Buy the hardback from Amazon

Monarchy and Exile: The Politics of Legitimacy from Marie de Médicis to Wilhelm II

(Edited by Philip Mansel and Torsten Riotte)
London, Palgrave Macmillan, 376 pages, 2011, ISBN 978-0-230-24905-9

Looking at fifteen different royal figures who went into exile, this volume discusses the role of exiled monarchs in domestic politics, in the state system in Europe and in the dynastic networks which transcended national frontiers. From the Jacobite diaspora and the French royalist émigrés to the German monarchists who hoped to install the Bavarian Crown Prince as German Emperor after the First World War, the absent monarch remained a focus of opposition, loyalism and patriotism. For the first time, monarchical exile is understood as a socio-political constellation that transformed society and not as personal fate or failure without further historical relevance.

As well as co-editing this book, Philip Mansel contributes the essay: ‘From Exile to the Throne’.

‘Mansel and Riotte show the kaleidoscopic range of experience of exile. Their main aim is to understand the political and cultural aspects of exile. They also ask the vital question how the exiled monarchs ran their campaigns to return.’ Karina Urbach (History, No. 331, July 2013)