by John Higgs
Regicide was not one of the aims of the revolution, but events gained their own momentum. In 1793 King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, knelt before the guillotine and were quickly and efficiently killed. The guillotine was an elegant and extremely French way to kill a king. It compared favourably with the English method of finding a big guy who needed money and handing him a mask and an axe. It was also egalitarian. To prove this, guillotines went on to remove the heads of tens of thousands of people from all levels of society, in a period now known as the Reign of Terror. Guillotines even went on to remove the heads of Robespierre and other architects of the Reign of Terror, just to demonstrate that there really was no favouritism anymore.
Like the English Revolution of 1649, the French Revolution led to a period of massacres and instability that made the previous regime appear quite attractive in comparison. It also resulted in the invasion of Austria, for reasons that made sense at the time. As is often the case with revolutions, the removal of the old guard produced a power struggle of ambitious contenders who, alas, were not the utopian, beneficial servants of the people whom the revolutionaries had hoped for. In both examples the result was a military coup. After a few years of paralysis, collapse and horror there is usually some general who has had enough and declares themselves to be the strong leader their nation craves. In England it was Cromwell, who insisted on a status lower than that of a king. In France it was Napoleon, who insisted on a status higher than king. In 1804 Napoleon was elected Emperor of the French, having received 99.93% of the three and a half million votes cast. This was an election that occurred in the period before the arrival of U.N. observers.
At this point the English and French revolutions went their separate ways. In Britain, the realization that the revolution really hadn’t turned out that well led to the decision to put things back together as best they could and apologize profusely until the whole embarrassing situation was forgotten. The French, however, would never follow this route. Their revolution occurred after the development of Enlightenment thought. While Cromwell based his authority on scripture, Napoleon based his on the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Of the two military leaders, Napoleon clearly had the more sophisticated paperwork.
Napoleon set about conquering much of the rest of Europe, because that is what military leaders invariably do when no one has the power to tell them not to. In doing so, he exported the Enlightenment ideals of the Declaration to the neighbouring conquered states. This was one aspect of his campaigning that was actually welcome. When he was eventually defeated and the French armies retreated back behind their own borders, many European countries decided to keep the new system of thought that had been imposed on them. Frequently they adopted a flag of three vertical stripes, based on the tricolour, to show their allegiance to republican ideals. This is the reason why so many European countries have such boring flags.
This didn’t mean all European monarchies were disbanded, of course, and even France would experiment with the odd king in the post-Napoleonic era. But thanks to the core of Enlightenment thought at the heart of the Declaration, these new kings were never really able to symbolically represent their nations on that all important irrational level. They were still the rightful hereditary heirs to the titles of their respected dynasties, but they had been trumped by a few sheets of paper, and everyone knew it.
European royalty continued on to the present day, and they have made repeated efforts to modernize and rationalize their existence. In the Netherlands, for example, the monarch is understood to be an office separate from the individual fulfilling that role, in the same way that an American president is separate from the office of the presidency. The symbolic nature of the monarchy, in this scenario, resides in the crown itself, rather than in the king or queen. As a result, in the recent investiture of King Willem-Alexander, the crown was placed on a chair next to him but was never placed on his head. This is believed to be progressive and rational, assuming that your definition of rationality can accommodate the concept of a magic hat.
Because European royalty are essentially devoid of both political and symbolic power, it hasn’t been worth anyone’s time to bother chopping their heads off. The great ruling families still exist, but as an odd little quirk of history. Their main duties are now to provide a regular supply of dependable content to the publishers of European celebrity magazines, to help fill the weeks when the Kardashians aren’t up to much.
9. Whales, Swans and the Problem of Charles
All of this helps to explain the odd fact of the survival of the monarchy in Britain and the Commonwealth. In England, the switch from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy occurred before political theory was sufficiently advanced to stand on its own two feet. As a result, the royal family have never been supplanted by a bill of rights. The closest example the British have to a document with such symbolic power is the far earlier Magna Carta, which dates to 1215. This declares that monarchy sometimes needs to get a grip and behave themselves, but it never once questions their existence.
From the British perspective, a bill of rights looks like a list of someone else’s rules. It’s an idea that is fine in theory, assuming that you are the person who gets to write that list. If a thousand people were each asked to write a bill of rights, the result would be a thousand different documents defining entirely different perspectives on which truths were “self-evident.” Who has the right to draft the official list, and how do they claim that power?
