How Totalitarianism Buried the Monarchic Order: From the French Revolution to World War II

Introduction: The Old Order vs. the Revolutionary Tide

The period from the French Revolution through the end of World War II witnessed the dramatic dismantling of Europe’s old monarchic order and the rise of mass ideological regimes. In the traditionalist view espoused by thinkers like Hans-Hermann Hoppe, this transformation was no triumph of progress, but a civilizational tragedy. The centuries-old system of hereditary monarchy, rooted in Christian faith and organic social hierarchy, had provided stability, continuity, and a “spirit of a gentleman and the spirit of religion” that nurtured European civilization’s highest achievements. The revolutionary tide that began in 1789 swept away these thrones and altars, replacing them with regimes claiming to rule in the name of “the people” – but which all too often produced new forms of despotism and chaos. From the Jacobins of 1793 to the totalitarian dictators of the 20th century, the upheavals of this age can be seen as revolts against throne and altar that paradoxically led to even more absolute and ideologically driven forms of rule. In the words of Hoppe, modern mass democracy itself “has nothing to do with freedom” and is merely a “soft variant of communism”, carrying forward the egalitarian and centralizing impulse of those earlier revolutions. This deep dive will argue that the rise of totalitarian regimes marked the definitive end of the old monarchic systems – and that this was not a change for the better. Adopting an explicitly traditionalist and pro-monarchy stance, we will explore chronologically and thematically how the ancien régime (old order) was undermined and destroyed, and why monarchy’s fall was a civilizational loss that subsequent liberal democracies have not truly repaired.

The French Revolution: Proto-Communist Revolt Against Throne and Altar

When revolutionaries in Paris toppled King Louis XVI in 1789, they hailed it as the dawn of liberty and equality – but traditionalist observers at the time saw a far more sinister development. The Anglo-Irish statesman Edmund Burke, watching in horror from across the Channel, lamented that “the age of chivalry is gone… and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever”. In his eyes, the French Revolution’s ferocious attack on the monarchy and the Church destroyed the very foundations of civilized order: the inherited “loyalty to rank,” the “dignified obedience”, and the unspoken social bonds that had civilized European life. Age-old institutions – throne and altar – that had provided what Burke called “the unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations” were swept aside by a fanatical zeal for abstract “Rights of Man”. Burke warned that the Revolution’s radical ideology – with its slogans of equality and its scorn for tradition – would lead only to “the hoofs of a swinish multitude” trampling down the cultural and moral order maintained by nobility and clergy. His prediction proved grimly accurate.

Indeed, the French Revolution can be seen as a proto-communist uprising, a precursor to the 20th-century communist revolutions in both its aims and its methods. Church historian H. W. Crocker III notes the “anti-Catholic and proto-communist nature” of the French Revolution, which established state-sponsored secular “cults” to replace Christianity and pursued egalitarian fanaticism at gunpoint. During the Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the new regime invented an official Cult of Reason and even a Cult of the Supreme Being – effectively state religions of mankind and the nation. In the cathedral of Notre-Dame, Reason’s altar replaced Christ’s, and the revolutionaries exalted secular “martyrs” in place of saints. As Crocker observes, “in all this, the French Revolution presaged the state religions of Nazism and Communism”, for it embodied the same principles: mass murders, militant nationalism, collectivist militias, and lootings carried out in the name of abstract equality and the almighty State. In short, 1789 set the template for the totalitarian experiments to come: it was a utopian ideological revolution that destroyed an anointed king and embraced political violence as a means of remaking society.

By 1793, the “freedom” promised by 1789 had given way to the guillotine. King Louis XVI went to the scaffold, executed like a criminal by his former subjects. The Revolution that ostensibly began for human rights degenerated into a bloodbath of factional purges and mob justice. As one observer later noted, “the Revolution had consumed itself in its own blood, the revolutionaries putting each other to death in a diabolical debauch”. In 1794, at the height of the Terror, the guillotine claimed dozens of victims a day – nobles, priests, even commoners suspected of lukewarm revolutionary zeal. Far from liberating France, the revolutionaries plunged it into anarchy and tyranny; they created what Joseph de Maistre (a Savoyard diplomat and great counter-revolutionary philosopher) called “the Revolution that uses men” as mere instruments of an ideological fury. De Maistre, writing in 1796, argued that the Enlightenment’s militant “rationalist rejection of Christianity” was directly responsible for the “disorder and bloodshed” that engulfed France. In other words, by rejecting the old bonds of Throne and Altar – the idea that monarchy is divinely sanctioned and that society rests on religiously grounded morality – the revolutionaries unleashed an impersonal ideological terror. The supposed rule of Reason became in practice the rule of the Guillotine.

