This article is taken from the February 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
Monarchy and dictatorship both imply one ruler. Yet they are quite different institutions. Monarchies are not always hereditary — think of the elective Holy Roman Empire and the papacy — but they are intended to be permanent, established by the grace of God, anointed like priests at their coronation. A king never dies: he has a corporeal body that is mortal and a metaphysical one that transcends mortality.
Dictators, by contrast, are by definition temporary, even if they die in office, and owe their authority solely to the people. The original meaning of “dictator” was an emergency ruler, usually a general, appointed for the duration of a war or other crisis, but expected to relinquish his authority when it was no longer required.
One of the earliest and still most celebrated of all dictators was Julius Caesar. As the conqueror of Gaul, he was given all-encompassing powers by the Roman Republic, but as soon as he showed himself inclined to accept a crown, he was killed. His assassins, Brutus and Cassius, drew a dagger-sharp distinction between dictators, who were tolerable, and kings, who were not. Yet, having crossed the line, Caesar remained the model not only for all future Roman emperors, but for many other monarchs since, from the Russian “Tsar” to the German “Kaiser”.
In practice dictators lack the legitimacy to make their offices hereditary. Hence they are seldom able to found dynasties. Oliver Cromwell’s son Richard lasted only a few months as lord protector. Despite Napoleon Bonaparte’s attempt to perpetuate his authority by crowning himself, his empire died even before he did. That empire could only be revived by his nephew Louis Napoleon after both monarchists and republicans had alienated the public and he had been elected as the first president of France.
As a Bonapartist, his style was that of a populist dictator rather than of a king, but his high-wire diplomacy was exposed by his Mexican adventurism and he was duped by Bismarck, nominally at least the guardian of Europe’s old pre-revolutionary monarchical order. What finally doomed his dynastic hopes was defeat. Dictators who are incompetent in war don’t usually end well. The emperor died, not in battle at Sedan, but in exile at Chislehurst.
France had no more monarchs after Napoleon III, but one unelected dictator in Marshal Pétain and one elected in General de Gaulle. The latter’s bequest, the Fifth Republic, comes closer to an elective dictatorship than any other Western democracy. The President may overrule parliamentary authority and dismiss governments at will — extraordinary powers of which Emmanuel Macron has made full use. If, despite such desperate measures, he is succeeded by Marine Le Pen then the Gaullist constitution will be tested, perhaps to destruction.
If the Fifth Republic does not degenerate into a full-blown dictatorship, the reason will be that De Gaulle was wise enough to incorporate into its political architecture the essence of a constitutional monarchy: presidential power is limited, not absolute; exercised not directly, but mediated through democratic institutions; and all authority is subordinate to the rule of law.
We can see the tensions between monarchy and dictatorship play out in the early years of the American Republic, too. General Washington, as he was usually known in his lifetime, had acquired such prestige by his victories in the War of Independence that many were minded to offer him a crown.
It was his unwavering conviction that the principles of Anglo-Saxon constitutional monarchy must be preserved, albeit in republican form, that saved the United States from the perils of a dictatorship legitimised by revolution: a pattern that we have seen play out many times since 1789 and especially since 1917 — but not in 1776.
The US Constitution was conceived against internal tyrants no less than external ones
The Declaration of Independence erected a transatlantic bulwark against both monarchical and parliamentary despotism. The ensuing settlement has endured thanks to the felicitous concatenation of past and present, combining not only the novel principles of Locke and Montesquieu but the primordial bedrock of English common law jurisprudence, harking back to Coke and Selden, Bracton and Fortescue. From the outset, however, the US Constitution was conceived to be a prophylactic against internal tyrants no less than external ones.
Nearly 250 years after the founding fathers enshrined in that archetype of written constitutions various provisions designed to prevent the executive branch from exceeding its authority, the system is under strain as never before. Donald Trump is neither a constitutional monarch nor an oriental autocrat. Much as he admires the former, however, he is more inclined to emulate the latter.
Except in one respect: Putin and Xi Jinping have made themselves presidents for life, but neither can have any realistic expectation of founding a dynasty. Trump, by contrast, seems deadly serious about just that; and, given the magnetic attraction of names like Roosevelt, Kennedy, Clinton and Bush, it would be rash to predict that Trump will fail in his ambition. In this sense only, he is more monarchical than dictatorial.
If there is something faintly archaic to British eyes about American politics, that is because some of the prerogatives of our 18th century sovereigns have been preserved as presidential powers: the virtually unrestricted right to pardon, for example, which Joe Biden recently exercised on behalf of his son. The need to keep such executive powers in check explains why the practice of impeaching officials, for centuries discontinued in Westminster, is anything but obsolete in Washington.
As Trump has demonstrated, however, the threat of impeachment is much more powerful than the execution. Whilst he was checked on various fronts during his first term, crucially he was never held accountable for his part in the siege of Congress on 6 January 2021. Jack Smith, the special counsel charged with investigating those events and especially the then President’s responsibility for them, concluded that the court rulings arising from his efforts had had “the unintended consequence of giving Mr Trump and every future president more, not less, freedom from legal constraints”.
