‘Augustus the Strong’ by Tim Blanning review

Although many of the potential readers of Tim Blanning’s latest book will not previously have heard of its hero – Augustus the Strong, elector of Saxony and king of Poland – they will no doubt expect much from its author. Blanning’s previous works – including, most recently, biographies of Frederick the Great and George I – have earned him an enviable reputation for conveying profound understanding with a memorable turn of phrase. Those who trust the author to entertain and educate will be rewarded from the very start as Blanning maps out the sorry trajectory of Augustus’ life (1670-1733): ‘Augustus of Saxony could have been a happy man. The accident of conception made him a member of the oldest and richest of all the princely families of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, placing in his mouth a spoon of unalloyed silver.’ But, 63 tumultuous years later, ‘as his gangrenous body sank towards oblivion’ and he confessed his life one of continuous sin, Augustus realised that gaining and regaining the spinous crown of Poland had not been worth the effort. Despite this, visitors to Dresden cannot fail to appreciate the artistic legacy of the ‘golden horseman’ defiantly rearing up at the end of the bridge that bears his name.

Blanning begins by guiding the reader along Augustus’ path to inheriting the wealthy Electorate of Saxony (‘the gilded cage’) in 1694. He then explains how and why Augustus became king of Poland in 1697. What follows is a portrait of Augustus’ often bewildering new realm (‘the iron cage’). Blanning lays greater emphasis on the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth’s intractability and vulnerability as a state assailed by multiple crises than on its underlying principles and potential as a civic republican community. The Great Northern War (1700-21) occupies the bulk of the book. Augustus foolishly picked a fight against his teenage first cousin, Charles XII of Sweden, after an epic drinking bout with the Russian tsar Peter (not yet ‘the Great’). Perhaps believing in his own self-fashioned image as the horseshoe-breaking ‘Saxon Hercules’, Augustus expected to cover himself in martial glory and make valuable conquests. Instead, his austere Swedish nemesis drove him from the Polish throne in 1706. Augustus recovered it after Peter defeated Charles at Poltava in 1709. However, he wasted a fleeting opportunity to escape his dependency on the tsar by building a lasting relationship with his citizen-subjects. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth ended the Great Northern War trapped in the web of Peter I’s newly proclaimed Russian empire.

In contrast, though, Saxony prospered and its ruler partied. Even before the long-drawn-out end of the war, ‘Augustus the Artist’ was organising ‘the wedding of the century’ for his son and heir (who later became king of Poland despite his father’s efforts, and not because of them). The book’s epilogue briskly covers the final dozen years of Augustus’ reign, before the conclusion reviews his posthumous reputation and sums up the various obstacles he failed to overcome. With characteristic brio, Blanning pronounces Augustus ‘a rascal, self-indulgent, recklessly extravagant, unprincipled, ruthless in the pursuit of sensual pleasure – not to mention all the other pejorative epithets directed by the wagging fingers of indignant moralizers’. But it was these very flaws that raised ‘him to iconic status, the cynosure of baroque culture’.

Blanning’s latest choice of subject plays to two of his longstanding strengths. The first is his immersion in the baroque court culture of the old Reich. The assumptions of this culture are established in the introduction while its manifestations are most fully developed (perhaps with a sigh of relief) in the two final chapters on ‘Augustus the Artist’. These cover festivities, music, architecture, landscape, jewellery, collecting, and wondrous Meissen porcelain. While undeniably ‘priapic’ (as behoved a baroque ruler), Augustus turns out to have fathered considerably fewer children by rather fewer mistresses than has often been alleged. But the verified anecdotes do not disappoint. Some are disturbing, especially those regarding the mass slaughter of animals that involved little actual hunting. Blanning asks readers to suspend their distaste while he explains the logic of this culture’s apparent absurdities.

The author’s second strength is his aptitude for cutting through thickets of military and diplomatic history to explain why wars started, why they (eventually) ended, and why the winners won and the losers lost. When the course of the Great Northern War becomes more than usually tortuous, Blanning spares the reader the worst of it. Slicing through Gordian knots of marches and counter-marches, sieges and skirmishes, he summarises the factors that proved decisive. But maps would have helped.

So far, so safe for Blanning. Yet Augustus the Strong has taken him well beyond his core repertoire of German, French, and British history in the long 18th century. Having added a good reading knowledge of Swedish, Russian, and Polish to his portfolio of languages, he has tackled long, dense, and humourless monographs on the Swedish empire, the Russian empire, and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The results are impressive by any standard. This book is a major contribution to the historiography of the Great Northern War. Indeed, the epic struggle between Peter the Great and Charles XII (whose pathological personality is memorably captured) sometimes threatens to sideline Augustus. But after spending a few pages in the ‘sin bin’ of history, the incorrigible Saxon leaps back onto the field and makes mischief anew. Historians of Poland-Lithuania may cavil at some of the author’s judgements (especially the more critical ones) and may query some of the choices of literature cited in the endnotes. But not many of them. No one has yet written a biography of Augustus remotely as good as this one, in any language. Tim Blanning’s artistry has done justice to a great artist.
 

• Augustus the Strong: A Study in Artistic Greatness and Political Fiasco
  Tim Blanning
  Allen Lane, 432pp, £30
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski is Professor of Polish-Lithuanian History at University College London.