It is telling that the ultimate winner of the French Revolution was not any enlightened republic of equals, but Napoleon Bonaparte – a military dictator who crowned himself Emperor. By 1799, as that counter-revolutionary source wryly noted, the Revolution had literally “put each other to death” to the point of exhaustion, and Napoleon emerged from the ruins as a military dictator. In 1804, Bonaparte famously grasped the imperial crown and placed it on his own head, declaring himself Emperor of the French – implicitly accepting that France yearned for the stability of monarchy again, even if in a new form. The irony was rich: the Revolution that began by beheading a king ended by elevating a new emperor. This was a foretaste of the Caesarism that philosopher Oswald Spengler later warned would be the fate of modern mass politics. Spengler observed that the age of Money and Mass Democracy (which began in earnest with the French Revolution’s ideals) inevitably prepares the way for a strongman, “the Caesar.” In his analysis, the revolutionary-democratic era destroyed the old cultural order, but in doing so “it prepares the way for the rise of a new and overpowering figure, who he calls the Caesar”. When that Caesar arrives, Spengler said, “money collapses” and liberal democracy’s pretense of popular rule is replaced by autocratic force. Napoleon was a proto-Caesar, and many 20th-century dictators – from Lenin to Hitler – would follow the script he wrote of one-man rule emerging from revolutionary chaos.

For traditionalists, the lesson of the French Revolution was clear: tearing down a legitimate monarch in the name of utopian equality leads not to liberty, but to terror and dictatorship. The old monarchic system, whatever its imperfections, was an organic social order sanctioned by time and faith – a point Burke emphasized when he noted that the British crown’s authority rested not on abstract rights of voters but on hereditary succession bound by law and tradition. Joseph de Maistre went even further, contending that monarchy is the only stable form of government, both divinely ordained and anchored in the deep respect of the people over generations. He famously remarked that “men never respect what they have made themselves” – thus a government invented overnight by revolutionaries will command little true loyalty. “This is why an elective king never possesses the moral power of a hereditary sovereign,” de Maistre wrote, “because he does not possess that kind of greatness independent of men and that is the work of time.”. In other words, a monarch whose authority comes from long tradition and God’s sanction has a legitimacy and continuity no elected president or self-proclaimed revolutionary committee can hope to match. The French revolutionaries ignored this wisdom, and the result was an era of unprecedented turmoil. The French Revolution thus stands as a prototype of modern ideological revolutions, foreshadowing the communist and fascist upheavals that would topple thrones in the 20th century. It was, in essence, the beginning of the end for the Old Order.

Restoration and Reaction: The 19th-Century Struggle for the Old Order

After Napoleon’s fall in 1815, Europe’s monarchies strove to restore the old order. The Congress of Vienna reestablished kings and princes on many of the thrones Napoleon had usurped, inaugurating the period known as the European Restoration. Led by conservative statesmen like Austria’s Prince Metternich, the Restoration aimed to rewind the revolutionary clock: Bourbon kings returned to France and Spain, the Pope regained the Papal States, and the aristocracy tried to rebuild the ancien régime social fabric. For a few decades, it appeared the monarchical principle had triumphed over the chaos of revolution. Metternich’s Europe was a “Concert of Princes,” where dynasties guarded against both Bonapartist adventurers and radical agitators. Joseph de Maistre and his fellow Counter-Enlightenment thinkers – Louis de Bonald, François-René de Chateaubriand, and others – provided the intellectual ammunition for this reaction. They defended social hierarchy, throne, and altar with fervor. Maistre argued monarchy was not only God’s will but essential for social cohesion: “It is as impossible to imagine a human society without a sovereign as a hive without a queen,” he wrote, likening the king’s role to a natural law of human organization.

Yet the 19th century also witnessed powerful new challenges to monarchy from the lingering embers of 1789. The ideas of liberalism, nationalism, and socialism – all in different ways hostile to the dynastic Old Order – spread across Europe. In 1830, a liberal uprising in France unseated the reactionary Bourbon King Charles X. And in 1848, a tidal wave of revolutions swept the continent: from Paris to Vienna to Berlin, crowds took to the streets demanding constitutions, national self-determination, or social reform. These Revolutions of 1848 were largely inspired by republicanism and the ideology of popular sovereignty. Thrones shook: the Austrian Emperor was forced to abdicate, the French King Louis-Philippe was ousted and a Second Republic declared, and even Prussia’s king was compelled to promise a constitution. Although several monarchies weathered the storm (often by force of arms – the Habsburgs brutally crushed rebellions in Italy and Hungary, for example), the writing was on the wall. The old legitimist idea – that royal authority came from tradition and God – was increasingly being replaced by the modern idea that authority derives from “the people” or the nation.

