A King of Shreds and Patches

On a new understanding of monarchism, and the enduring legacy of Napoleon I

The Senate and People of Rome

Before the modern socialist-conservative distinction took hold of political discourse, the “left” and the “right” were defined by their opposition or support of the monarchy, respectively. In the French National Assembly after 1789, supporters of the Bourbon dynasty sat to the right of the President of the Assembly, and opponents to his left.¹ The French Revolution is the source of most modern politics: the notions of liberalism and conservatism find their roots in the Montagnards and the Girondins, respectively. Few periods in history have ever been as chaotic as France in the late eighteenth century.

If it were not for the Reign of Terror, history might have been far kinder to Maximilien Robespierre and his Montagnard-Jacobin allies. After all, the complaints of the French bourgeoisie against the Bourbon monarchs were quite valid. For centuries, various Kings had extracted taxation without consulting the people, participated in extrajudicial killings, gone to war for paltry reasons, and so on. The Estates General was not called to Paris between 1614 and 1789. It is no wonder that once they were called, the Third Estate immediately revolted. Monarchical regimes have, no doubt, been some of the most violent, arbitrary, brutal governments in history.

That being said, if one considers only the present, and disregards the past, it is abundantly obvious that monarchies, be they constitutional or absolutist, tend to outperform republics of any form, especially when compared region-by-region. When using Human Development Index,² the forty-three monarchies have an average of 0.811, compared to 0.696 for republics. That might seem like a small difference, but in fact, it is quite substantial. The average monarchy is Kuwait, and the average republic is Iraq. Eleven of the top twenty nations according to their HDI are monarchies; none of the bottom twenty are. Consider the Gulf monarchies compared to Iran or Syria; Morocco compared to Libya; Belgium, the United Kingdom, or Denmark compared to Hungary or Bosnia; Japan and Thailand versus the Philippines and China; Canada versus Mexico.

The political theory underpinning monarchy, that is, monarchism, may rely on a variety of different notions, including divine right theory—the Western concept that the monarch is chosen by God as a vicar, the mandate of heaven—a similar concept in the Sinosphere which asserts that any given imperial dynasty is allowed to remain in power by the will of heaven and that the toppling of a dynasty signifies the loss of that mandate, or state symbolism theory—a more modern, Enlightenment-era concept of the sovereign as an abstract symbol of the state. This is the theory under which modern constitutional monarchies operate.

There are a wide variety of monarchistic arguments for the return or maintenance of a hereditary sovereign as the head of state, some of them valid and some of them absurd. Some on the right fringe will assert, gleefully and without self-examination, that an absolute monarchy is the superior form of government because the electorate simply cannot be trusted—this is an argument so prima facie absurd that it is not worth even examining. The Enlightenment was, of course, correct in its opposition to absolute monarchism, but those in France would learn the risks of swinging the proverbial Hegelian pendulum too far to the left. Certainly, if you had asked any of the brave men who stormed the Bastille on 14 July 1789 if the Revolution had succeeded by mid-1794 when Robespierre and his Revolutionary Tribunal had buried ten thousand Frenchmen, the Catholic Church, and the calendar of all things, they might have expressed some concern. Contrarily, it is unlikely that any member of the Jacobin Club predicted that by the decennial of the Storming of the Bastille, a Corsican general would have founded a new monarchy. The grave of the revolution was dug the moment the National Assembly condemned Louis XIV, foolish and terrible as he was, to death by guillotine.

The Republican Experiment

The ideology of monarchism might range from the non-partisan mainstream, as in the United Kingdom, to the conservative mainstream, as in Spain, to a state ideology whose dissidents face severe reprisal, as in the Gulf monarchies, to a counterrevolutionary ideology whose adherents face severe reprisal, as in China. In the United States, it is decidedly a fringe belief, as the country was founded on decidedly republican and anti-royalist principles. Despite this cultural disdain for monarchies, some arguments may convince even the most ardently republican of Americans.

