New Wittelsbach Museum

A new Museum of Bavarian Kings, devoted to the Wittelsbachs who ruled Bavaria from 1180 to 1918, opened to the public earlier this month. The museum sounds fascinating and I'm sure I would enjoy visiting myself. However, Bavarians--traditionally the most conservative and Catholic Germans--should not be content to confine the great Wittelsbach dynasty to their beautiful country's past. The ancient family must become a central part of Bavaria's future too: time to restore the monarchy. Long live the Kingdom of Bavaria!

A Willing King for Libya?

Prince Mohammed el Senussi, great-nephew of King Idris I, is ready to serve as King of Libya if its people want him. Leaders of the rebels, typically reluctant to share any power or glory, deny that he and the royal family are to have a constitutional role in post-Gaddafi Libya, but other Libyans surely back a return of the King. Hopefully their rightful aspirations for constitutional monarchy will not be thwarted by republican scheming inside and outside Libya as has happened in far too many other countries on the brink of restoration. Monarchists can oppose making the Crown dependent on electoral consent without violating our own principles, since we do not claim "majority rule" as the basis of all political legitimacy (whether it is prudent to do so today is another matter), but if democrats are true to theirs, they must allow a free vote on the restoration of the monarchy and respect the result whatever it is. Long live the Kingdom of Libya!

Battle over French royal inheritance

I hate the French Republic as much as any royalist, and lean towards the "Orleanist" position on the post-1883 royal succession, but the late Count of Paris (who would have been King Henri VI) (1908-1999) did not exactly distinguish himself with his bizarre vendetta against his children from whom he was determined to exclude his vast fortune. Now via the courts his heir Henri "VII" and his surviving siblings may be poised to recover their inheritance. I never understood the late Count's behaviour, and his children probably have the right of the argument, but it leaves a bitter taste in the royalist mouth that they must rely on the laws of the French Republic (whose citizens have a complex relationship with royalty) to make their case.

Archduke Felix of Austria (1916-2011)

His Imperial & Royal Highness Archduke Felix of Austria & Hungary, the last surviving child of Emperor Bl Karl and Empress Zita, died yesterday in Mexico at the age of 95, about two months after his elder brother Otto. The generation of Habsburgs born when their family still reigned is now gone. Shame on modern Europe for failing to restore them to their rightful place. Archduke Felix, to his credit, never renounced his rights to the throne and so was once threatened with arrest by the criminal enterprise that calls itself the Austrian Republic for the "crime" of visiting his own country. May he rest in peace.

Retreat of Canadian republicanism

Canadian columnist Jack Knox skewers republicans upset by the recent restoration of the word "royal" to the Canadian navy and air force, thoroughly demonstrating how monarchists can turn the tables on republicans who often seem to believe that irreverent humour is on their side while in fact coming across as grumpy and dour, especially compared to cheerful monarchists like Mr Knox.

Genghis Khan: The Exhibition

Today I visited the excellent Genghis Khan exhibit at the Irving Arts Center. This exhibition, which continues through September 30, is the largest collection of Mongol artifacts (including the remains, coffin, and possessions of a medieval Mongol aristocratic woman) ever displayed in one place and is well worth a visit by anyone in the North Texas area who is interested in history. Genghis Khan (1162-1227), the greatest of Mongolian monarchs who is still widely revered in Asia today and was the subject of the 2007 film Mongol, was a complex figure difficult to pigeonhole as either a hero or a villain. Certainly he was a man capable of both brutal destruction and visionary benevolent insight whose varied and widespread legacy remains significant nearly eight centuries after his death. I was particularly interested to learn about the impact of Mongolian bowed string instruments on European music (whose string instruments were previously limited to plucking), without which my profession as we know it would not exist.

Genghis Khan, a product of a nomadic culture in which leadership though not unrelated to family ties was normally taken by force, presents an interesting paradox as a ruthless authoritarian ruler whose regime included elements of democracy and meritocracy as well as enduring innovations such as passports and diplomatic immunity. Whether Genghis Khan was the type of monarch present-day monarchists wish to defend is debatable, but as our nomenclature literally means "rule by one," monarchist visitors to this fascinating exhibit may find themselves agreeing with his vision that "there should be one Khan as there is one sun in the sky."

Georg Friedrich & Sophie

In what ought to be regarded as the third major European royal wedding of the year, Prince Georg Friedrich of Prussia married Princess Sophie of Isenburg in Potsdam (more photos and video here). The media seem determined to belittle the couple's royal status by slyly putting the word in quotation marks, but from a traditionalist point of view this was arguably 2011's most royal wedding since unlike the ones in Britain and Monaco both bride and groom came from titled families, the Isenburgs being one of Germany's ancient "mediatised" (lost sovereignty with the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 but retained their status for marital purposes) families. I cannot for the life of me understand why Germans would rather have some boring president than this attractive and glamorous young couple. Indeed, the wedding seems to have rekindled interest in German royalty to some extent. Congratulations to their Royal Highnesses!