Sons and Heirs

Succession and Political Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe

Heidi Mehrkens, Frank Lorenz Müller, Heidi Mehrkens, Frank Lorenz Müller

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137454980
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

Bringing together an international team of specialists, this volume considers the place of royal heirs within their families, their education and accommodation, their ability to overcome succession crises, the consequences of the death of an heir and finally the roles royal heirs played during the First World War.

1

Stabilizing a ‘Great Historic System’ in the Nineteenth Century? Royal Heirs and Succession in an Age of Monarchy

Frank Lorenz Müller

In terms of epochal epithets, Europe’s nineteenth century provides an embarrassment of riches. Eric Hobsbawm’s classic tryptic characterized it as a threefold age, first of revolution, then of capital and finally of empire. In his durable textbook M. S. Anderson focused on the continent’s ‘ascendancy’ after 1815. Jonathan Sperber chose to headline its ‘revolutionary’ character for the first half of the century and described the decades after 1850 as shaped by ‘progress, participation and apprehension’. Eberhard Weis and Theodor Schieder, who covered the century within the grand Propyläen history of Europe series, declared the ‘breakthrough of the bourgeoisie’ and ‘system of states as global hegemon’ to be the epoch’s defining themes. Finally, in his magisterial global history of the century, Jürgen Osterhammel recently credited the era with having achieved ‘the transformation of the world’.¹

These, and many other prominent appraisals of the period, foreground the dimensions of the enormous change that occurred between the French Revolution and the First World War. The century witnessed industrialization and scientific advance, demographic growth and mass migration, general literacy and the expansion of the public sphere, constitutional progress and large-scale enfranchisement, Europe’s dramatic imperial reach across much of the globe, and many other profound cultural, social and emotional transformations. When the Long Nineteenth Century ended, some 130 years after the final meeting of France’s Estates General, the world had learned to use X-ray machines, drop bombs from fixed-wing aircraft and laugh at Charlie Chaplin films. This stupendous record of innovation has left its mark on the ways in which the period has been explored. The historians’ attention – just like the human eye – is drawn to rapidly moving parts. The resultant emphasis on what changed in the nineteenth century has, however, served to obscure what may appear to be a remarkable and counter-intuitive survival and persistence phenomenon: European monarchy.

The hypothesis that has inspired the present volume is that another epithet must be added to the other crucial characterizations mentioned above in order to achieve a full and fruitful understanding of Europe’s nineteenth century: it was also an age of monarchy. Notwithstanding the depth and breadth of the epochal changes, which meant that the notion of divine ordination lost almost all traction, executive power was increasingly in the hands not of princes but of ministers and laws could no longer be made without a form of parliamentary cooperation, monarchy as a system of government and – more widely – as a complex of cultural, emotional and legal structures proved astonishingly resilient. For all of its drama and symbolic significance Louis XVI’s mounting of the scaffold in January 1793 did not mark the beginning of an extinction event for European monarchs. The ‘Age of Democratic Revolution’ did not usher in an age of republics.² The next great continent-wide revolution, the multiple upheavals of 1848–49, did not significantly thin out the royal panoply either. Instead, Europe remained solidly and deeply monarchical. Every European state that was newly formed in the nineteenth century – from Greece (1821) and Belgium (1830) to Bulgaria (1878) and Norway (1905) – chose to take the step into independence under a crowned head. When the continent went to war in 1914, France, Switzerland, San Marino and Portugal constituted the small republican exception that proved an overwhelmingly monarchical rule.³ While there were some anti-monarchical movements, and individual rulers were regularly subjected to fierce criticism, monarchy was not, on the whole, existentially threatened. Rather, hereditary monarchical regimes, in which the crown was passed on along a carefully guarded blood line, appear to have enjoyed a significant degree of popularity and occasionally affectionate forms of public endorsement. When the cataclysmic conflict that would end up sweeping away vast parts of monarchical Europe broke out in 1914, the continent’s crowns were not identical to those of 1789, but were, on the whole, in fine fettle.