The second half of the 19th century saw a temporary equilibrium. Monarchs still reigned over most European countries, but many had yielded significant power to elected parliaments or constitutional frameworks. Constitutional monarchy (as in Britain under Queen Victoria or in a liberalized Austrian Empire after 1867) became the compromise between the old principle and the new. Europe even experienced a flourish of economic and cultural greatness during the so-called fin de siècle (late 19th to early 20th century). Traditionalist scholars argue, however, that these successes occurred not because of nascent democracy or Enlightenment values, but largely thanks to the lingering strength of the old monarchical social order. As one analysis of Hoppe’s views notes, “the successes of the fin-de-siècle age… were not the product of liberal predominance or cosmopolitan virtues but of the ancien régime and its restrictive social order.” In other words, Europe’s economic growth, low crime, flourishing arts, and relative stability in the 19th century were achieved under societies still guided by aristocratic norms, strong family dynasties, and Christian moral frameworks – all legacies of monarchy. Even in constitutional monarchies, kings and nobles still set the tone and provided a unifying authority above partisan fray.

This period also gave rise to modern traditionalist intellectuals who extolled monarchy and aristocracy in more systematic terms. One such thinker, the English Catholic author William Cobbett, quipped that he preferred “the heaven of hierarchy to the hell of anarchy.” In more recent times (and from a libertarian angle), Hans-Hermann Hoppe has articulated why a monarchy can outperform a democracy in preserving social order and liberty. Hoppe argues that a hereditary monarch, seeing the realm as his privately owned intergenerational estate, will govern with a long-term perspective, acting as a caretaker for his descendants’ inheritance. A democratic politician, by contrast, is a “temporary caretaker” who has no lasting stake in the country’s capital value. Hoppe writes, “Instead of a prince who regards the country as his private property, a temporary caretaker is put in charge… He does not own the country, but as long as he is in office he is permitted to use it to his and his proteges’ advantage. … This will not eliminate exploitation. To the contrary, it will make exploitation less calculating and carried out with little or no regard to the capital stock, i.e., short-sighted.”. In Hoppe’s view, then, 19th-century monarchs – for all their faults – had an incentive to preserve the “capital stock” of their nations (social stability, infrastructure, culture), whereas the forthcoming class of 20th-century democratic and totalitarian rulers would recklessly consume that inheritance. This insight illuminates why traditionalists see the 19th century, under its kings and emperors, as a final Indian summer of Western civilization – a time when, despite pressures, order and continuity still largely prevailed.

By 1900, the monarchic principle was still visibly present: the glittering courts of Saint Petersburg, Vienna, Berlin, London, and Rome projected an aura of majesty. However, the monarchs themselves were sitting atop a volcano of modern ideological forces. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria-Hungary – they ruled multi-ethnic empires strained by nationalist movements and socialist agitation. When that volcano erupted in 1914, it would bury them all.

World War I: Twilight of the Kings

World War I (1914–1918) was the cataclysm that effectively ended the Old Order in Europe. The war was often called at the time “the war of the cousins,” highlighting how intertwined the royal houses were – for instance, Britain’s King George V, Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm II, and Russia’s Tsar Nicholas II were all first cousins. Yet family ties did not prevent a conflagration. By the war’s end, four great empires had crumbled: the Romanov dynasty in Russia, the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany, the Habsburg dynasty in Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Turkish sultanate. As one summary put it, “At 11 AM on November 11, 1918… the Russian, German, Austrian, and Ottoman Empires had crumbled, the royal landscape of Europe had changed forever.” In a matter of days in November 1918, Kaiser Wilhelm II abdicated and fled, Emperor Karl of Austria-Hungary released his peoples from allegiance (effectively ending the Habsburg throne), and the Ottoman Sultan was soon forced out as well. Centuries-old monarchies vanished almost overnight. A contemporary New York Times front page captured the astonishment of that moment – kings and kaisers reduced to exiles, ancient crowns cast into uncertainty.

The fall of these thrones was not a peaceful, organic reform – it was a collapse amid total war and revolution. In Russia, Tsar Nicholas II had already been overthrown in early 1917 amid military defeat and economic breakdown. The collapse of monarchy there led directly to the Bolshevik Revolution – arguably the most consequential totalitarian seizure of power in history. When Lenin’s communist faction seized control in late 1917, they executed the Tsar and his family and erected a one-party ideological state far more repressive than anything under the Tsars. As de Maistre’s adage predicted, the Russians “got the government they deserved” in a darkly ironic sense: the violent upheaval and loss of faith paved the way for Lenin’s Red Terror. The Russian Civil War and Bolshevik dictatorship that followed cost millions of lives. The old Christian monarchy of the Romanovs – whatever its flaws – never sought to exterminate whole classes of its subjects; the new atheist-communist regime openly did so in the name of creating a utopia for “the people.” Here was the French Revolution redux on an even grander scale: the abolition of monarchy led not to freedom but to the most thoroughgoing tyranny yet seen. Tsarist Russia had been an autocracy, but it was tempered by tradition, religion, and the Tsar’s patrimonial duty to his people; Bolshevik Russia was a messianic regime claiming infallible ideological authority to remake every aspect of life. The proto-communist terror of Robespierre had found its fulfillment in the fully communist terror of Lenin and Stalin.

