus’s early exposure to Louis XIV’s Versailles that left the greatest mark on history. In Blanning’s thought-provoking formulation, the glittering French court was ‘representational’, because its ‘raison d’être was the re-presentation (in the sense of “making present”) of the power, glory, wealth and legitimacy of the patron’. And it was this coupling of personal display and political power that served as the wellspring of Augustus’s makeover of Dresden as the ultimate Residenzstadt, or courtly city.
Like his father, Augustus was a pious libertine – ‘a combination which is an oxymoron, not a contradiction in terms’, the author wittily observes. His mistresses numbered not 354, as his propagandists suggested, but a mere eight (insists the killjoy Blanning). In an age which ‘did not just allow or encourage but positively privileged exhibitionism, narcissism, self-indulgence and sensualism’, Augustus was no shirk. At an ‘après manoeuvre’ party for the Order of the White Eagle, which he founded in 1705, a specially built theatre featured ‘three castrati and two female sopranos hired from Venice, Italian comedies and ballets’. There were also firework displays, hunting and ‘sumptuous banquets’. A cake was baked using a ton of flour, 305 litres of milk and 3,600 eggs. The resulting prodigy of patisserie was 18 metres long and required eight horses for its transportation. ‘As usual with Augustus, there were no half-measures.’
Fatefully, Augustus brought equal energy and panache to bear on the worst decision of his life – the impulsive and inexplicable bid to become King of Poland in 1696. Hereditary monarchy in that era proved a terrible way to organise human affairs. But the Polish expedient of an elective monarchy seemed to have been even worse.
The Polish electors included every hereditary noble in the country – approximately 7 per cent of the population. In the previous century, the title of King of Poland had essentially been sold off to whoever was able to bribe this aristocracy most generously. Louis XIV briefly considered offering as a candidate the recently deposed James II of England, who had been moping about, irritatingly, at Versailles. Instead, he settled on his kinsman Prince François Louis de Conti, providing a million livres to grease the necessary palms.
Undaunted, Augustus pawned not only great swathes of Saxon lands to various neighbours but also the crown jewels to his usefully well-connected court Jew (Hoffjude, a real title) Berend Lehmann. He also got the Jesuits onside by converting from Lutheranism to Catholicism. (When later admonished by his confessor for spiritual laxity, Augustus put the Jesuit’s proffered rosary on his pet dog’s neck.)
Tens of thousands of Polish nobles who gathered for the election in a field outside Krakow received IOUs from the French representatives and duly voted for Conti. Overnight, however, Lehmann toured the site with a cartload containing 40,000 gold thalers. Preferring specie to scrip, the next day’s vote turned decisively in Augustus’s favour. Though both candidates’ representatives celebrated masses, Augustus was quicker off the mark in terms of actually showing up in his new kingdom, which he had never visited before.
Poland was then the largest country in Europe (not counting Muscovy, as contemporaries did not), and its Ukrainian provinces were a vast breadbasket. But it was also the most sparsely populated, and its tax revenues were a tiny fraction of France’s. In truth, being King of Poland was among the worst monarchical jobs going. The nobles believed themselves to be descended from Noah’s most virtuous son, Japheth. The mass of the population, on the other hand, were held to be descendants of Ham, the degenerate son who saw his father’s nakedness and was cursed: ‘A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren.’
Biblical theories of social class were by no means the strangest feature of Polish political practice. Voting in the biannual parliament, or Sejm, had to be unanimous. A single vote could end the proceedings immediately and annul any laws or taxation hitherto approved. The fundamental governing principle after 1505 was nihil novi (nothing new). The Duchess of Orléans, better known as Liselotte of the Palatinate, observed:
Augustus would have been a thousand times happier if he had gone on enjoying a quiet and peaceful life as Elector of Saxony instead of becoming king of such a factious and volatile nation of which he will never be the absolute lord and master but will only ever be king in name.
So why did he do it? The sources can merely provide superficial answers. Blanning writes: ‘All his life, Augustus was a keen but inept risk-taker, a gambler who always called va banque! and always raised when he should have folded.’ But his decision to seek the throne of Poland was ‘a terrible mistake… one wager that brought him nothing but stress, privation, disappointment and misery’.
Polish armies had occupied Stockholm in 1598 and Moscow in 1610; in 1683 the Polish king Jan Sobieski had led the relief of the Ottoman Siege of Vienna. But by the outbreak of the Great Northern War in February 1700, armaments were in steep decline and Augustus’s troops were no match for the rising superpowers of Prussia, Russia and Sweden.
This generally splendid book does go wrong in places. Augustus never quite emerges as a three-dimensional character and remains a preening product of the court culture of his times. The narrative also goes a little deeper into 17th-century Polish economic history than the general reader might like, and the chart on the ‘Growth of Latin-rite monasteries 1600-1772/3’ is maybe point of information too far. In all, though, it is an engaging portrait of a man whose achievement in making Dresden one of the great civilised centres of the age qualifies him for a kind of greatness. And he could have been greater still ‘if the millions of thalers squandered in the fruitless pursuit of dynastic and territorial gain had been freed for investment in Saxony’, notes Blanning.
The thought leads to an interesting historical counter-factual. In the end it was the militaristic Prussia created by Frederick the Great that shaped Germany’s future in the following century and beyond. But if Augustus had avoided his foolish Polish adventure, might intellectual, baroque, humanistic Saxony have come to dominate the destiny of the German lands instead? We shall never know.
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