An American on Monarchy

Colonel Bogle reviews Charles Coulombe's 2025 defence of Christian monarchy. I have read the book and can't recommend it enough!

From Crisis

By James Bogle, KM, TD, Col(Retd)

The Compleat Monarchist by Charles Coulombe is an erudite, engaging, and comprehensive defense of a Christian monarchy from an American perspective.

While at first it might seem unusual for an American to be writing in praise of monarchy, in fact, a scholarly American writer may, ironically, be in a better position than many others to praise this most ancient of institutions.

So it is with Charles Coulombe, author of the recently-published book, The Compleat Monarchist; a partly French-Canadian American; and possibly the foremost American writer on the subject of monarchy. 

His connection with the British monarchy—through his French-Canadian ancestry—together with his American nationality, allow him to view the world’s various monarchies with a degree of objectivity that the denizens of those monarchies might lack.

Not that he is nonpartisan. He is a firmly convinced monarchist, and for very sound and rational reasons; but, being an American citizen, he is not tempted to favor one dynasty over another out of mere national prejudice.

Instead, he takes the entirely rational view that if one is to have a monarchy—and that monarchy is to be hereditary, rather than elective—then it ought to be the legitimate line.

He takes the entirely rational view that if one is to have a monarchy-and that monarchy is to be hereditary, rather than elective.Tweet This

He views all the current monarchies, the various contenders to reestablish a monarchy, and the current occupants or would-be occupants, with an entirely objective eye save that, being himself Roman Catholic, his personal preference, again for good reasons, is for Catholic monarchy. 

However, he maintains an entirely open and objective view of all other monarchies, whether Protestant, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or whatever. His Canadian background gives him a particular affection for, and loyalty to, the British monarchy, which is Anglican, not Catholic.

He then proceeds to discuss, analyze, recount, retell, and muse over a whole range of ideas and subjects relating to monarchy, interlaced with learned literary and historical allusions, tales and stories, anecdotes, illustrations, poetical interludes, and social and political theorizing so as to produce an immensely readable book, a vade mecum for all comers, whether they be monarchists or not.

The book is also favored with a laudatory foreword by English Dominican scholar Rev. Fr. Aidan Nicholls, O.P.

Weaving in his lifelong interest in Oxford’s Inkling set of renowned scholars—J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams, and others—the author treats us to an insight into their varied views on monarchy, linking the same to some of their more famous works, such as Tolkien’s famous trilogy The Lord of the Rings, Lewis’ masterpiece That Hideous Strength, and Williams’ 1938 poem Taliessin through Logres.

Not that he restricts himself to the Anglophone world—far from it. He ranges across the whole of European history and culture, back to its origins, and across to the Middle Eastern, Asian, and Far Eastern world to consider monarchies in Bhutan, Japan, Tibet, China, and beyond.

Inevitably, because it has unquestionably been the most influential of monarchies, he focuses on European Christendom, whose central sheet anchor was—from the Edict of Thessalonica of February 27, 380, of Roman Emperor Theodosius I—the newly baptized Roman Empire. He reminds us that baptism into Christianity was made coterminous with becoming a full subject of that same Empire.

We are several times reminded of what were the chief characteristics of that Christian Empire: the altar, the throne, the principle of subsidiarity or devolving of power, solidarity among all the estates and classes in society, and, last but not least, the idea of Christendom or the res publica Christiana.

Although he does not say so, this latter idea derives, first, from the words of Christ Himself, “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s” (Matthew 22:21) and, second, from the 494 letter of Pope St. Gelasius I the Great, titled Famuli Vestrae Pietatis, addressed to Eastern Emperor Anastasius Diocorus I.

Scholars have since called this blueprint for Christendom the “Gelasian dyarchy,” dividing the government of Christendom between the spiritual power and the temporal power, each having the responsibility to ensure the good government of the commonwealth and to further the common good of all.

