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| The Crown Jewels, 1887, by Blaise Desgoffe. The painting depicts the Crown of King Louis XV and the sword of Blessed Emperor Charlemagne |
Whenever we meet new people and certain views come to light, familiar questions tend to arise. The same is true for new readers here. It's worth addressing the most pertinent ones directly.
How would you respond to critics who claim that monarchists are disconnected from political reality, or merely sentimental idealists lost in a historical fantasy?
In the popular imagination, to be a monarchist today is often to be dismissed as a LARPer—a dreamer lost in romantic pageantry, acting out in a world that has “progressed.” Monarchists are mocked as quixotic fantasists with no real grasp of political reality. And yet, what appears more delusional: the sober recognition that order, hierarchy, and transcendence form the pillars of any enduring civilization, or the misguided belief that democracy, equality, and progress can build a coherent and lasting society?
The modern liberal state rests upon several articles of faith: that all men are equal, that history moves inexorably toward greater freedom and enlightenment, and that the rule of the many is wiser and more just than the rule of the one. Long treated as self-evident truths, these assumptions now reveal their failures. Egalitarianism produces resentment rather than harmony. Democracy devolves into a procedural contest of interests, easily manipulated by oligarchic forces. “Progress” increasingly serves as a euphemism for the managed decline of culture, authority, and meaning itself.
The monarchist’s worldview does not promise utopia; it promises continuity. Authority is not invented but inherited, sanctified, and exercised within limits set by divine or natural law. Unlike the faceless bureaucrat or the demagogic party functionary, the monarch embodies a sacrificial function, bearing the burden of political and spiritual order as a duty and offering for the common good. He does not reign to flatter the mob or manage opinion, but to stand as a visible link between the people and the transcendent. His authority is not absolute, but symbolic of a higher order, which is precisely what modernity has severed in its hubris.
The liberal order, in contrast, suffers from a curious schizophrenia. It insists that all hierarchies are arbitrary, while simultaneously enthroning technocratic elites; it preaches tolerance while engaging in cultural erasure; it claims to liberate the individual while dissolving all bonds of tradition, place, and faith that give individual life meaning.
Who then is the LARPer? The man who looks to the past for the principles that built civilization—or the one who acts out the fantasy that mankind, newly unmoored from faith and culture, can invent a just society ex nihilo (from nothing, as if by sheer will alone) through votes, slogans, and algorithms?
Monarchism is not a “LARP.” It is the political expression of metaphysical realism. It is an acknowledgment that man is fallen, that power must be based in tradition, and that legitimacy cannot be manufactured but must be transmitted. To believe otherwise requires not only delusion, but faith in illusions that, after centuries of trial, no longer even pretend to work.
~ By Giovanni di Napoli, January 26th, Feasts of Sant’Alberico di Cîteaux and Santa Paola Romana