Even if that document had been drafted with exquisite wisdom, it would still not be able to react to changing circumstances. There are occasions where it has been possible to ignore parts of such documents when they become horribly dated, such as the sexism of the French Declaration. This took the view that unquestioned, universal rights only applied to men. But there are occasions where a poorly worded article, or a concept that made sense in a particular historical context, can get wedded into a culture because of the sacred, fixed nature of such texts. Current gun legislation in the United States is an obvious example. No system is perfect, of course, and the protections offered by a bill of rights no doubt outweigh any of these concerns. But to the British way of thinking it is better not to define such rights, keep things loose, and bumble on in a way that doesn’t make much logical sense, but which does sort of work.
This lack of enthusiasm for a bill of rights in Britain, and their early adoption of constitutional monarchy, has had an unexpected side effect. The constitutional move from an absolute to a constitutional monarchy was, to use a modern computer term, something of a kludge, and the instructions behind it are notoriously buggy. Although in principle the Queen should not wield any state power, there are a few areas in which she technically could use her influence, and in which parliament are technically required to seek her consent.4
Much of these bugs are related to her own finances, household staff and personal interests. The archaic nature of a number of the clauses give a nice little insight into the seventeenth century. Royal prerogative, for example, gives the Queen the right to claim “waifs and estrays.” Here a “waif” refers to goods thrown away by a thief in flight. Modern thieves tend to take laptops and phones, the delicate nature of which means they can become worthless when thrown away by thieves in flight, so perhaps this is the reason why the Queen does not bother claiming this prerogative. An “estray” is likewise defined as “valuable animals of a tame or reclaimable nature found wandering and whose owner is unknown,” which again the Queen doesn’t seem in a huge rush to claim. She is also granted ownership of all “swans and whales,” which is quite funny, as there aren’t a great deal of whales in British waters and the swans that we do have are really unpleasant.
Where these royal prerogatives tip into less archaic areas, there is an unspoken understanding that those powers will not be used, or only used in a symbolic manner. One example of this is the Queen’s power to appoint a prime minister and summon a parliament. Technically, the Que
en could announce that Rob Ford is British prime minister starting tomorrow, if she so wished. Fortunately, this is not the sort of thing that she does. British monarchs know that they had better agree with whatever the British people request in democratic elections, for they understand the lessons of Charles I. They have no desire to see the popular uprising and the burning of their palaces that using those prerogatives would trigger. The understanding that the Queen does possess indefensible powers, but can be trusted not to use them, is the sort of respectful, practical and deeply irrational arrangement that British people seem to like.
This, though, brings us to the problem of Prince Charles, the current heir to the throne.
Charles also has archaic royal prerogatives, and he has vast land holdings and estates. It is popularly believed that he uses the former to help profit the latter. The exact details of his lobbying and influence on government policy are currently unclear. At the time of writing, The Guardian newspaper is engaged in legal action to gain access to the private letters written by the Prince to government ministers, which would reveal the extent of the Prince’s attempts to alter official policy. Obtaining these letters through the Freedom of Information Act was vetoed by the Attorney General, Dominic Grieve, who has said that the “particularly frank” letters could harm the future king’s position of political neutrality. This veto was then overruled by the court of appeal, on the grounds that there didn’t actually appear to be any legal basis for the Attorney General’s position. The Attorney General, his spokesperson said, was “disappointed” at this verdict, and has launched a further, lengthy appeal. This standoff, it seems, could continue for some time.
It may be, of course, that the prince’s actions were perfectly justified and that his behaviour was entirely fitting for a high ranking member of a constitutional monarchy. But in a role that is symbolically powerful, perceptions can be more important than facts. The vetoing of the release of his letters appears suspicious, and as a result questions are being asked as to whether Charles is fit to be king. Royals are allowed all sorts of feuds, scandals and affairs, because their public enjoy these immensely, but using royal prerogative to overturn democratically backed government crosses the line.
All this throws an interesting light on modern monarchy. When the heir to a dynastic throne is not perceived to be fit for the job, what happens? Is this the excuse to finally scrap the whole damn lot? Should Charles be skipped over, and the crown be passed to his son William instead? Or will there be a typically British fudge, where Charles is eventually crowned on the understanding that he’s getting on a bit, and won’t be around for long? In this scenario, maintaining tradition is regarded as being more important than the problem of putting up with an inadequate king for a few years.
People would still go through the motions in his presence, of course. But Charles would be king in name only because he would not possess the symbolic resonance that his mother had, and that perhaps his son will gain. The British have had a fair amount of crap kings over the years, so they know it is not the end of the world. This is unfair on the countries of the Commonwealth that share the same monarchy, for the people of Canada and Australia tend to be a little saner than the Brits. The crowning of King Charles III will undoubtedly give a valuable boost to their republican movements, unless they too can look on King Charles III in a manner not dissimilar to how my family looks upon our cat.
