The Great Survivors

Peter Conradi

ISBN: 978-1-84688-234-0

Alma Books

Peter Conradi, by being a kind of insider and by attending to his research, made quite a success of The King’s Speech, the best-seller that as a film won an Oscar. He returns to the territory with this look at the entire phenomenon of European monarchy, in an attempt to understand the archaic anomaly; and why and how it survives in post-industrial democracies where unearned deference is otherwise strictly a thing of the past. We aren’t just dropped in it, though: the book starts off with a race through the history; the rise and fall and rise again - opening with the highly visual Final Walk of King Louis-Auguste, followed by his wife Marie Antoinette. This might equally be the way to open the story if you were telling it as a film instead of a book. It could have been the beginning of the end for European monarchy(if Cromwell’s men hadn’t already done that in London a long time before), but in fact after this, whenever a country was faced with a choice of options including having an unelected toff as head of state they (including France after the revolution) tended to re-establish, and even newly created countries like Belgium wanted one, too. Today the subject has been mooted in Scotland (not entirely unseriously) as independence is news again.

We know, though, why newspapers and the rest of the news media pay so much attention to the royals. It sells. But the rest of it remains a complex puzzle. This book makes very good sense of the reasons for monarchy's survival into the twenty-first century.