Perhaps the most obvious benefit of a monarchy is the Sovereign’s non-partisanship. The Queen is not Tory, Labour, or Lib-Dem; but the President can only be a Democrat or a Republican. Having a non-partisan head of state, separate from the head of government, provides for a continuity that simply cannot exist in republics. British political scientist Vernon Bogdanor points out this benefit, especially in multinational states.³ Belgium is deeply divided along ethnolinguistic lines between the Francophone Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flemings; there is only one true Belgian, the King.

Thomas Hobbes, the famous English political philosopher and ethicist, saw the chaos wrought by the English Civil War of the mid-seventeenth century and decided that the modern state was effectively analogous to a ship—and a ship needs a captain: the despot. For obvious reasons, I cannot adhere to the absolutism of Hobbes (except of course the anthropomorphic tiger from Watterson’s comic strip). He does, however, make some compelling arguments for the mere existence of the monarchy, be it absolute or constrained.⁴ Hobbes argues that the sovereign can—in circumstances where the sovereign is sane and competent—be given quality counsel in secret and with genuine concern for the well-being of the populace, compared to an assembly, where counsel is always given with scheming and self-serving conspiracy in mind. This of course only applies to an absolute monarchy. In a constitutional monarchy, this benefit applies, but in reverse: given that a sovereign is well-respected as the symbol of the state, he could offer quiet and restrained guidance to a Prime Minister in private, as Queen Elizabeth II herself is sometimes known to do.

Returning to a previous observation, why is it that monarchies tend (again, tend) to be more prosperous, pleasant places to live compared to their republican neighbors? The International Monarchist League, an organization dedicated to the “preservation and promotion of the monarchical system of government,”⁵ has long argued that monarchies are simply better equipped to preserve the liberty of their subjects than an arbitrary and capricious republic because a sovereign is by nature not beholden to the will of popularly elected politicians. Monarchies—especially European monarchies—it has been noted, have largely avoided extremist politics and military dictatorships (with the noted exception of Italy in the early twentieth century). Modern constitutional monarchies are some of the “most stable, prosperous, and free in the world.”⁶ Antifascist revolutionary and anti-authoritarian writer George Orwell argued that constitutional monarchy effectively stifled fascist movements since the “function of the King” was to promote stability and act as an “escape valve for dangerous emotions.”⁷ Contrarily, the Austrian political scientist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn argued that since liberty and equality are contradictions, elected assemblies tend to acquire more power than even the most brutal of absolute despots could dream of, and therefore have a tendency towards totalitarianism. Hierarchy by its very nature tends towards freedom since equality can only be accomplished through the suppression of liberty. Hierarchical monarchic societies are, as a result, fundamentally freer and more prosperous places than the ochlocracies that democratic republics quickly devolve into.⁸

Regardless of what ideologically-based argument one agrees with, be it the tendency of monarchies towards greater political accountability through elections, the superiority of the Westminster legislative model, a natural desire for hierarchies, or the non-partisanship of a sovereign, the proof really is in the pudding. Region-by-region, nation-by-nation, monarchies outperform republics at every benchmark economic, political, and social metric. The reason does not matter, only the conclusion: the proper governmental structure on the macro-level is the constitutional monarchy.

God Save the Emperor

There are very few individuals who have truly made history, and fewer still are any sort of hero. Throughout writing this essay series, it has become increasingly obvious to me that while the Great Man view of history is at best a misleading perspective, and at worst a gateway to reactionary politics and racial historicism, there are at least a few genuine examples of Great Men (regardless of whether or not they were actually great, or actually men). Caesar, Alexander, Qin Shi Huang, and Hiawatha⁹ are often-cited examples.