* * *

Historians seeking to account for these persistence and loyalty phenomena have seized upon the importance of a media culture of monarchical celebrity. Carefully and strategically conceived, nurtured and disseminated, it was meant both to camouflage the dwindling of the princes’ command of hard power and to project and engender Untertanenliebe (subjects’ love).⁴ How monarchies operated within the nineteenth century’s evolving public spheres, which themes, narratives, images and methods they employed to communicate their message – either to their populations as a whole or to influential sub-groups – is now recognized as a key issue in the history of monarchical persistence in nineteenth-century Europe. The successes and failures of those acting their part either as members of Europe’s ‘Performing Monarchy’ or merely on its behalf will thus be one of the central concerns addressed in this volume.⁵

A complementary approach to explaining monarchical durability, which will also play a prominent role in the present volume, focuses on the adoption of monarchical constitutionalism across much of nineteenth-century Europe. There appear to be good reasons for why this happened. Recent studies have drawn attention to the significant problem-solving capacity offered by this political model. ‘Constitutional monarchy provided an answer to questions arising in various European countries’, Martin Kirsch has observed, pointing to issues such as ‘the financial problems of the absolutist state, national independence, structuring a new – or newly expanded – state or the integration of the people into the formation of a political will’. Dieter Langewiesche has provided a similar appraisal: he emphasizes the monarchs’ record of achieving, essentially through the granting of constitutions, an orderly completion of the necessary reform processes begun by the revolutions of the late eighteenth century. Moreover, Langewiesche credits the monarchs with having facilitated ‘the incremental concentration of power in a small number of states without triggering a great European war’, a feat which he recognizes as the most important achievement of the monarchs of nineteenth-century Europe. This point is echoed by Johannes Paulmann, who describes the constitutionally ‘converted’ European monarchies post-1815 as a ‘stabilizing element’ within a less bellicose international order and praises their cooperation within a ‘nascent “royal international”’ as ‘one element of the early nineteenth-century political equilibrium’. Little wonder, then, that Volker Sellin recently recognized the granting of monarchical constitutions as a legitimizing strategy aimed at securing acceptance of the monarchies amongst Europe’s citizenry.⁶

This volume takes the notion of a pan-European model of monarchical constitutionalism as the starting point for its analysis of the meanings of succession within the political culture of nineteenth-century Europe. By framing its topic in this fashion it is informed by the seminal work of Martin Kirsch who accords ‘monarchical constitutionalism’ – defined as rule by a single individual whose power is constrained by (codified) constitutional law – the status of a ‘European constitutional type’. It emerged in almost all of the continent’s constitutional states. Within this wider type, preponderant power could be located in different places. Yet regardless of whether monarch or parliament were dominant, whether a specific version of the model bore Bonapartist or corporate features, whether monarchies strove to become national institutions (or instead chose to remain sub- or multi-national entities), the nineteenth century witnessed a consistent preservation of the monarchical variant of constitutionalism – in preference to republican or collegial alternatives.⁷ A central explanation for this, Kirsch argues, can be found in the process of the ‘functionalization’ of the monarch on the basis of constitutional law. As long as he or she was effective, the bearer of the crown – functioning, variably, as a source of national integration, as a political mediator or as a bulwark against further political change – would be underpinned by a new mixture of legitimating principles. ‘A king’s rule was not accepted as God-given’, Kirsch concludes, ‘but was increasingly judged according to the success with which he fulfilled his function in state and nation’. By 1912, according to the liberal politician and writer Friedrich Naumann, this criterion had become so important that monarchy had to pass a quasi-democratic test. ‘The king himself cannot wish to be a minority-king for any length of time. Monarchs need majorities’, he wrote. ‘They live on being deemed necessary. Once this belief has gone, even the most ancient hereditary legitimacy will be no help’.⁸

The concept ‘monarchical constitutionalism’ does not, of course, imply that the theory and practice of monarchical systems all over the continent and across the decades were uniform, monolithic or unchanging. The experience of monarchy in Louis XVIII’s France was profoundly different from Christian IX’s Denmark or Edwardian Britain. The political environment changed as more and more constitutions were passed, electorates grew, states modernized and public spheres expanded. Using the wide definition of this constitutional type makes it possible, though, to identify at different points in time both the contrasts and commonalities that can be observed amongst the various monarchical systems that complied with Kirsch’s basic definition. It also facilitates the investigation of an overall phenomenon that, through its dynastic networks and connections, consistently reached across national borders, while – at the same time – contributing to a firmer and more explicitly articulated definition of distinct nation states.⁹ As the catalogue of their different functions within the constitutional state shows, monarchs could act as bulwarks delaying a widening of political participation or the granting of social demands. Yet, monarchical systems also provided the framework within which constitutional reform and political transformation could take place in an ordered and peaceful manner.

