Reinstating the French monarchy makes no sense at all

The Fifth Republic is said to be faltering. Rather than make a Sixth Republic, right-wingers have a better idea: reappoint a king. Constitutional monarchy works in the UK, they say, why not in France?

Anyone in favour of reinstating the monarchy after a 156-year absence is suffering from a triple delusion.

They do not understand the meaning of liberty, equality and fraternity; they are ill-informed about the country’s history; and they misunderstand the nature of monarchy in Britain.

There is a good reason why there has not been a reigning French king or queen in modern times: every attempt at monarchy ended in disaster.

France’s Bourbon dynasty would still be with us if Louis XVI had made a pact with his people, as did William of Orange with his new English subjects a hundred years before him.

Instead, he denied the need for reform and attempted to flee the country, exposing himself as an intransigent reactionary and leading him to the guillotine.

The throne should have gone to Louis XVII after the execution of his father and mother, but the republic had no need of him and he died in 1795 without being crowned.

Napoleon Bonaparte had no God-given right to rule but still crowned himself emperor in 1804. He was forced to abdicate twice, failing to establish his four-year-old son in his place and thereby start a dynasty. Junior (Napoleon II) was only in the post for two weeks in 1815.

Next came Louis XVIII who had to be restored to the throne twice.

His successor, Charles X, the last Bourbon king of France, again messed things up. He declared himself absolute ruler, by divine right, and scorned the idea of constitutional monarchy.

After he abdicated, he was obliged to go into exile for the second time of his life, to be replaced by the ‘Citizen King’ Louis Philippe who made himself – and the institution of monarchy – so deeply unpopular that he was forced to flee to England under the assumed name of ‘Mr Smith’. So much for majesty.

Next, Louis Napoleon shouldered the Second Republic out of the way to become Emperor Napoleon III, but he proved the most spectacular royal failure of all. 

He was ignominiously defeated in the Franco-Prussian War and, again, took the boat across the Channel to die in Kent.

The remaining Bourbon pretenders realised the game was up and France has been a republic ever since.

When someone says that France has been a monarchy for most of its history, from the Middle Ages to 1870, they conveniently overlook the chaos of the institution’s final 80 years and two republics.

Any comparison with the UK, meanwhile, is erroneous. The British royal family has survived largely because no one has managed to write a constitution which acknowledges popular (rather than royal) sovereignty; the equality of all citizens; and inalienable civic rights.

Which French person, you may well ask, would be willing to sacrifice any or all of these attributes in order to have a posh guy lord it over them just because of his genealogy?

“Ah,” sigh royalists, “having a monarch in France would be so much better than the current political mess in which the head of state gets soiled with politics.” 

They may have a point if they could devise a form of monarchy that was minimal, ultra-discreet, entirely symbolic, politically impotent, uncontroversial and acceptable to rational people. 

The trouble is that monarchy, by its nature, tends to be the opposite of all those things.

What royalists really want, I suspect, is a different kind of president. That is a conversation worth having but first they are going to have to abandon the nostalgia and mythologising that prevents them from seeing that republicanism is the least bad form of state organisation.