People of the Revolution and the USSR

Monarchy and royalism 1744–1797 ○ Died at Potsdam while reigning

King of Prussia who signed the Declaration of Pillnitz and campaigned against France

In August 1791 he co-signed the Declaration of Pillnitz with Leopold II in support of the French king, and in 1792 he joined in person the campaign led by the Duke of Brunswick.

He succeeded his uncle Frederick II as King of Prussia in 1786 and, at home, turned away from his predecessor’s enlightened style towards tighter censorship and religious control. In reaction to the French Revolution he set aside the old rivalry with Austria: in August 1791 he joined Leopold II in the Declaration of Pillnitz, and a formal alliance followed in February 1792. He took part in person in the 1792 and 1793 campaigns against France, but was held back by lack of money while his advisers looked more to the partitions of Poland. He signed a separate peace with France at Basel in 1795 and died in 1797.

Monarchy and royalism 1747–1792 ○ Died of illness in Vienna while reigning

Holy Roman Emperor who co-signed the Declaration of Pillnitz

On 27 August 1791 he and the King of Prussia signed the Declaration of Pillnitz, saying they would act together for the French king if the other powers joined them.

A son of Maria Theresa and brother of Marie Antoinette, he ruled Tuscany as a reforming grand duke from 1765 and abolished the death penalty and torture there in 1786. He succeeded his brother Joseph II as emperor in 1790. In August 1791 at Pillnitz he and Frederick William II declared that they would intervene in France only if the other powers joined them. Historians have called it a formality, since Leopold knew Russia and Britain would not act, but it contributed to the radicalisation of the revolutionary movement in France. He died of pneumonia in Vienna on 1 March 1792, shortly before France declared war.

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.

Austria state institutions Monarchy and royalism 1863–1914 ✕ Assassinated in Sarajevo

Heir presumptive of Austria-Hungary whose assassination in Sarajevo in 1914 was the immediate cause of the First World War

Born in Graz, the eldest son of Archduke Karl Ludwig, the younger brother of Emperor Franz Joseph, he became heir presumptive after Crown Prince Rudolf’s suicide in 1889 and his father’s death in 1896. His morganatic marriage to Sophie Chotek was allowed only after he renounced his descendants’ rights to the throne. He exerted great influence over the armed forces and in 1913 became their inspector general. Clericalism, anti-democratic views and anti-Hungarianism were the cornerstones of his politics; he advocated more autonomy for the empire’s Slav peoples, but urged caution towards Serbia for fear of conflict with Russia. On 28 June 1914 he and his wife were assassinated in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, setting off the July Crisis and the war.

Monarchy and royalism 1869–1924 ○ Natural death

The Tibetan-born reincarnate lama enthroned as the last great khan of Mongolia

'The princes feared him, the common people loved him.'

Born in Lhasa, Tibet, the 8th Jebtsundamba Khutuktu was, after the Dalai and Panchen Lamas, the highest living incarnation in Mongolian Buddhism. When the Qing dynasty collapsed in 1911, Mongol nobles enthroned him on 29 December as the 'Bogd Khan' ('Holy Ruler') of a new theocratic state. Stripped of power when China abolished autonomy in 1919, he was reinstated as a limited monarch after the 1921 revolution and died of throat cancer on 20 May 1924, ending the monarchy. The first and last great khan of Outer Mongolia since the late 17th century, he held Mongols together amid upheaval through his religious charisma.

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.

Qing dynasty Monarchy and royalism 1906–1967 ↓ Abdicated 1912 · natural causes

Last emperor of the Qing, puppet emperor of Manchukuo, and a “remoulded” citizen of the People’s Republic

Crowned China's last emperor before he was seven, he lost the throne to the 1911 revolution and was restored once in 1917. Through Manchukuo's chief executive and emperor to Soviet captivity in 1945, he was amnestied in 1959 and shown as a model of reeducation.

Enthroned at three as the Xuantong Emperor, he abdicated in the 1911 revolution. Expelled from the Forbidden City in 1924, he went to the Japanese concession in Tianjin and in 1932 became chief executive, then emperor, of Japan’s puppet state Manchukuo. Captured by the Soviets in 1945 and returned to China in 1950, he was “remoulded” at the Fushun war criminals’ prison and pardoned in 1959. He lived as a gardener and later a political-consultative delegate in Beijing and died of illness in 1967, early in the Cultural Revolution.

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.