The budget-cutting at the court of King Frederick William I of Prussia (1713-1740) was largely representative, in that it was often done very publicly but involved vanishingly small amounts of money. Moreover, making ostentatious cuts to court personnel — in his own words, a “thunderstrike” (Donnerschlag) — was clearly designed as much to impose insecurity and precarity on the remaining personnel as to save money. There’s a strong affiliation with contemporary changes in gender norms, too, in that the king’s sartorial austerity dovetails well with the “great masculine renunciation,” and that frivolity and idleness were gendered feminine, and that hard work and thrift were gendered masculine.