Meanwhile, in Central Europe, the end of World War I saw the Habsburg and Hohenzollern monarchies replaced by fragile republics or fragmented nation-states. The Austro-Hungarian Empire splintered into a half-dozen new countries. The German Empire became the Weimar Republic, a parliamentary democracy that inherited enormous problems – economic crisis, national humiliation in defeat, and political polarization. Weimar’s constitution gave Germany the forms of a modern liberal democracy, but many traditionalists at the time (and since) viewed this as a poisoned chalice. The revered German jurist Carl Schmitt would later call Weimar’s liberal parliamentarism a “facade” behind which irreconcilable factions fought for power. The absence of the Kaiser’s steadying hand left Germany prey to both Communist and radical nationalist forces in the street. In a sense, the fall of monarchy created a legitimacy vacuum. As one historian quipped, “What a lot of gold braid – too bad all those mustachioed monarchs, many of whom were related, couldn’t agree never to go to war”. The war came, the kings fell, and into that vacuum stepped the demagogues.

Indeed, the interwar period (1918–1939) became a breeding ground for totalitarian movements that rushed to fill the void left by dethroned kings. In country after country, the promised liberal-democratic order failed to deliver stability or pride, and radical alternatives emerged. Most ominously, in Germany the vacuum was filled by Adolf Hitler, who consciously presented himself as a kind of populist “Caesar” figure to a disillusioned nation. Spengler’s prophecy from the 1920s seemed to come true: “Caesarism grows on the soil of democracy… The coming of Caesarism breaks the dictature of money and its political weapon, democracy.” In other words, the age of mass democracy that had dawned with the revolutionary era culminated in a new form of dictatorship – Caesarism – embodied by leaders like Hitler. It is notable that Hitler never considered restoring the Hohenzollern monarchy in any form; he, like other totalitarians, derived his authority from ideology and mass movement, not from dynastic legitimacy. The Nazi regime was explicitly anti-monarchist and anti-aristocratic in its ethos (despite tactical alliances with some old elites). Hitler styled himself “Führer” (Leader) of a Third Reich, a regime that claimed to succeed both the medieval Holy Roman (First Reich) and Bismarckian Hohenzollern Empires (Second Reich) – effectively appropriating the mantle of empire without any traditional royal lineage. This was monarchy’s replacement: a pseudo-religious cult of personality anchored in nationalist and racial ideology.

Similarly, in Italy, the parliamentary constitutional monarchy under the House of Savoy was hollowed out by Benito Mussolini’s Fascist movement. King Victor Emmanuel III remained on paper the head of state in the 1920s–30s, but Mussolini seized real power as Il Duce, relegating the king to a figurehead. Again, once the idea of the inviolable sovereignty of the king was broken (Italian monarchs had already been weakened by liberal forces and by their own hesitant response to Fascism), it was a small step for a charismatic dictator to usurp authority. And once Fascism fell in World War II, the Italian monarchy was swiftly abolished by referendum in 1946, as the Italian people associated the King with the disgraces of the war and Mussolini’s regime. Throughout Eastern Europe, a similar pattern played out by the end of World War II: ancient thrones toppled under twin pressures of fascism and communism. In Romania, King Michael was forced at Soviet gunpoint to abdicate in 1947 when the Communists took over. In Bulgaria, young Tsar Simeon II was deposed in 1946 after a Soviet-backed referendum declared a people’s republic. Yugoslavia’s monarchy was abolished in 1945 by Tito’s communist partisans. World War I had shaken the old order; World War II shattered what remained.

World War II: The Final Fall of Thrones

If World War I dealt monarchy a grievous blow, World War II administered the coup de grâce. By the time the guns fell silent in 1945, hereditary monarchy as a governing force had been effectively removed from most of the world, surviving only in a few pockets largely as a ceremonial relic. The victors and antagonists of WWII were almost entirely ideological states: on one side, the liberal democratic Allies (United States, Soviet Union – ironically communist, but allied – and Britain, though Britain was a monarchy it was a democracy at heart by then); on the other side, the fascist Axis powers (Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Imperial Japan – Japan did retain its Emperor but he was forced into surrender and stripped of divine status thereafter). The war’s outcome further discredited monarchy. Italy’s people formally abolished their monarchy in 1946, as noted, with the House of Savoy sent into exile. In 1947, under Soviet occupation, Bulgaria and Romania ousted their kings, transforming into communist “people’s republics”. Even far beyond Europe, the shockwaves toppled monarchies – for example, the imperial institution in China (the Qing dynasty) had fallen earlier in 1912, but WWII’s end saw the last Qing pretender (the puppet emperor Puyi in Manchukuo) captured and the Communist revolution brewing in China would soon eradicate any restoration. In the Middle East, the Ottoman Sultanate had ended after WWI; WWII’s aftermath saw the few remaining traditional monarchies in places like Egypt and Iraq come under pressure or coup in the 1950s as revolutionary nationalism spread. Monarchy as a system of government had been routed.

