Frederick Augustus III of Saxony
Frederick Augustus III was the last king of Saxony, a popular, unpretentious man who is remembered for what he said when he abdicated - Macht doch euren Dreck alleene, make your own mess, then - and for coming back to Dresden as a private citizen to a welcome the republic found embarrassing. He came to the throne in 1904 already a figure of sympathy. His wife, Luise of Tuscany, had left him in 1902 with the children's French tutor, and he had raised the six children himself and refused to remarry. He was a Catholic king of a Protestant country, a trained soldier who commanded a corps, and a man who spoke to his subjects in the Saxon dialect and was photographed doing so, which was rare, and the anecdotes the Dresdeners told about him - the tram he rode, the gruff kindness, the plain speech - were the currency of a monarchy that had no politics left to it. The government was the Reich's, the parliament was the Landtag's, and the war was Berlin's. Saxony contributed an army corps and a quarter of a million dead. In November 1918 the workers' and soldiers' councils took Dresden and Leipzig in two days, and on 13 November he signed an abdication that ended eight and a half centuries of the Wettin dynasty in Saxony, telling the delegation, in the version everybody repeats, to make their own mess. He withdrew to a castle in Silesia and lived quietly, came back to visit, and was cheered in the streets in a way the Weimar authorities found awkward. He died in 1932 and was buried in the Catholic court church in Dresden, the cathedral now, with a crowd of half a million along the route, which was more than the republic could get for anything. The line is his monument; the Saxons still use it.
- Lived: 1865 CE – 1932 CE
- Nationality: German
- Roles: king, monarch, head_of_state