Like our cat, King Charles would be fed and housed and, in time, could earn a grudging affection. Parliament may occasionally debate doing something to limit his powers, just as we sometimes wonder if there is a cat equivalent of Prozac. There might be a rational argument for putting Charles in a sack and taking him down the canal but, if I was a betting man, I would say it’s unlikely that it will ever go that far.
For all his flaws, King Charles III would still be our pet.
10. Dementia and Revolution
Recently I’ve had cause to visit an old people’s home that specializes in dementia care. It is not an experience I particularly enjoy, to be honest, but it is educational in unexpected ways.
Because many of the patients like to wander off and then immediately forget where they are going, the staff put pretty or interesting pictures on the wall so that the patients might at least find something rewarding on their journey. Some of these picture frames contain collages of familiar faces that should still be stored in the patient’s long-term memory, such as film and television stars, and the monarchy.
To my surprise, I noticed that the collage of actors generated a different reaction to the collage of royals. I had, up until that point, agreed with the “soap opera” theory of royal popularity, in which support for the royals is a product of their familiarity. People followed their stories like a life-long soap opera, and that shared narrative became part of the social glue that helped keep societies together. But watching dementia sufferers looking at both celebrities and royals, I began to question this.
Elderly dementia sufferers, unfortunately, can be bitter and unpleasant. As these frail women wandered about the care home, they would frequently blurt out phrases like, “Disgusting! It’s disgusting!”, or “She’s a cow, a stupid cow”, as if they were the letters page of a right wing newspaper. I watched one particularly unhappy woman peer at a collage of 1970s film stars, and her face curled up as if there was a bad smell. But she then walked past the pictures of royalty, and an abrupt change came over her face. Her features unknotted themselves and, just for a moment, her eyes shone. She looked with interest at the faded black and white images, forgot herself, and wandered away. Whatever appeal the royals held for her, it was not something that the celebrities shared.
This was, of course, just one woman, who may well have been an arch-royalist who had once had an unhappy love affair with Burt Reynolds. But I was reminded of one of the central arguments of republicans, which is that monarchists support the royalty because, ultimately, monarchists are less rational than republicans. And in this instance, that argument was entirely correct, for the lady in question had lost much of her short-term memory and higher brain functions, and was considerably less rational than the majority of the population. But did this mean that her emotional reaction no longer counted?
What of other people who, although healthy, may indeed be dumber than a typical republican? Is the fact that monarchy occasionally gives them some irrational pleasure a factor that needs to be considered? Is not the argument that clever people should make decisions for stupid people against the democratic, egalitarian spirit of republicanism? When a position is essentially symbolic, irrational and the result of magical thinking, perhaps those who are dumb as a bag of hammers are better equipped to understand it?
All of this would need to be considered in that hypothetical scenario at the start of our story, when we accidentally became caught up in an imaginary London revolution and found ourselves in the same Palace room as Queen Elizabeth II. The question then was, what would you do? Would you hand her over to the mob?
I don’t think I would. I’d probably apologize for the noise, and reassure her that such high spirits will die down soon, for we all know what Londoners are like. I’d then take a selfie with her, because the folks back home really aren’t going to believe this, and then I’d lock her safely in a wardrobe, possibly nick something silver for my troubles, and head on home.
And if anyone asked why, I’d say that I understand how much we have benefited from rationality and the philosophies of the Age of Enlightenment. But just because you are pro-rationality, it does not logically follow that irrationality is your mortal enemy. We can, and should, be good friends with irrationality. Like all good friends, we would be under no illusion as to what its character is really like, but we would also recognize that, for good or ill, it is part of our life, that we benefit from its company, and that its influence helps make us who we are. To deny this is to fool ourselves.
So I would spare the Queen, on the grounds that a bitter old woman with Alzheimer�
�s once looked at a photo collage in the same way that I look at my cat.
Notes
1. Newspoll. “Becoming a Republic.” The Australian. http://resources.news.com.au/files/2011/04/24/1226044/215274-aus-news-file-newspoll-110425.pdf
2. Van der Helm, Peter A. “Symmetry Perception.” Oxford Handbook of Perceptual Organization. Oxford: Oxford University Press. http://www.gestaltrevision.be/pdfs/oxford/van_der_Helm-Symmetry_perception.pdf
3. Angus Reid Public Opinion. “Canadians Lukewarm on Monarchy, Would Pick William as Next King.” http://www.angusreidglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/2013.04.30_Monarchy_CAN.pdf
4. “Queen’s or Prince’s Consent.” Office of the Parliamentary Council. December 19, 2012. http://data.parliament.uk/DepositedPapers/Files/DEP2013-0074/QC_PC_pamphlet_191212.pdf