France in late 2025 looks less like a durable republic than a machine in free fall. President Emmanuel Macron, once sure of his mandate, now presides over a government that changes ministers faster than the seasons. His latest prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, lasted only twenty-six days in office and, in a surreal twist, resigned mere hours after unveiling his new cabinet amid a looming no-confidence motion. Within days, Macron re-appointed him in what even friendly papers called a “shock move.” What plays out in Paris is more than everyday politics, but rather a system gasping for legitimacy — and one that might, in some deeper sense, be yearning for the kind of stability it abandoned centuries ago.
The French monarchy will not be restored. Yet in moments like this, the thought of it inevitably returns. France’s Fifth Republic was designed to supply monarchical strength without a monarch — to make the president both sovereign and servant, symbol and executive. But the design is showing its limits. A century and a half after the last king, the country that turned republicanism into a secular creed now finds itself haunted by the absence of a crown.
France has lived under the Fifth Republic since 1958, when Charles de Gaulle sought to rescue the nation from the chaos of the Fourth. Its structure depends on balance: a powerful presidency, a prime minister who commands a legislative majority, and emergency provisions like Article 49.3. The system works only when faith in its institutions holds. When it falters, even an heir like Louis Alphonse de Bourbon, Duke of Anjou — the quiet, modern descendant of Louis XIV — begins to seem less like a relic of the past than a symbol of the continuity France has lost.
Macron’s 2024 gamble — calling early legislative elections — was supposed to restore control. Instead, it shattered what was left of it. The vote produced a divided National Assembly split among the left-wing New Popular Front, Macron’s Ensemble coalition, and Marine Le Pen’s National Rally. No bloc holds a clear majority, and compromise is treated as betrayal. Every bill becomes a battle of attrition. With each government relying on procedural shortcuts and fragile deals, governance turns into improvisation.
France’s factions are not just partisan labels; they are worlds apart. The hard left dreams of a planned economy and withdrawal from NATO. The populist right seeks border control and national sovereignty. Macron’s centrists defend Europe, markets, and modernization. None will tolerate the others. Coalition politics demand negotiation, yet the French political psyche — still animated by revolutionary absolutism — sees compromise as surrender. Even Britain, with its Labour-Conservative duopoly, produces stability through alternation. America’s two-party system, for all its flaws, channels division into structure. France, by contrast, has fractured into ideological shards that cannot cohere.
The practical consequences are immense. The country faces swelling deficits, an unpopular pension reform that sparked months of protest, and a budgetary standoff that could paralyze public spending. Lecornu’s fragile government must deliver the 2026 budget to Parliament under the threat of yet another no-confidence vote. If the Assembly rejects it, France could face dissolution or paralysis — its fifth prime minister in barely two years already clinging to power through procedural artifice. These are not normal rhythms of democratic life; they are symptoms of a state losing its capacity to mediate disagreement.
Lecornu has attempted one bold act out of desperation. He announced that Macron’s 2023 pension reform, which raised the retirement age from 62 to 64, would be frozen until after the 2027 presidential election. He also pledged not to invoke Article 49.3, promising that laws would be debated and voted upon rather than imposed. The move bought him breathing space; by courting Socialist MPs with appeals to unity, he briefly staved off a no-confidence vote. Yet the costs are heavy: suspending the reform will drain hundreds of millions in 2026 and billions by 2027, offset only by vague promises of “savings.” It seems less a governing decision than a survival maneuver — a government negotiating with its own demise.
A government spokesperson now says Macron would dissolve the National Assembly rather than appoint another prime minister if Lecornu’s cabinet falls to a no-confidence vote — a stark warning that dares Parliament to risk new elections that could empower the extremes. Yet the threat also reveals Macron’s weakness: a president so boxed in by factional paralysis that his only remaining weapon is dissolution itself.
The Founders of the United States worried about this very thing. In Federalist No. 10, Madison warned that the greatest threat to republics was faction — citizens “united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens.” The American system mitigated that danger through strong but separated powers, electoral regularity, and a shared civic myth. France’s revolutionaries, by contrast, exalted faction as moral truth: each new regime claimed to embody “the people” and therefore destroyed its predecessors in the name of virtue. That revolutionary instinct, transposed into modern parliamentary life, produces the chaos we see today.
In today’s France, legitimacy has been reduced to endurance. Leaders survive, but survival itself has become meaningless. Decisions hinge on back-room abstentions, personal favors, and procedural maneuvers. The republic still functions on paper, yet its spirit feels spent. Burke would have recognized this malaise immediately. In Reflections on the Revolution in France, he warned that a society cut off from its inheritance ends up trapped in endless upheaval. Liberty without tradition, he wrote, is not freedom but chaos.