In Europe, after 1945, only a handful of constitutional monarchies remained, mainly in the West and Scandinavia – Britain, the Netherlands, Belgium, the Scandinavian kingdoms, etc. But these were monarchies in form, not in substance: kings and queens who “reigned but did not rule.” The real power lay with elected parliaments and ministers, as per the liberal democratic model. As one historical overview notes, “Most of Europe’s monarchies were abolished either during or following World War I or World War II, and the remaining monarchies were transformed into constitutional monarchies.” The ancient concept of monarchy – a sovereign who actually governs and serves as ultimate guardian of his people’s welfare – had no real place in the post-WWII order. In a sense, the destruction of the old monarchies was completed by 1945: the line of continuity connecting modern Europe to its medieval and classical past was broken.

The end of WWII also marked the rise of two ideological superpowers – the United States and the Soviet Union – whose global rivalry defined the next era. Both of these powers were revolutionary republics by heritage (the US from 1776, the USSR from 1917) and deeply hostile to old-world aristocracy and monarchy. The new international order (the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Union beginnings) was built on ideological principles of egalitarianism, secularism, and democracy. Monarchy was relegated to a quaint tradition, tolerated only insofar as it was politically toothless. Kings who remained were often reduced to performing symbolic duties – ribbon-cutting ceremonies and moral encouragement – while real governance was in the hands of elected officials or, increasingly, bureaucratic technocrats. As a Polish scholar observed of this period: “Immediately after the war, six kingdoms ceased to exist and became republics”, fundamentally altering Europe’s political landscape.

For traditionalists, the destruction of monarchy by mid-century was nothing less than the destruction of Europe’s soul. Not only were individual royal families deposed; an entire worldview was vanquished. The monarchic worldview had held that society is an organic, intergenerational covenant, as Burke wrote – “a partnership between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” The king was the linchpin of that partnership, the steward of the nation’s legacy and the father of his people. With monarchy gone, this sense of organic unity was supplanted by the modern doctrine that a nation is merely a collection of individuals or classes vying for power. One by one, the old kingdoms fell – often accompanied by an unsettling iconoclasm. Crowns and sceptres were cast into museums, coats of arms scraped off public buildings, and even calendars and street names were changed in some countries to sever ties with the monarchical past (the French Revolution had started that trend by inventing a new calendar and renaming streets, a pattern repeated by communists in Russia and elsewhere).

To be sure, some ordinary people welcomed the demise of monarchy, blaming kings for the wars and crises. But a great many also felt a profound sense of loss. Memoirs and literature of the late 1940s frequently evoke the sentiment of finis Europae – “the end of Europe” – as a civilization of elegance and order. For example, the writer Vladimir Nabokov, an exile from Tsarist Russia, lamented the “plain prose” of the new epoch replacing the “ornate canto” of the old. In more political terms, conservative philosopher Russell Kirk later wrote that Europe was “a series of beautiful old tapestries, rent and fading” after the World Wars – the implication being that the fabric of European high culture (much of it nurtured under monarchic patronage) was irreparably torn.

After 1945: Liberal Democracy and the Loss of Tradition

In the post-World War II era, liberal democracy firmly established itself as the dominant political system in the West (while communism dominated the East). To traditionalist critics, this new order – ostensibly the antithesis of totalitarianism – nonetheless carried forth many of the same revolutionary DNA that had toppled the monarchies. Liberal democracies were founded on the Enlightenment principles of individual equality, secularism, and popular sovereignty. While these sound noble, thinkers like Hans-Hermann Hoppe and other traditionalists have unmasked serious flaws in the modern democratic state. Hoppe provocatively calls modern democracy “a soft variant of communism, and rarely in the history of ideas has it been taken for anything else.” His reasoning is that both communism and democracy rest on a rejection of natural hierarchy and “universal suffrage” leveling that enables the masses (or their demagogic leaders) to expropriate the productive and reshape society arbitrarily. Indeed, Hoppe notes that wherever democracy has spread, it has led to higher taxation, perpetual public debt, inflation of currency, endless regulation, and the erosion of property rights. In his scathing assessment, “the American model – democracy – must be regarded as a historical error, economically as well as morally. Democracy promotes shortsightedness, capital waste, irresponsibility, and moral relativism… It leads to permanent compulsory wealth redistribution and legal uncertainty. It is counterproductive. It promotes demagoguery and egalitarianism. It is aggressive and potentially totalitarian…”. This dire verdict echoes the warnings of earlier reactionaries: democracy, lacking the restraining hand of monarchic authority and religion, tends toward mob rule and the expansion of state power in pursuit of ever-shifting egalitarian goals.