In my estimation, there is no greater Great Man than the Emperor of the French, Napoleon Bonaparte. Even in his final loss, and even in consideration of his exile to Elba, and then to St. Helena, his legacy endures. The Napoleonic legal code is used alone, or with modifications, in much of Europe, Africa, Latin America, Central Asia, Quebec, and Louisiana; he liberated women and Jews across his Empire; he exported the objectively good ideas and ideals of the French Revolution, including the metric system, across the world. Napoleon may be responsible for the deaths of many, a legacy of devastation which cannot be excused, but perhaps more than anything else he killed the great evil of divine right theory; of absolutism.

For the first few thousand years of human civilization, justice and politics were largely personal, driven by the whims and arbitrary desires of arbitrary men (and sometimes women). Monarchs were despots, utterly capricious in their power, for whom generosity and greed, mercy and malice were but political tools subject only to them, rather than coherent national or sub-national policy. Though I have in the past asserted that monarchism, specifically feudal monarchism, constituted the First Ideology,¹⁰ it cannot truly be considered as such in the same sense that Marxism-Leninism or Rhenish neoliberalism can be considered.

If the purpose of the French Revolution was to end the feudal monarchy, to dispel the notion that the monarch rules by divine right, it did not succeed until the ascension of Napoleon. While his remarks at the time may have seemed absurd to the bourgeois revolutionaries of Robespierre’s day—at least, to those of them that survived the Terror—Napoleon was utterly correct when he declared, upon overthrowing the Directory on 18 Brumaire of Year 8 (that’s 9 November 1799 for the reactionaries among you) that “the Revolution is set to the principles upon which it was raised. It is over.” Napoleon kept alive the spirit of Bastille, maintaining the institutions which served to truly benefit the masses de Granit. Ten of his maréchaux were commoners; Joachim Murat was the son of an innkeeper. Napoleon’s Code civil preserved the meritocracy that the Montagnards had worked so hard to create, in opposition to the courtly intrigue of the ancien régime. The grand armeé was reformed away from both its royalist and republican forms, offering scholarships for poor entrants to the école Polytechnique, and promoting officers based on skill rather than loyalty.

Regardless of whether or not Napoleon faked the plebiscite that allowed him to crown himself Emperor, the fact that a plebiscite happened at all serves as a guide to his ideology. Napoleon believed that his power to rule came not from God—though he used the Catholic Church to provide him with legitimacy—but from the people. Famously, it was not Pope Pius VII who placed the crown on the new Emperor’s head, but Napoleon himself. Anti-Bonapartists suggest that this was an act of arrogance, a rebuke of Catholic authority, but in fact, it had been negotiated long in advance and did not come as a surprise to the Holy Father. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 dispelled the notion of absolute monarchy and made clear that the Sovereign was beholden to his nation, but it took the Napoleonic reforms to dispel the notion of the divine right in its entirety: not only is the Sovereign bound to the will of the people; the people must grant their assent for the Sovereign to rule at all. The Bonapartist monarch is ultimately a democratic one, though he might still be an autocrat.

What even is Bonapartism, anyway? The term gets thrown around quite frequently in the twenty-first century, especially by leftists who are eager to categorize President Sukarno of Indonesia and Hafez al-Assad as “Bonapartists.” What do al-Assad and Sukarno have in common with Napoleon? Not much, frankly. The leftist notion of Bonapartism derives from their view of Napoleon himself—for the would-be revolutionaries, a Bonapartist betrays the ideals of the movement which put him into power. For the communard and the Sandanista; the Corbynite and the Leninist, Napoleon and those of his ilk are gravediggers of the revolution, and as such must be dismissed as fraudulent and bourgeois. Bonapartists are therefore easily identified by the presumption of democratic or revolutionary legitimacy; their use of strongman autocratic authoritarianism, often in stark contrast to the libertarian revolutionary theory of their enablers; and selective reformism in an attempt to appease the masses. Marx himself defined Bonapartism as the counter-revolutionary ideology of military officers who seize power back from civilian rebels after a successful revolution.¹¹

The fundamental problem with this definition is that while admittedly, it accurately describes how Napoleon and those who admire him have come to power, it does not touch on the ideology of Napoleon. The leftist definition of Bonapartism is one of praxis, rather than one of theory.

