ABSTRACT
While Frederick the Great’s achievements through the end of the Seven Years War had elevated him to a position of respect in European public opinion unique among the sovereigns of his time, they had also left a deep and ineradicable impress on his personality. Stressed to the limits of psychological and physical endurance by the continuous challenges and dangers of a long and bitter war he almost lost; and driven for many years thereafter by the different but equally demanding tasks of reconstructing his seriously damaged country and of defending its newly-won political position in Europe, Frederick lost most of the exuberant lightheartedness he often displayed earlier in his reign. Physically gaunt, preoccupied by the constant pressure of crushing responsibilities and often irritable (especially during painful episodes of the gout which plagued his later years), the king developed a strong misanthropic bent which was particularly evident in his behaviour towards his bureaucrats, the majority of whom he suspected of laziness, graft or one or another kind of obstructionism. An extreme reserve in all his personal relationships, perhaps resulting from the self-protective secretiveness he developed in childhood as a shield against his father’s insults and rages, made him an increasingly isolated and emotionally lonely figure in whom unremitting service to the state and to the welfare of his people as he understood them swept all other human considerations aside and led him to presume wilful indolence in all who did not work as hard as he.