In practical terms, the post-WWII liberal democracies did bring more personal freedoms and consumer prosperity than the brutal totalitarian regimes they opposed. Traditionalists do not deny that one can vote for one’s leaders or speak one’s mind more freely in London or Washington than in Hitler’s Berlin or Stalin’s Moscow. However, they argue that these freedoms have been hollowed out by a loss of cultural cohesion and moral grounding that the old monarchic-Christian order had provided. Hoppe, for instance, points out that under democratic conditions the natural social hierarchy – what he calls “natural elites” – is undermined. In every society, he notes, there tend to be a few individuals or families distinguished by talent, wisdom, heroism, and wealth, who become community leaders. In a monarchy, such natural elites often formed the aristocracy and provided leadership grounded in personal character and intergenerational responsibility. Under mass democracy, by contrast, leadership is determined by popularity and propaganda, often favoring those most adept at demagoguery. As Hoppe puts it bluntly, “What is true, just, and beautiful is not determined by popular vote. The masses everywhere are ignorant, short-sighted, motivated by envy, and easy to fool.” (This stark appraisal recalls Plato’s ancient critique of democracy as mob rule by the uninformed.)

Without a monarch to serve as a unifying father-figure and moral exemplar, post-war societies increasingly looked to ideologies and bureaucratic governments as their guides. The result, many traditionalists argue, has been a continuous drift towards what some call “soft totalitarianism” – a pervasive state presence in life, albeit without the overt terror of a Stalin. The sprawling welfare state and regulatory regime of modern democracies extend government influence into areas of family, business, and community life that were once governed by private or local authority. Taxes in democratic nations climbed to levels unthinkable under kings (often 30-50% of GDP, whereas even absolutist monarchs rarely took more than 10%). Bureaucracies, rather than benevolent patriarchs, now manage most aspects of life. Joseph de Maistre’s feared scenario of a society run by abstract theories rather than organic traditions seems vindicated: “If the rationalist rejection of Christianity was responsible for the bloodshed of 1789,” he warned, then a secular polity would continually be vulnerable to new forms of disorder. In today’s liberal democracies, we indeed see social fragmentation, cultural relativism, and a loss of shared values – trends that traditionalists link to the eclipse of the old anchored institutions of Throne and Altar.

One striking example often cited is the European Union. The EU, a product of the post-WWII desire for peace and unity, has evolved into a massive bureaucratic superstate run by technocratic commissioners in Brussels. To traditionalist eyes, the EU’s governance is impersonal, secular, and unmoored from Europe’s heritage. It issues edicts on everything from the curvature of bananas to the tax rates of nations, diminishing the sovereignty not only of nations (many of which were once monarchies) but also of peoples to govern themselves in traditional ways. The EU’s very structure – unelected commissions, remote central banks, and a Parliament with relatively weak powers – has been called “democracy without a demos,” rule by administrators in the name of an abstraction (“Europe”). Where once a prince or local lord might address community needs personally, now faceless Eurocrats impose regulations from afar. This, argue pro-monarchy thinkers, is in some ways more arbitrary and aloof than the old aristocratic rule. The latter was at least grounded in local knowledge, noblesse oblige, and a sense of reciprocal loyalty between ruler and subject (a king was expected to be the “first servant of the state,” as Frederick the Great said, and peasants often had personal affection for “Good King So-and-So”). The new liberal order replaces that with what Hoppe describes as rule by interest groups and vote-buying coalitions, leading to incessant government growth as each faction tries to plunder the public till.

From a moral and cultural standpoint, the post-1945 West has seen trends that alarm traditionalists: declining birthrates, breakdown of the family unit, loss of religious faith, and a culture often fixated on instant gratification and novelty. These are seen as the social consequences of dethroning both God and king – the twin pillars that once buttressed a stable social order. Hans-Hermann Hoppe even argues that democracy undermines standards of beauty and excellence, leading to a cultural leveling. He contends that in a mass society, art and education succumb to base tastes since political leaders cater to majority preferences; by contrast, historical monarchies patronized high arts and grand projects (from Baroque architecture to classical music) as a point of princely pride. Indeed, one could note that the most sublime cathedrals, paintings, and musical compositions of Europe came from the monarchic era, not the democratic. The “democratic age” has given us much technological progress, but arguably a drab uniformity in aesthetic and spiritual life – what some call the “McDonaldization” of culture. In the eyes of a traditionalist, the sacral aura of monarchy (the idea of kingship as a reflection of divine order) had a elevating effect on civilization; once that was gone, society inevitably became more materialistic and profane.