In terms of ideological Bonapartism, I make a distinction between the strict and the broad varieties. Strict Bonapartism is nothing more or less than support for the restoration of the Bonaparte claimant—currently, Jean-Christophe Napoleon, known to supporters as Napoleon VIII—to the imperial throne of France, along with the Napoleonic institutions which were dispensed after the fall of the Second Empire, especially the Imperial nobility. Broad Bonapartism is less of a monarchistic yearning for an older, more conservative notion of public society and more of a coherent ideology. Strict Bonapartists—petit-bonapartistes—might not be Broad Bonapartists—grands-bonapartistes, and vice versa. Broad Bonapartism is based on the Napoleonic notion that the hereditary monarchy is a fundamental, indispensable institution that derives its sovereign legitimacy from the consent of the people—a people which constitutes a nation. These Bonapartists also support the Napoleonic ideal of meritocratic government, constitutional monarchy, an educated populace, religious freedom, monetary sovereignty, and a non-privileged noble elite.

I consider myself a grand-bonapartiste under this framework.

The Noble Obligation

There were many institutions abolished by the revolutionaries of 1789; many justifiably, and many arbitrarily. Some were brought back under the First Empire, mostly falling clearly into the first category: the Church resumed its place in French society, though limited by the Concordat of 1801; the seven-day week and traditional month names were restored, and so on. It seems puzzling then, at least to a modern student of history, why Napoleon chose to restore the nobility, though not their privilege. Of all the absurd and outdated institutional vestiges of ancien regime institutions the Revolution sought to abolish or modernize, certainly, the landed gentry constituting the First Estate got what they deserved.

The very concept of the feudal nobility flies in the face of modernity, liberal democracy, and of Lockean-Georgist property rights. All land is owned by the King, enfeoffed and subinfeuded to lords, knights, abbots, and bishops based on their loyalty to their superiors, with serfs bound to the land and all but owned by their dominus. It was this feudal system that upheld and created the nobility, and if the feudal system must be done away with, surely the nobility themselves must follow, along with their titles and status?

Napoleon understood the fundamental role of hierarchy in human societies. The libertarian-socialist goal of reducing all humans into a single stratum is a pipe-dream; every society must, by the very nature of mankind, have nobility and peasantry. The ultimate goal of political, economic, and social liberalism is not to eliminate the stratification of society, but to lift the entire strata, to improve the quality of life of all.

But there must be a nobility. Be they brahmins, daimyo, mandarins, patricians, billionaires, or the descendants of knights who fought with William at Hastings, there will always be an elite. Napoleon sought to make the elite into “aristocrats of the soul,”¹² with marshals of the Empire being created princes de Victoire or ducs; generals, ministers of state, and archbishops becoming comtes; bishops and mayors of certain cities being granted the title of baron; and hereditary knighthoods for others deserving of the honor. By replacing the old feudal nobility with a newly meritocratic one (at least in theory), Napoleon hoped to offer the common Frenchman a class of heroic paragons to whom they could look up. Whether or not these nouveau-nobles fulfilled this heavy obligation is, naturally, a matter of opinion.

The United States has an interesting history of noble classes. Until the 1960s, the noble elite were the so-called WASPs,¹³ though not all were in fact of Anglo-Saxon extraction. Mostly concentrated in the South, and largely of English, Scottish or Dutch ethnicity—though there was a sizable minority of French Huguenots, like the du Pont family of chemical fame—these American aristocrats derived from wealth from grants of land by old colonial monarchs. English WASPs, usually Episcopalians, were concentrated around the Chesapeake and the Massachusetts, while the Presbyterian Scots found themselves dispersed in the Deep South, the Congregational Dutch along the Hudson, and the Calvinist French were dispersed across the Upper Midwest and, to a lesser extent, Louisiana. While their power has largely waned in the postwar years alongside their Mainline Protestant churches, as the traditionally deprived ethnoreligious minorities increasingly assert their political and economic clout, the WASPs have retreated to their old upper-class pursuits: law, charity, and high finance.

