MONARCHY AND GOD AGAIN: France’s Fifth Republic and the Forgotten Idea of Sacred Authority
The Crisis
France is weary. Beneath the symbols of the Fifth Republic, the machinery of government continues to turn, but the nation itself seems hollowed out. Political tempests follow one another in relentless succession: six prime ministers in two years, parliamentary deadlock, and street unrest that reveals not conviction but exhaustion. The deeper malady is spiritual. France, once the baptised heart of Europe, now speaks of freedom and fraternity while denying the Fatherhood of God. Her unity has fractured because her faith has faded.
The crisis is not simply political. It is civilizational. France’s predicament mirrors that of the entire West: a people that has lost the memory of who it is, and of the order by which it once lived. The Republic that promised stability and progress now breeds apathy and cynicism. Its institutions endure, but its soul no longer sings.
The Voice
Into this silence has spoken a surprising voice—the voice of a man without office but with a heritage stretching back a millennium. Louis de Bourbon, head of the ancient House of Bourbon and heir to the royal line of France, recently offered himself to his country. “The situation has never been so serious,” he said. “The Fifth Republic is on the verge of collapse. My family has served France for centuries, and if France calls upon me, I will be at its service. The indispensable condition is that France desires the return of the monarchy—a monarchy above parties, unifying.”
His words would have sounded anachronistic a generation ago. Now they sound prophetic. They recall a time when rulers were judged not by opinion polls but by the measure of duty—when the bond between sovereign and people was not transactional but sacramental. Louis de Bourbon’s offer is not a political campaign but a moral gesture: an assertion that service, not ambition, is the soul of legitimate authority.
The Meaning
The modern mind has lost sight of monarchy’s true nature. To it, kingship appears an ornament of history or a privilege of birth. But the Christian vision saw something more profound. The monarch stood as an image—an imperfect but visible reflection—of divine governance. His authority was not self-created; it was received. The crown was never a reward for power but a reminder of obedience. The king reigned because he himself was ruled by God.
This theology of authority, though mocked by modern ideologues, is inseparable from the Christian understanding of society. All order, to be just, must be hierarchical, and all hierarchy, to be holy, must serve. The Church never pretended that monarchs were sinless, but she insisted that their office was sacred. The abuses of kings discredit men, not monarchy; their failures confirm the need for grace within governance.
To the modern democrat, such language seems obsolete. Yet the collapse of contemporary politics proves the opposite. When legitimacy depends only on consent, authority becomes fragile and truth negotiable. The old form, for all its flaws, preserved a truth that the new forgets: that power must bow before a higher law.
The Renewal
Something within the modern spirit still hungers for that forgotten order. Across Europe and America, the young are beginning to look beyond slogans and ideologies to something older, steadier, and truer. Raised amid chaos and digital noise, Generation Z feels instinctively that meaning cannot be manufactured. They are rediscovering what their ancestors once knew—that hierarchy, when rooted in holiness, liberates rather than oppresses.
This explains why, in France of all places, there is a quiet revival of Catholic life. The traditional liturgy, with its silence and splendour, attracts thousands of young converts who sense in it a mirror of the eternal. They do not long for crowns and thrones; they long for coherence—for a visible sign that the world is not random, that beauty and truth still reign somewhere.
Christian monarchy, properly understood, is not nostalgia for feudalism but an incarnate philosophy: the belief that God’s order should be reflected in the structures of human life. It was this conviction that moved St. Louis IX to build the Sainte-Chapelle, enshrining the Crown of Thorns not as treasure but as testimony. It was the same conviction that moved Louis XVI to forgive his murderers at the foot of the guillotine. Authority purified by sacrifice—this is the pattern the modern world has forgotten.
The Vision
The deepest wound of the West is metaphysical. Charles Péguy saw it coming: a civilization that “believes in nothing, not even in atheism,” a world proud of its emptiness. And so, politics has replaced prayer, and administration has replaced vocation. But where God is absent, tyranny and despair soon follow.
To say “Monarchy and God Again” is not to demand the restoration of Versailles. It is to call for the restoration of reverence—the recognition that all true authority is a participation in the divine. The crown may never return to the brow of a king, but the spirit of kingship must return to the conscience of nations. The hierarchy of grace is the only antidote to the anarchy of self.
France once carried the Cross before all Christendom. If she were to recover that vocation—not merely politically, but spiritually—she could yet lead the West out of its fog. Her crisis may become her moment of conversion.
And so, in an age that has forgotten how to kneel, perhaps the ancient cry must rise again: not Make America Great Again, but Monarchy and God Again—a renewal of the truth that power is service, that freedom requires faith, and that without God, even the Republic cannot endure.
¹ Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II (New York: Vintage Books, 1954), p. 229.
² Joseph de Maistre, Considérations sur la France (1797), ch. II.
³ Charles Péguy, Note Conjointe sur M. Descartes et la Philosophie Cartésienne (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), p. 47.
⁴ Hilaire Belloc, Europe and the Faith (London: Constable, 1920), p. 6.
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