Scholars have since called this blueprint for Christendom the “Gelasian dyarchy,” dividing the government of Christendom between the spiritual power and the temporal power….Tweet This

The author then explains the nature of that same Christendom, which has given the world most of what we now recognize as the benefits of civilization in art, architecture, law, medicine, science, education, universities, schools, government and constitution, defense, engineering, scholarship, and, of course, religion.

By 800, that Christian Roman Empire had become what would be later called the Holy Roman Empire, beginning with the crowning of Charlemagne, the “father” of Europe, on Christmas Day of that year by Pope St. Leo III. He had been elected the new Western Emperor by the people, nobility, and clergy of the city of Rome. 

Ever after, the imperial office was an elective office, like that of the pope, the Roman electors of both offices later delegating their voting power to electoral colleges (an idea later copied by the American Constitution).

Indeed, one of the author’s many themes is the extent to which so many elements of that ancient Roman Christendom have endured to this day, not only in modern Europe but also in America because of its European origins.

In a chapter headed Sacrum Imperium, he reminds us that the Church universally prayed for the Christian Roman emperors, from the earliest times, on Good Friday and Easter Saturday until as late as 1954.

The emperor-elect was crowned and anointed by the pope or his delegate, made a sub-deacon, and sang the Gospel at his coronation Mass. A description is provided from The Liturgical Year by the Rt. Rev. Dom Prosper Gueranger, Abbot of Solesmes, who refounded Western monasticism after the disaster of the French Revolution.

The author rightly reminds us that all other Christian kingdoms, not least the British Empire, copied much from the old Holy Roman Empire—including its coronation rite, recently seen in the coronation of King Charles III, Britain’s current monarch. 

Likewise, too, did the Greeks and Russians, albeit Eastern Orthodox, copy closely ceremonies of the Western Empire—Tsarist Russia, indeed, claiming to be the successor thereof.

The author quotes a homily given on May 7, 2005, by the late Pope Benedict XVI when he, the pontiff, reminded us that “all Catholics are in some way Roman.” He quotes much from the English legal scholar and professor Viscount James Bryce, whose work The Holy Roman Empire is a primary work on the subject.

The author also quotes the great Russian writer, sometimes called the Russian Newman, Vladimir Soloviev, another sincere monarchist.

The author then compares the remarkable strength and unity of Christendom as it once was with the remnants that now remain in modern Europe and the West, a West now gravely threatened with collapse and conquest, and shows how the descent into the secular totalitarianism of the 20th century, following two hugely destructive world wars, has all but reduced us to a shadow of our former selves.

The author then turns to the many attempts to provide a basis for reviving the glories of the past. 

For instance, he cites the great aristocratic French Catholic writer and former cavalry officer Charles-Humbert-René de La Tour du Pin Chambly de La Charce, descendant of an old noble Dauphinoise family who had given him a strong Catholic and Royalist identity, his father also instilling in him a strong spirit of noblesse oblige and chivalry toward the poor, the dispossessed, and the weak.

This leads on to a description and discussion of the developing Catholic social doctrines that were advanced by Catholic monarchists who lamented the exploitation of the ordinary people by the new, secularist, bourgeois Capitalist elites. They likewise eschewed and warned against the growing Socialist movement that wanted to put more and more power into the hands of bloated governments.

Catholic monarchists wanted to restore the spirit of solidarity between the estates and classes that had existed in medieval Christendom, where the nobility were obliged to provide for the common good out of the estates they had been given by the crown.

Similarly, the towns and cities formed guilds and livery companies to provide for the members of each profession and trade, for their training, employment, old age, and indigence, such was the spirit of solidarity and private, not government, charity.

Catholic monarchists wanted to restore the spirit of solidarity between the estates and classes that had existed in medieval Christendom.Tweet This

The author also analyzes some of the corporatist ideas of the 1930s that, in opposition to the ideas of Socialism, sought to recapture that old cooperation between the estates, professions, and trades. He shows how they were endorsed by political figures who were usually also monarchist. 