In their place has arisen a new elite class, devoid of the ethnic and religious supremacy inherent in the Wealthy Anglo-Saxon Protestants: the technocrats. Typically deriving their immense wealth—far more immense than even the richest of the Old Elite—from technological innovation or financial speculation, these nouveaux-riche lack the virtues of the WASPs.

This is not to imply that the Old Elite are free of sin; they are certainly not. Up until the 1960s and the election of John Kennedy to the highest office in the land, no one except a white mainline Protestant man could reach the upper echelons of American political and social culture, with some exceptions in the Mormon Corridor and Catholic immigrant-heavy New York metropolitan area (though, for the purposes of political culture, Latter-day Saints are sometimes considered pseudo-Protestants, if only by the fact that they are Christians who are not Catholics, and even then, a Latter-day Saint would not reach national prominence until the Presidential candidacy of George Romney in 1968). In the South, the Protestant Ascendancy maintained slavery until the 1860s and segregationist policies until a century later. Certainly, very little can be said for an elite which maintained a system that was, at its very core and by its very nature, exclusionary to Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Native and non-European Americans, and which placed women—even women from the elite social class—into a subservient and secondary role in society.

However, some lessons can be learned from the old aristocracy, especially when compared to the modern blue-bloods. At its best, the WASPs maintained a subdued, modest presence, rarely flaunting their wealth except indirectly through their acts of charity and patronage of the art; this stands in contrast to the McMansion-buying, superyacht-boating, rainbow-encrusted-watch-wearing nouveau riche of the twenty-first century. They upheld standards of etiquette that required at least a pretend kindness towards the poor; the modern billionaires refuse to even acknowledge them or their suffering, preferring to mock them for their “lack of hard work.”

Even Fareed Zakaria, the famed Indian-American center-left journalist at CNN (hardly a bastion of intellectualism and thoughtful critique of current events, but for Zakaria), defended the Old Elite, saying in a 2018 monologue after the death of George H.W. Bush, long considered the “last of the WASP political class:”

Many of Bush’s greatest moments—his handling of the fall of communism, his decision not to occupy Iraq after the First Gulf War, his acceptance of tax increases in order to close the deficit—were marked by restraint, and an ability to do the right thing, despite enormous pressure to pander to public opinion.¹⁴

Zakaria asserts that the source of these virtues was the very fact that the position of the Protestant elite was so assured, their position so unassailable, that when elected, they could afford to rely on their consciences and ignore the sometimes-wrong democratic will of the people (becoming “trustees” instead of “delegates”). Additionally, it appears that much of the WASP understanding of their privilege, at least towards the latter half of the twentieth century (and notable excepting the Southeast), was a correct understanding: that their status was no more than a historical accident and the result of numerous happenstances, rather than the result of their inherent “supremacy” as a class, as other upper classes in various societies have often believed. Late twentieth-century WASPs understood this and sought to maintain only their appearance as moral paragons, rather than fighting openly to preserve their actual status. As a result, many WASPs (especially from the North) came to embody and espouse liberal and centrist politics, as did George H.W. Bush, Nelson Rockefeller, and John Chafee. Indeed, though their power has considerably waned, many upper- and upper-middle-class Americans continue to attempt to emulate their style and adapt their pursuits. Consider the upper-class American heroes: the men in first-class aboard the Titanic who bravely and stoically went down with the ship, generous philanthropist entrepreneurs like George Westinghouse, and intellectuals like William F. Buckley; they were all WASPs who embodied the WASP virtues.