To be sure, these judgments are controversial. Many people in the West value their democratic rights and would not trade them for a king. But the purpose of this deep dive is to articulate the traditionalist pro-monarchy perspective, and from that angle, the past two centuries appear as a tragic story of decline. The French Revolution was the opening act – a revolt that, in the name of liberty, unleashed terror. The 19th-century saw a valiant but ultimately doomed rearguard action by monarchs and their allies to preserve the old virtues. World War I and II then erased the remaining bastions of the old order, ushering in an age of mass states and total ideologies. Communism and Nazism represented the most demonic extremes of the anti-monarchical impulse – each a kind of secular religion or “state cult” that demanded total obedience in absence of the king. And even after those extremes burned themselves out in 1945, the secular egalitarian ethos persisted in the form of liberal democratic welfare states and transnational bureaucracies. The result, as Hoppe and others argue, is a world where quantity trumps quality in leadership, where the timeless is sacrificed for the trendy, and where social order must be enforced by ever-expanding laws and surveillance since the natural loyalties and reverence that once kept society cohesive have been weakened.

Conclusion: The Case for the Monarchic Tradition

In light of this historical arc, the rise of totalitarian regimes can be seen not as an aberration, but as the fulfillment of the revolutionary crusade that began in 1789. The guillotine in Paris, the firing squads of Lenin, and the gas chambers of Hitler all issued from a hubristic attempt to eradicate the past and engineer a new society in defiance of human nature. They marked the end of the old monarchic systems in the most brutal way imaginable. Hans-Hermann Hoppe does not mince words about the legacy of the democratic-revolutionary age: it is, in his view, an era of “civilizational decline” in which true liberty and order have suffered. He and other modern traditionalists (like Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Russell Kirk, or the late Roger Scruton) invite us to reconsider the virtues of the pre-revolutionary order. Monarchy, for all its historical peccadilloes, rested on the idea of a transcendent source of authority (whether God or the weight of history). This constrained rulers from acting as mere self-interested demagogues. A king was obliged to think of his realm generationally – as an inheritance from his ancestors to pass to his descendants – a perspective inherently opposed to the short-termism of vote-driven politics. The old royal families often fostered a sense of paternalism and care for their subjects (the many charitable works of kings and queens, their role as arbiters above faction, etc., testify to this). In contrast, the leaders of modern mass states often behave like administrators of a vast machine, bound by no permanent loyalty to any one people or place, easily swayed by lobbyists or ideological fashions.

The traditionalist argument is not that every king was virtuous or every democracy wicked – history is more complex. Rather, it is that the institutional framework of monarchy is more compatible with human scale, cultural continuity, and deep-rooted liberty than the institutional framework of mass democracy or totalitarianism. Monarchies developed slowly over centuries, adapting custom and precedent; they carried the memories of a people. Totalitarian regimes and even modern democracies tend to be built anew on abstract blueprints, discarding the inherited wisdom of ages. Joseph de Maistre once quipped, “Constitutions are not made, they grow.” The monarchy was the living embodiment of that principle – the crown as an evolving crown of society’s organic growth. Revolutions tried to “make” society anew, and the disastrous results are written in the gulags and killing fields of the 20th century.

Today, in 2025, most of the world regards the old monarchic order as a relic – interesting for tourists or history books, perhaps, but irrelevant to modern governance. Yet the very dissatisfaction many feel with present-day politics – the sense of fragmentation, of cynicism, of a lack of higher purpose – indicates that something vital may have been lost when we “murdered kings.” Hans-Hermann Hoppe provocatively suggests that we must even now re-evaluate democracy’s supposed sanctity, noting that “there can be no tolerance toward democrats and communists in a libertarian [traditional] order. They will have to be physically separated and expelled from society.” (a shocking statement to liberal ears, but one that reflects the depth of his conviction that those ideologies are inherently destructive). While one need not endorse such extreme measures, Hoppe’s underlying point is that true liberty and order might require a return to natural hierarchy and decentralized authority – principles well embodied in the historical monarchies. In fact, some contemporary movements in Europe nostalgically look to their former royal houses for a sense of stability and national identity amidst chaotic politics. For example, opinion polls occasionally show a significant minority of Serbians or Romanians open to restoring the crown, seeing the monarch as a unifying non-partisan figure above corrupt politics.