However, corporatism was never given a chance and then had its name blackened by the claims of Hitler and Mussolini to be adopting corporatist ideas when, in fact, they were not doing so.

In fact, as certain libertarian thinkers of our time have partially understood, in order to revive the cooperative spirit of medieval Christendom, what is needed is a return to private ownership and organization so as to escape the massive stranglehold that modern government now has over the lives of most people. 

Once, it was the role of the gentry and nobility to provide a local (and thus subsidiarized) administration, judiciary, and militia; and if any of them declined to do so, they would forfeit their estates back to the crown. 

Under the system obtaining in medieval Christendom, land was not owned by the government but held privately under feudal obligations; and all was run privately for the common good—not centrally by corrupt, complacent, and bloated governments.

In addition, there were the monasteries, all private—not government—institutions, who provided sustenance and education for the indigent and impoverished.

However, at and after the Reformation, this system was corrupted by allowing the landed gentry to breach their obligations and yet retain their estates.

In due course, aping their seniors, the professions and commercial magnates took over and created the bourgeois Capitalist state that ground the face of the poor. That, in turn, led to Socialism, Fascism, Nazism, and Marxism all of which conspired to break up and destroy Western society.

The Romantic Revival, which swept across Europe after, first, the crass materialism of the Enlightenment which then generated, secondly, the disastrous bloodbath of the French Revolution, was notable, says the author, for its deliberate attempt to hearken back to the past glories of medieval Christendom which now seemed like a lost paradise by comparison with the sordid, new, post-French Revolutionary world.

The author provides a most interesting insight into his own personal development as an American monarchist, beginning with his upbringing by well-educated Catholic parents, to his own discoveries, through reading, travel, and personal encounter, of the glories of that long-lost world of Christendom.

In so doing, he studied the likes of de Maistre, de Chateaubriand, von Kuehnelt-Leddihn, Molnar, Maurras, Donoso Cortes, Figgis, Stahl, Belloc, Chesterton, the Cavaliers and Jacobites, the French Legitimists, the Spanish Carlists, the Portuguese Miguelists, and much more besides.

The author quotes Sir Winston Churchill, who said in his The Second World War: Triumph and Tragedy: 

[T]his war would never have come unless, under American and modernising pressure, we had driven the Habsburgs out of Austria and Hungary and the Hohenzollerns out of Germany. By making these vacuums we gave the opening for the Hitlerite monster to crawl out of its sewer onto the vacant thrones.

But the Allies did not back the restoration of monarchy, as clearly Churchill would have liked. Instead, they backed the even more monstrous Joseph Stalin and his gang of torturers and assassins.

Such, then, has been the upshot of the West abandoning Christendom and Christian monarchy in experimental pursuit of a society without God: death, destruction, and ruin.

But Western leaders do not seem willing to learn.

Thus, U.S. President George H.W. Bush vetoed royal restorations in Romania and Bulgaria in 1992, and, when it was pointed out to U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright that the monarchists were the largest opposition to the Milosevic government, she airily replied, “we don’t do kings” and proceeded to bomb and destroy left and right in order to impose her will on the Serbian people.

The author adds that the knee-jerk hatred of monarchy, so characterized by U.S. foreign policy, has cost untold amounts of blood and treasure, both foreign and American.

While to some monarchy remains anathema, the author reminds us that most of the resistance to both Nazism and Communism came from monarchists of one kind or another and that it was Socialists, like Karl Renner of Austria, who collaborated with the Nazis (the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany is another example).

The author then explores various ideas for the return of monarchy, revisiting Tolkien by calling it the “Aragorn option,” Aragorn being the returned king in The Lord of the Rings.

He ends with a lament for today’s lack of good leadership and the benefits of a rational nostalgia for times past that might usefully be harnessed again today.

In short, this is a book that every thinking person who also likes a good read should not hesitate to buy, enjoy, and treasure.