This stands in bold contrast to the modern technocratic elite. Indeed, there is very little ethnic or religious commonality between them, being perhaps the most diverse “ruling class” of any society in history. There is also little civic virtue found in this elite, as many espouse—some openly, some clandestinely—an Objectivist¹⁵ political and social view of the world. The New Elite truly believe that they deserve their status, that their accumulation of wealth is just because they have invented something or improved some technical process. I do not dispute this notion in principle—after all, shouldn’t someone like Bill Gates, the great progenitor of the personal computing revolution, be rewarded with wealth? The problem is not in the accumulation of wealth itself but in the increase in status that results from that wealth. The WASPs were powerful not because they were wealthy—many of them were not that rich, at least compared to the technocrats of today—but their power and their wealth both emanated from historical status and the maintenance of enough wisdom to preserve that power and wealth. The technocrats view themselves as Randian heroes, Peter Thiel is in his mind John Galt,¹⁶ and Elon Musk is Howard Roark,¹⁷ and as a result espouse a heroically selfish politics: utterly disdaining the disadvantaged and poor, being fundamentally blind to the failures of government-subsidized Anglo-Saxon corporate capitalism. The New Elite is not at all concerned with cultivating an image of detached, kind, educated liberalism, nor do they bear any restraint, but prefer to flaunt their wealth as much as possible, because after all, they earned it.

There will always be an elite. Napoleon knew that as well as anyone. The only variable is the mobility between the social classes and the nature of that elite.

I advocate for a return to hereditary nobility for the same reason as Napoleon. The monarch—who ought to be a Bonapartist popular monarch deriving his power from the people—should not have any real political power except as necessary to maintain governmental continuity, and the ability to grant letters patent creating noble titles. The actual titles themselves do not matter and should be culturally relevant, but they must be both hereditary and deprivable; that is, they should ordinarily pass to the eldest child, and the Sovereign must have some means to deprive a title of someone who has dishonored the nobility. These titles should be granted rarely, with some kind of limitation on either how many can be granted in a given year, or on how many members of the nobility can exist at the same time, and only for great civic service. Consider the great honors of the United States under such a system: perhaps the descendants of Medal of Honor could be considered “Dukes” of the place in which their ancestor performed the heroic act in which that act took place, and so on.

The purpose of this nobility is simple: to create an upper class that is deserving of their honor, and which can serve as a positive example for others, and which one can hope to emulate. Surely this system would be abused: some would, as now, pretend to be nobility without cause, and some actual members of the nobility would be disgraceful. That being said, it sure beats the current system of pseudo-nobility deriving immense wealth from technocratic pursuits, and who delight in shoving that wealth down the proverbial throats of the proletariat.

1. Left and Right: Significance of a Political Distinction, Berrio Noberto, 2016.

2. All HDI figures are derived from the United Nation’s 2020 Human Development Report.

3. “The Guardian has got it wrong,” Vernon Bogdanor, The Guardian, 2000.

4. Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes, 1651.

5. Wording from their website.

6. “The Benefits of Monarchy,” Matthew Feeney, Reason Magazine, 2013.

7. Spring 1944 Partisan Review, George Orwell, 1944.

8. Liberty or Equality, Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, 2014.

9. I don’t list any religious figures here as Great Men, because while the impact of those like Jesus and Siddhartha Gautama are enormous, they would credit that impact to the Divine, rather than to their own volition. Great Men must, according to the commonly held definition, change the world by themselves, not by harnessing popular movement or divine intervention.

10. “Pallbearers of the Tyrants,” Neo-Demosthenes, Destroika, 2022.

11. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx, 1852.

12. A term derived from Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for Aristocrats of the Soul, Julius Evola, 1961.

13. The origin of this term is disputed, but it first appears in print in “Liberal Democracy and Social Control,” Andrew Hacker, American Political Science Review, 1957.

14. “Fareed: I’m not calling to revive WASP culture. Just to learn from it.” Fareed Zakaria, CNN, 2018.

15. A term used for Ayn Rand’s particular strand of right-libertarianism.

16. The hero of Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand, 1957.

17. The hero of The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand, 1943.