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Bishop Bossuet
Bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet was a prominent orator and intellectual at the court of Louis XIV of France, and a strong supporter of the Gallican movement which argued for royal supremacy over the national church, as well as being an advocate of the divine right of monarchs to rule. In reward for his loyal services, he was made tutor to the Dauphin in 1670, in which capacity he wrote his “Discourse on Universal History,” (1681) a text wherein he likens the role of sovereign to the divine. -
Political Balance in Europe
Gustav III of Sweden was considered an ideal of enlightened despotism in the 18th century. A patron of art & culture, he introduced a number of reforms aimed at political and economic liberalization at the expense of the aristocracy. An avid essayist and intellectual, he wrote a number of well-received works, famously including his treatise on “Political Balance in Europe” (1786). -
Comte de Maistre
Joseph de Maistre was the intellectual leader of the reactionary, ultra-royalist movement that emerged during the Napoleonic Wars and the Restoration, which utterly rejected Enlightened & Revolutionary values in favour of a return to religious-absolutist monarchy on the 17th century model, foreshadowing the Romantic nationalists& conservatives of the early 19th century. His seminal work was the “Essay on the generative principle of political constitutions” (1809). -
Walter Bagehot
Walter Bagehot was a prominent essayist and intellectual of Victorian England. His most celebrated work, “the English Constitution” (1867), explored the role of the constitutional monarch in the British system, and typified the trends of moderate and liberal political thought in the European monarchies of the late 19th century. -
Russian Electoral Law of 1907
The electoral law promulgated in 1907 by the Tsar’s government followed the coup of Stolypin which ended the brief liberalization of the Russian political system following the 1905 Revolution. It largely restricted the franchise to the wealthy & conservative rural landlords, thereby negating any power of the new electoral system to curtail the Tsar’s authority. -
Heinrich Bruning
Heinrich Bruning served as Chancellor of Germany between 1930 & 1932. A polarizing figure in historiography, his motives and ideology remained opaque and contested among historians in the 20th century until the publication of his Memoirs in 1970, wherein he claimed to have been a steadfast monarchist acting in the interests of a Hohenzollern restoration. He was one of the last German monarchists to occupy so prominent a position in public life following the establishment of the Republic.