Even beyond the practical, there is a spiritual dimension. Monarchy was intertwined with the sacramental vision of society – the king was often literally anointed with holy oil at coronation, symbolizing that his authority was under God. The aura of monarchy thus reminded society of the vertical dimension: that we stand not only in horizontal relations of power with each other, but under higher truths and duties. The totalitarian and liberal regimes that displaced monarchy all, in their own ways, rejected that vertical sacred order. The Nazis and communists substituted their own secular cults (the “Leader,” the “Party”) and actively persecuted religion; liberal democracies ostensibly allow religion but have steadily relegated it to the private sphere, emptying public life of the sacred. The result, many argue, is a spiritual void. Society becomes a mere contract or marketplace, lacking the mystique that enthroned kings once embodied – the sense that “some things are worth revering.” As Burke feared, “we have made no discoveries in moral philosophy” better than what tradition taught, yet the revolutionary mindset presumed it could start morality from scratch, and we are living with the consequences.

In summation, the rise of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century was the apotheosis of the anti-monarchical revolution that began in the late 18th. In overthrowing the old monarchies, the revolutionaries claimed to be inaugurating an age of freedom, equality, and reason. What they in fact ushered in was an age of ideological fanaticism, mass mobilization, and unprecedented state power over the individual. The old monarchic systems, for all their imperfections, appear in hindsight as comparatively restrained, lawful, and humane. Kings had personal, vested interest in the prosperity of their realms – their family name and honor depended on it. Totalitarian dictators and even short-term elected politicians, by contrast, had (and have) perverse incentives toward short-term exploitation and consolidation of power at any cost. The historical record of the 20th century – two horrendous world wars, democides and genocides by radical regimes, cultural decay under permissive democracies – reinforces the traditionalist conviction that the overthrow of monarchic order was a civilizational wrong turn.

As we look at our contemporary liberal democracies and the supranational technocracies governing much of the world, the traditionalist asks: Are we truly better off? Yes, we have material wealth and certain individual liberties. But we also see social disintegration, loss of common purpose, and a political life often reduced to cynicism and tribal populism. Perhaps the time has come to remember the virtues of the old monarchy: continuity, legitimacy, duty, and a check on the whims of the masses. Hans-Hermann Hoppe provocatively urges a radical decentralization – a world of small sovereignties, maybe even a return to “natural elites” and “voluntary monarchies” in communities. While the clock cannot simply be turned back to 1788, the principles that guided the monarchic order – respect for hierarchy, tradition, faith, and property – are perennial. They may yet provide guidance for building a more humane future in the shell of a disenchanted world.

In conclusion, the story from the French Revolution to the end of World War II is one of an old world dying and a new one struggling to be born. The death of the old monarchic world was the birth pang of totalitarian horrors and, eventually, the current liberal order. But rather than viewing this as linear “progress,” a traditionalist, pro-monarchy perspective views it as regression in many aspects: from order to chaos, from depth to surface, from Legitimacy to Legality. The rise of totalitarian regimes truly marked the end of the line for the old monarchies – but it also proved, in blood and tears, the folly of abandoning the inherited wisdom of the ages. As Burke admonished revolutionaries long ago, “It is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society.” The monarchic edifice had answered those purposes for centuries. Its destruction opened the door to nightmares. It is now up to us, the inheritors of a post-monarchical world, to rediscover enduring truths and perhaps rebuild some of what was lost – not literal thrones, maybe, but the timeless ideals of order, virtue, and reverence that thrones once represented. Only by doing so can we hope to avoid the totalitarian temptations that lurk whenever society becomes unmoored from its past.

Sources:

• Burke, Edmund. Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).

• Crocker III, H. W., quoted in Joseph Pearce, “Anti-Catholic Revolution and Catholic Revival,” The Imaginative Conservative (2024).

• Pearce, Joseph. ibid..

• de Maistre, Joseph. Considerations on France (1796) and other writings.

• Spengler, Oswald. The Decline of the West (1918-22). .

• Unofficial Royalty – “Effects of World War I on European Monarchies”.

• “Monarchies in Europe – Wikipedia” (accessed 2025).

• Hans-Hermann Hoppe. Democracy: The God That Failed (2001); and “Reflections on State and War” (2006).

• Hoppe, Hans-Hermann. “Natural Elites, Intellectuals, and the State” (Mises Institute, 2006).

• Janek Wasserman on Hoppe’s view of fin-de-siècle achievements.

• Wikiquote compendium of Burke’s Reflections.

• Reddit (r/monarchism and historical forums) for anecdotal references on post-WWII abolition of monarchies.

• Royal Collection Trust (RCT) and Wikipedia for the “Nine Sovereigns at Windsor” (1910) photo context.

• Hoppe’s interview quotes on democracy and communism.

(All citations have been preserved in the text in the format 【source†lines】, and the information has been derived from the connected references as noted.)