To say this is not to romanticize the Bourbons or wish for absolutism’s return. It is to ask a deeper question: what institution can embody continuity in a country that has made rupture its national creed? When a society erases its living symbols, every election becomes existential and every leader disposable. France once had a crown to bear that symbolic burden. Since 1793, it has had only paper constitutions.
A modern constitutional monarchy would not mean a return to Versailles. It would not confer unchecked power or revive divine right. It would simply restore a visible, unifying figure above the day-to-day combat of politics. The monarch would not dictate policy but embody the state itself — opening parliaments, appointing prime ministers, consoling the nation in grief, and reminding its people that France endures beyond the fever of ideology. In moments of crisis, the monarch could serve as a brake on factional excess, ensuring that the machinery of government serves the nation, not the egos of its temporary custodians.
The model exists. In Spain, when floods or scandals shake public confidence, King Felipe VI steps forward — not to rule, but to comfort and steady. In Britain, Queen Elizabeth II performed that role for seventy years, her constancy quietly binding the kingdom through wars, recessions, and cultural revolutions. King Charles III continues that same work in his own restrained fashion. Monarchs such as these hold no legislative power, yet they wield a kind of moral authority republics cannot manufacture. They personify continuity. France once enjoyed that grace — and has missed it ever since it was torn away.
The lineage, of course, survives. The senior claimant is Louis Alphonse de Bourbon, Duke of Anjou, a direct male-line descendant of Louis XIV through Philip V of Spain. Monarchists call him Louis XX. He has hinted, cautiously, that if France ever called, he would serve. Rival branches, notably the Orléans, contest his claim on the grounds of the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. But dynastic law, as Burke would remind us, is not something governments can simply rewrite by treaty. It is inheritance, not policy.
No one imagines a coronation at Reims next year. The republican culture runs deep, and monarchist movements remain marginal. Yet a 2016 BVA poll found that 17 percent of French respondents said they would support a king or queen as head of state, a modest but revealing figure in a country whose republican identity is so entrenched. While no major party champions restoration, the sentiment lingers — a quiet reminder that the monarchy’s emotional hold has never fully disappeared.
To American readers, this may seem paradoxical. Our national story begins with the rejection of kings. Yet the Founders shared Burke’s understanding that liberty must live within form. They replaced monarchy not with abstraction but with an intricate system of balance, precedent, and inherited rights — a kind of crownless monarchy. France, by contrast, destroyed the form and tried to invent legitimacy anew. Two centuries later, it is still trying.
Macron could dissolve the Assembly and call fresh elections. He could attempt constitutional reform and inaugurate a Sixth Republic. Or he could simply hang on until 2027, governing through procedural loopholes and weary resignation. None of these paths addresses the deeper void: a nation with no unifying symbol and no institution left to inspire trust. The crisis is not only political — it is civilizational. France has run out of containers for its own identity.
That is why the monarchy matters, even as theory. It represents the possibility of continuity, of moral restraint, of legitimacy grounded not in ideology but in history. A constitutional monarch would not threaten democracy. On the contrary, he would dignify it. His very presence would remind the republic that power is temporary, but duty is not.
Burke captured the principle in one immortal line: “What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils.” He saw monarchy, properly limited, as liberty’s guardian rather than its enemy. France’s revolutionaries mistook destruction for creation. They tore down a house whose foundations they still needed, and their descendants are still patching the walls.
France’s crisis today is the bill for 1789. It is not merely that governments fall or that presidents grow unpopular. It is that the republic has forgotten what it means to endure. When every new administration must reinvent legitimacy from scratch, politics becomes theater and the nation drifts toward cynicism. The crown, even unseen, still haunts that stage.
The monarchy will not be restored, at least not soon. Yet its absence is felt more sharply with each collapse of government. It stands as a memory of steadiness in an age of permanent improvisation. Perhaps that is why the thought of a king still provokes curiosity rather than contempt. France does not need to reject the republic to recognize what the monarchy once offered. It needs to remember that liberty without continuity is a flame without a lamp.
If America represents revolution tamed by structure, France represents structure undone by revolution. Both remind us that freedom must rest upon something older and steadier than passion. France, tired and searching, could yet rediscover that truth. The monarchy will not return — but perhaps it should. A republic gasping for legitimacy might yet find its breath in the forgotten art of continuity.
Michael J. Hout is Editor-in-Chief of Liberty Affair. Based in Warsaw, Poland, he writes about politics, culture, and history. Follow his latest insights on X: @michaeljhout.
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