MONARCHY

the undivided sovereignty or rule of a single person. The term is applied to states in which the supreme authority is vested in a single person, the monarch, who is the permanent head of the state. The word has, however, outlived this original meaning and is now used, when used at all, somewhat loosely of states ruled by hereditary sovereigns, as distinct from republics with elected presidents, or for the monarchical principle, as opposed to the republican principle. The most conspicuous example of an elective monarchy was the Holy Roman Empire, but in Europe all monarchies were, within certain limits, originally elective. After the introduction of Christianity, the essential condition of the assumption of sovereign power was not so much kinship with the reigning family as consecration by the divine authority of the church. The purely hereditary principle was of comparatively late growth, the outcome of obvious convenience, exalted under the influence of various forces into a religious or quasi-religious dogma. The old idea of monarchythat of the prince as representing within the limits of his dominions the monarchy of God over all thingsculminated in the 17th century in the extreme version of the doctrine of the divine right of kings, and was defined in the famous dictum of Louis XIV: L'tat c'est moi! (I am the state!). The conception of monarchy was derived through Christianity from the theocracies of the eastern Mediterranean and of Rome, though Germanic tribal concepts of kingship were also incorporated into the medieval monarchy. The ancient Greeks knew monarchy mainly in two forms: the Homeric and the Macedonian. In the first the king was a hereditary ruler whose authority was intimately bound up with his prowess in battle. In the second he was an imperial ruler who acquired divine properties, as in Hellenistic times his conquests, like Alexander's, took him farther away from the restraints of Greek rationalism and democracy into an Oriental despotism. Monarchy was the underlying principle of the medieval empire and also of the medieval papacy. As the unity of medieval Christendom broke up, monarchy acquired a new basis. The monarch was ideally placed to provide the centralized power needed by the new nation-states of the 16th and 17th centuries. Frequently the monarch became an absolute ruler, the only source of law, the only mainspring of administration. But in England, Tudor absolutism retained parliamentary institutions, so that when the Stuarts endeavoured to assert the divine right of kingship they were frustrated by forces that were determined to set limits to monarchical power (see Rights, Bill of). On the continent of Europe monarchical absolutism in general continued to thrive in the 18th century, accommodating itself even to the first impact of the Enlightenment in the form of the benevolent despot, of whom Frederick the Great of Prussia and Catherine the Great of Russia were notable examples. In 1789, however, the French Revolution dealt it a shattering blow. Even when, as in many countries, the institution survived or when, as in others, it was restored in the reaction after the Napoleonic Wars, it was almost always in a modified form. In Latin America republics rose on the ruins of the Spanish and Portuguese empires; Brazil was unique in retaining a monarchy down to 1889. World War I brought ruin to those monarchs who had retained so much personal power that they could not escape blame for defeat or social injustice. Among such victims were the monarchies of Russia, Germany, and Austria-Hungary. In Spain the monarchy was overthrown in 1931 though the constitution of 1947 still called Spain a kingdom, even while proclaiming General Francisco Franco as chief of state. King Juan Carlos I succeeded Franco as head of state in November 1975, and the constitution of December 1978 proclaimed Spain a parliamentary monarchy. In China the Manchu dynasty had been overthrown as late as 1912. In Japan defeat produced a voluntary abandonment of the doctrine of imperial divinity; by the constitution of 1946 (adopted 1947) the emperor became merely the symbol of the state and of the unity of the people. In Europe monarchy survived in Britain, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium, and The Netherlands, and in Greece until a military junta there decreed the monarchy's end in 1973. Denmark was the last of the European monarchies to abandon absolutism (in 1849). All the Scandinavian monarchies were notable for their scrupulous constitutionalism and their democratic unpretentiousness. The pattern of all these limited monarchies was set by Britain, the personal prestige and longevity of Queen Victoria playing an important part.