Synopsis
Explores the interwar movements to restore Europe's deposed royal houses, examining their political significance and influence on global power dynamics.
Among the great hidden narratives of twentieth-century history are the movements in Europe which, between the two world wars, aimed to restore the royal and imperial houses forced out of power in 1918 (or, in Portugal’s case, eight years earlier). These efforts acquired media coverage and, often, strategic importance far greater than would be now supposed from the cursory, often dismissive, treatment which they have received from most historians since.
Campaigns to reinstate such dynasties as the Hohenzollerns, the Habsburgs, the Wittelsbachs, the Braganças, and even France’s House of Orléans, were taken seriously at the highest governmental and journalistic levels in London and Paris, not to mention the Holy See. Upon the whole phenomenon, this book seeks to shed light. It discusses both the phenomenon’s ‘soft power’ manifestations (the designs of newspaper tycoon Lord Rothermere upon the Hungarian throne for his son, for instance) and the phenomenon’s ‘hard power’ manifestations, among which probably the most dramatic were the successful monarchical campaigns in Albania and Greece.
With a cast that includes not only the monarchist candidates themselves but Churchill, Lloyd George, Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco, this is a drama that embraces a continent and forces thorough reappraisals of events which we thought we knew. No one can read it without acquiring a firmer grasp of political power's very nature and the sheer narrowness of the gap between victory and defeat.
About the Author
Historian and organist Robert James Stove is the author of César Franck: His Life and Times (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2012), The Unsleeping Eye: Secret Police and Their Victims (New York City: Encounter Books, 2002), and Prince of Music: Palestrina and His World (Sydney: Quakers Hill Press, 1990). His articles have been frequently published in The American Conservative (of which he is a Contributing Editor), Modern Age, The Musical Times, The Sydney Organ Journal, Organ Australia, and elsewhere, while his organ-playing has been captured on five CDs all available on the Ars Organi label. In 2021, he was awarded his PhD in musicology from Sydney University, having devoted his doctoral thesis to Sir Charles Villiers Stanford’s organ compositions. He lives in Melbourne with his beloved cat.
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