This contradictory and multivalent record indicates that the topic needs to be approached in an open way which eschews teleologies. Europe’s monarchies did not move uniformly in the direction of some constitutional beau ideal – neither towards the Whig version of a parliamentary monarchy epitomizing freedom and progress nor in the direction of the more authoritarian ‘monarchical principle’ Otto Hintze celebrated in 1911.¹⁰ Monarchies did not march towards the Great War and obsolescence, either. Such unilinear narratives are problematic, not least because of the great importance of individual agency within monarchical systems. After all, fulfilling ‘his function in state and nation’ proved to be well beyond many a monarch, while some others rose to the challenge. Besides, the topic is simply too multi-faceted for reductionist interpretations. Given their near-omnipresence and high political profile, the continent’s monarchical systems had to respond to, were shaped by and played a part in most aspects of the lives of Europeans in the nineteenth century. The resilience and adaptation of monarchy are woven into the very fabric of the century’s dramatic changes. With its traditional baggage and rigidities as well as its adoption of new techniques and ideas, nineteenth-century monarchy was not just a survivor, but also a child of its times.

* * *

The studies presented in this volume are informed by a sophisticated and growing body of research directed at the phenomenon of nineteenth-century monarchy. This is a relatively recent achievement, though. As late as 1989 David Cannadine still criticized royal scholarship for offering ‘too much chronicle and too little history, a surfeit of myth-making and a dearth of scholarly scepticism’. To correct this, he insisted, monarchy would have to be treated ‘as an historical problem and as an historical phenomenon’.¹¹ Following a long period of relative neglect, when the topic was either dismissed as reactionary, nostalgic and apologetic, or was frequently approached in overly orthodox ways,¹² the field has flourished in the last two decades. Between 1995 and 2001 a remarkable clutch of studies appeared which marked a step change in the examination of late-modern monarchy. By exploring imperial ceremony and imagery in late-modern Russia (Richard Wortman) and Japan (Takashi Fujitani), the influence of monarchical philanthropy on Britain’s civic life (Frank Prochaska), monarchical constitutionalism across Europe (Martin Kirsch), the melding of dynastic and international history in monarchical encounters (Johannes Paulmann) and the role of the monarchical state in the creation of sub-national identities in Germany (Abigail Green) these works have prepared the ground for much fuller, more problem-orientated research into monarchical topics.¹³

Since then, the investigation of the relationship between monarchy, the media and the public spheres created by them has attracted particular attention. John Plunkett, Martin Kohlrausch, Eva Giloi, Daniel Unowsky, Simone Mergen, Catherine Brice, Dominik Petzold, Michael Obst and Alexis Schwarzenbach, to name but a few, have explored the mutual interactions between monarchy and their various publics in Prussia-Germany, Bavaria, Saxony, Britain, Austria-Hungary, Italy and Belgium.¹⁴ The media analysed by these authors range from newspapers and books, to photographs, material objects, souvenirs, museums institutionalizing a royal politics of memory, (re)invented ceremonial, the staging of anniversaries, systematic philanthropy, public oratory and film. Their work shows monarchical systems that were fully engaged in modern forms of mass communication and, seeking to utilize them, found themselves at their mercy. While Queen Victoria and Prince Albert may have succeeded in generating and utilizing a ‘civic publicness’, the ‘logic of the mass media’ left Emperor Wilhelm II and his attempt to stage a ‘charismatic monarchy’ (M. Kohlrausch) mired in a series of scandals. He also, as Jost Rebentisch has shown, ended up lampooned in ever more aggressive cartoons.¹⁵ ‘A prince’s palace will always be more or less a glass house’, is how Berlin’s National-Zeitung summarized the new reality when commenting on a royal wedding anniversary in 1883.¹⁶ How those inside the palaces reacted to and sought to manipulate the public gaze, how well (or ineptly) they coped with and utilized what Heinz Dollinger described as the increasingly inescapable ‘publicity of their existence’ is now much better understood.

Silke Marburg’s study of the voluminous correspondence within Saxony’s royal family shows, though, that parallel levels of ‘interior communication’ (Binnenkommunikation) existed within dynasties. The discourses reflected in these sources complement and correct the expressions of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Stabilizing a Great Historic System in the Nineteenth Century? Royal Heirs and Succession in an Age of Monarchy
• Part I  Dynasties as Royal Families
• Part II  Courtly Contexts
• Part III  Overcoming Succession Crises
• Part IV  The Impact of Dynastic Deaths
• Part V  Heirs in the Great War
• Index