It was, though, in the 20th century that monarchs and dictators clashed head-on. The abrupt implosion within a year of the Romanovs, Habsburgs, Hohenzollerns and Ottomans left Europe with a vacuum of legitimate authority, quickly filled by usurpers. It was an age of dictators: Lenin and Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler.
Yet whilst democrats were thin on the ground, most European states leaned towards authoritarianism, rather than the more radical totalitarianism of the Nazis, fascists or communists. Martial strongmen, such as Atatürk in Turkey, Piłsudski in Poland, Horthy in Hungary or Franco in Spain, Tiso in Slovakia and Dollfuss in Austria.
Amongst the minor dramatis personae in Europe’s Gesamtkunstwerk of Wagnerian self-immolation were monarchs and ex-monarchs. Faced with the totalitarian temptation, some acquitted themselves well. Haakon VII of Norway, for example, went into exile in London rather than collaborate with Vidkun Quisling. His encouragement of the Norwegian resistance in large part explains why this monarchy remains in place today. The Danish king, Christian X, did not go into exile, but helped the Jews of Denmark to escape.
Vittorio Emanuele III, on the other hand, became a byword for vacillation and weakness. Denis Mack Smith — the great postwar British historian of Italy whom I was proud to count a friend — described the king as a “timid, enigmatic person … Temperamentally he was drawn to anyone who would take firm decisions and control domestic unrest”.
When Mussolini’s Fascists marched on Rome in 1922, Vittorio Emanuele at first agreed with his cabinet to declare a state of emergency and order the army to crush the insurrection. Some of the fascists said that they would have obeyed a royal command, even if it had meant acquiescing in the execution of their Duce. But the king bottled it by refusing to sign the decree. He thereby betrayed his constitutional duty, and Italy’s fascist destiny was sealed.
When, after two decades of ignominy, the king finally dismissed Mussolini in 1943, he still dithered for months before declaring war on the Axis, giving the Nazis the opportunity to occupy the North and drag out the war there for two more horrific years. After it was all over, Vittorio Emanuele abdicated in favour of his son, but this gesture was too little and too late to save the House of Savoy.
In the postwar referendum that established a republic, the monarch’s dereliction of duty was a gift to the nascent Communist Party. The king could have had Mussolini shot for treason. Instead, Italy was sacrificed to the vanity of an old fool who preferred the company of his coin and stamp collections to that of his subjects.
Perhaps the worst case of all was the House of Hohenzollern. Its role in Weimar Germany and the Third Reich has hitherto been seen as a sideshow, of marginal or no significance for the rise of Hitler and the dismemberment of democracy. The ex-Kaiser, after all, lived in exile in Holland until his death in 1941, whilst the former Crown Prince Wilhelm, was seen as at best a reactionary playboy.
Such dismissive attitudes suited the family, especially when its titular head, Louis Ferdinand, began an elaborate decades-long campaign for the restitution of estates worth hundreds of millions. Much of this revolves around the role of Crown Prince Wilhelm, because Nazis and their descendants are not eligible for compensation. The Hohenzollerns have fought more than 80 lawsuits to back up their claims, seeking to deter all but the friendliest journalists and historians from investigating their past.
One of the scholars who has not been deterred by litigation is Stephan Malinowski, whose meticulous, groundbreaking research has culminated in a superb 681-page book, The Hohenzollerns and the Nazis: A History of Collaboration. As the use of the word “collaboration” implies, the family portrait he presents is not a pretty picture.
As the ex-Kaiser’s pro-Nazi ravings in exile are already well known, thanks to the late John Röhl, Malinowski’s focus is on the crown prince, of whom the photographs reproduced in the book tell their own story. We see him with campaigners for the Nazis in the 1932 presidential election, beaming at the camera in his “Motor SA” uniform, in a swastika armband with Himmler in a 1933 propaganda film, bantering with Hitler and Goering at the “Day of Potsdam” in February 1933. And so on, ad nauseam.
Does this matter? Sir Christopher Clark, engaged and financed in 2011 by the Hohenzollerns to look into Wilhelm’s record, concluded that he was a “nonentity”, though he later changed his mind after new evidence emerged. As Malinowski shows, Wilhelm was an important influencer in the period when the German (especially Prussian) aristocracy was deciding whether to back the National Socialists. The visibility of the crown prince at Nazi events and his very public endorsement of their cause were bound to reassure the German nobility during the crucial embryonic phase of the Nazi regime.
In June 1940, as the Battle of Britain began, the crown prince sent a telegram to Hitler, “as an old soldier full of admiration” for the Führer’s “genius leadership”, and looked forward to a “final setting of accounts with perfidious Albion”. He signed off, “Sieg Heil!”
Malinowski easily debunks the postwar fable that Wilhelm later joined the aristocratic resistance. He may have been frivolous and foolish, but why should he be exonerated any more than those notorious Nazi sympathisers, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor? If Britain had collapsed in 1940, the former Edward VIII would probably have been willingly restored to the throne as a Nazi puppet. The crown prince, too, was one of Hitler’s useful idiots.
The fall of the House of Hohenzollern, like that of Savoy, remains unlamented. As the psalmist sings, put not your trust in princes. But I think of Otto von Habsburg, whom I once met and who defied the Nazis despite being sentenced to death in absentia. Now there was a man worthy to be the last crown prince of his house.
