People of the Revolution and the USSR

Germany state institutions Monarchy and royalism 1859–1941 → Died in exile

Last German Emperor, who backed Austria-Hungary in the July Crisis and abdicated and fled in 1918

The son of the Prussian crown prince and Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, he became emperor in 1888 and dismissed Bismarck in 1890. In 1900 he urged the troops sent against the Boxers to fight like Huns, and his naval build-up and Moroccan interventions isolated Germany. In the July Crisis of 1914 he assured Austria-Hungary of military support. In the war he left decisions largely to the Supreme Army Command, leading to the de facto military dictatorship of Hindenburg and Ludendorff. When his abdication was announced on 9 November 1918 he went into exile in the Netherlands, which refused to extradite him as the Treaty of Versailles provided. He died at Doorn in 1941.

Italy state institutions Monarchy and royalism 1869–1947 → Died

A monarch caught between constitutional authority and responsibility for Fascism

On 25 July 1943, he dismissed Mussolini, had him arrested, and appointed Badoglio to head a new government.

As king of Italy, he presided over the decline of liberal constitutionalism, the consolidation of the Fascist state, and two world wars. He approved Mussolini's seizure of power, colonial wars, the racial laws, and entry into the Second World War, making the monarchy a participant in Fascist rule. In July 1943 he dismissed Mussolini and appointed Pietro Badoglio, using the crown's constitutional powers to open a legal route for governmental change, but his flight from Rome after the armistice left the armed forces and state in disarray. He abdicated in 1946 after the monarchy failed to recover its legitimacy.

Austria state institutions Monarchy and royalism 1887–1922 → Died in exile

Last Habsburg monarch, Emperor Charles I of Austria and King Charles IV of Hungary, who twice tried to regain the Hungarian throne in 1921

In November 1916 he succeeded his grand-uncle Franz Joseph as Emperor of Austria (as Charles I) and King of Hungary (as Charles IV). His secret peace negotiations with the Allies failed, and in the autumn of 1918 the empire fell apart. On 11 November in Austria and on 13 November in Hungary he renounced participation in affairs of state, carefully avoiding the word abdication. After going into exile in Switzerland in 1919, he twice tried to regain the Hungarian throne, in March and October 1921, but failed in the face of opposition from Regent Horthy. Arrested after the second attempt, he was exiled to the Portuguese island of Madeira, where he died of respiratory failure in 1922. The Catholic Church beatified him in 2004.

Yugoslavia Monarchy and royalism 1893–1976 → Died

A regent pressed toward the Axis while trying to keep Yugoslavia out of war

Two days after Yugoslavia joined the Tripartite Pact on 25 March 1941, a military coup removed him from the regency.

Paul Karađorđević was the prince regent who governed the Kingdom of Yugoslavia for the minor Peter II after the assassination of Alexander I. He sought to soften the legacy of centralised rule and reconcile the state with the Croatian national movement, culminating in the 1939 Cvetković-Maček Agreement and the creation of the Banovina of Croatia. As war spread and British and French guarantees weakened, his attempt to preserve neutrality shifted toward concessions under German pressure, and Yugoslavia’s 1941 accession to the Tripartite Pact triggered a military coup that removed him. He lived in exile after the war, died in 1976, and was rehabilitated by a Serbian court in 2011.

Japan state institutions Monarchy and royalism 1901–1989 ○ Natural causes

The emperor who carried Japan through war and constitutional transformation

“Enduring the unendurable”, a phrase from his 1945 rescript announcing Japan’s surrender

Hirohito was Japan’s 124th emperor from 1926 to 1989, occupying both the sovereign position of the imperial constitution and the symbolic role defined by the postwar constitution. He stood at the apex of the state that authorized Japan’s aggression and Pacific War, while the extent of his responsibility for the war and its crimes remains contested. After Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Soviet entry into the war left the Supreme Council deadlocked, he intervened to accept the Potsdam terms and announced the surrender by radio. After the war he renounced imperial divinity and remained a symbolic head of state, while continuing his research in marine biology.

Romania Monarchy and royalism 1921–2017 ↓ Forced to abdicate; died in exile

The last King of Romania, who arrested Antonescu on 23 August 1944 to bring the country over to the Allies and abdicated at gunpoint in 1947

On the morning of 30 December 1947, in a palace surrounded by troops, Groza and Gheorghiu-Dej put the abdication before him. Michael testified in exile that he was told refusal would mean bloodshed and the shooting of a thousand students held in custody. That afternoon parliament proclaimed the People's Republic.

Born to Crown Prince Carol of the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and Helen of Greece, he became king at six in 1927 under a regency because his father had renounced the succession, and was demoted to crown prince when Carol II returned to take the throne in 1930. When Antonescu deposed Carol II in September 1940 he was crowned again at eighteen, but power lay with Antonescu's dictatorship and the Axis alliance. On 23 August 1944, with the Red Army across the border, he arrested Antonescu in a palace coup, concluded an armistice with the Allies and turned Romania against Germany, becoming one of the very few foreigners awarded the Soviet Order of Victory. Yet in March 1945 he had to appoint the Groza government under Vyshinsky's pressure, and his "royal strike" of refusing to sign decrees from August that year could not stop the rigged election of 1946 or the Maniu trial of 1947. On 30 December 1947 he signed the abdication forced on him by Groza and Gheorghiu-Dej, and the People's Republic was proclaimed the same day. Stripped of citizenship in 1948, he lived in Britain and Switzerland as a test pilot and a broker; a million people gathered in Bucharest on his first return at Easter 1992. His citizenship was restored in 1997, and he died in Switzerland in 2017, buried with a state funeral in the royal necropolis at Curtea de Argeș.

Yugoslavia Monarchy and royalism 1923–1970 ○ Died

The last king who carried Yugoslavia’s royal legitimacy into exile

On 27 March 1941, Dušan Simović told him: "Your Majesty, from this moment you will exercise your full sovereign power."

Peter II became king of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia as a child after the assassination of his father, Alexander I, and was its last monarch. The 27 March 1941 coup ended the regency and declared him of age, but the Axis invasion soon forced him to lead a government in exile from London. His crown represented state continuity against occupation, yet the exile government’s divisions and the Partisans’ military and political victory stripped it of an effective base of power. After the monarchy was abolished in 1945, his permanent exile left unresolved the question of Yugoslavia’s political legitimacy.