What Would Movies in a Monarchy-Dominated World Look Like?

[snerfuplz]

If the popular monarchies and revolutions are some how avoided, there would probably be a lot of class distinctions in movies. The nobility and the royalty would want to set itself apart from the dirty masses. That can of course take a lot of forms. A parallel would probably be food where elite menus changed depending what was available to the common people.

I'd imagine movie theaters would likely resemble opera houses with large ostentatious boxes for the higher elites. Going to see a movie in one of these theaters would probably be insufferable since the movie will be second to the Society games. So nobles showing up fashionable late and the noisy buzz of gossip as a new sensation appears. Read the Robert le Diable chapter from the Count of Monte Cristo for a taste

 

[Drunkrobot]

What would a monarchist “Throne Pact” ideology that is explicitly monarchist without being generic right wing dictatorship look like?

I would hazard a guess that a successful one would work to avert or minimise the creation of nationwide, bourgeois political forces. This would mean addressing the issues that IOTL fuelled the creation of these forces, but doing so in ways that circumvent them.

While better ideas in this regard are certain to be possible, I think a decent shot at this would some kind of semi-democratic/meritocratic parliament, with one house filled by commoners via sortition ("selection by lottery"), not election as we are used to in modern liberal democracies. Elections mean political parties, hence organisations with long-term leaders that can rally supporters and start issuing demands to the King, and it means election campaigns, which guarantees that debates about how the country should be run and who should run it dominate the social conversation. In contrast, if a lottery picks out a random cross-section of society (or at least the part of society considered suitable for the role) and puts them in the role of representing the people to the monarch for a year or two, then the people selected will not have much incentive to empower a house that they know they will leave before long, they won't have a party or an electorate to be loyal to (I can imagine some kind of council of judges to check against corruption or deliberatively harming behaviour of the members at the end of their terms to minimise malpractice), there would be an avoidance of polarisation of parliament into staunch monarchists and committed republicans, and the people might come to the mind that whatever issues are worth addressing is being done so by the parliament so it's not that worth worrying about kingdom-wide politics unless they happen to be selected themselves.

The upper house might have some representation of the First and Second Estates, but its main body would be life-appointees of the monarch, perhaps about 150 seats in size. If the purpose of the lower house is to keep the government in touch with the needs of the people, the upper house's purpose is to give the kingdom's government an institutional memory and a stable element that can minimise the impact of inexperienced and incompetent monarchs. As the upper house would contain members of a wide diversity of ages, and the monarch would typically wish to maximise their influence by appointing the fairly young, it would be expected for the upper house to change in its composition by only a few members in any year. Ministry positions would be picked by a combination of monarchial appointments as votes by the upper house - let's say the Foreign Ministry is run by a college of seven, with the monarch appointing four positions and the house three, or perhaps the other way around in certain conditions (like the monarch needs special concessions like new taxes for their projects, or it is the first few years of their reign and so need experience in government before being trusted with the dominant role in appointments).

Finally, a continuation or a strengthening of the localism of medieval government, which a large amount of leeway given to large urban areas. It's for the monarch to be the guy ready to swoop in and deal with corrupt city elders than to be the done levying taxes and leaving bread scarce. I think a pillar of the monarch's rule would be the yeomanry who would supply the bulk of the wealth and bodies for the monarchs core institutions for keeping social order; the professional army, the intelligence service, and the granaries. It's important for the monarch to not let the city and country unite in common cause: that would actually be a good reason for the king to allow some amount of social liberalism in the towns, to alienate the two places from each other.

 

[xsampa]

I would hazard a guess that a successful one would work to avert or minimise the creation of nationwide, bourgeois political forces. This would mean addressing the issues that IOTL fuelled the creation of these forces, but doing so in ways that circumvent them.

While better ideas in this regard are certain to be possible, I think a decent shot at this would some kind of semi-democratic/meritocratic parliament, with one house filled by commoners via sortition ("selection by lottery"), not election as we are used to in modern liberal democracies. Elections mean political parties, hence organisations with long-term leaders that can rally supporters and start issuing demands to the King, and it means election campaigns, which guarantees that debates about how the country should be run and who should run it dominate the social conversation. In contrast, if a lottery picks out a random cross-section of society (or at least the part of society considered suitable for the role) and puts them in the role of representing the people to the monarch for a year or two, then the people selected will not have much incentive to empower a house that they know they will leave before long, they won't have a party or an electorate to be loyal to (I can imagine some kind of council of judges to check against corruption or deliberatively harming behaviour of the members at the end of their terms to minimise malpractice), there would be an avoidance of polarisation of parliament into staunch monarchists and committed republicans, and the people might come to the mind that whatever issues are worth addressing is being done so by the parliament so it's not that worth worrying about kingdom-wide politics unless they happen to be selected themselves.

The upper house might have some representation of the First and Second Estates, but its main body would be life-appointees of the monarch, perhaps about 150 seats in size. If the purpose of the lower house is to keep the government in touch with the needs of the people, the upper house's purpose is to give the kingdom's government an institutional memory and a stable element that can minimise the impact of inexperienced and incompetent monarchs. As the upper house would contain members of a wide diversity of ages, and the monarch would typically wish to maximise their influence by appointing the fairly young, it would be expected for the upper house to change in its composition by only a few members in any year. Ministry positions would be picked by a combination of monarchial appointments as votes by the upper house - let's say the Foreign Ministry is run by a college of seven, with the monarch appointing four positions and the house three, or perhaps the other way around in certain conditions (like the monarch needs special concessions like new taxes for their projects, or it is the first few years of their reign and so need experience in government before being trusted with the dominant role in appointments).

Finally, a continuation or a strengthening of the localism of medieval government, which a large amount of leeway given to large urban areas. It's for the monarch to be the guy ready to swoop in and deal with corrupt city elders than to be the done levying taxes and leaving bread scarce. I think a pillar of the monarch's rule would be the yeomanry who would supply the bulk of the wealth and bodies for the monarchs core institutions for keeping social order; the professional army, the intelligence service, and the granaries. It's important for the monarch to not let the city and country unite in common cause: that would actually be a good reason for the king to allow some amount of social liberalism in the towns, to alienate the two places from each other.

How would such a system deal with industry and corporations?

 

[xsampa]

I would hazard a guess that a successful one would work to avert or minimise the creation of nationwide, bourgeois political forces. This would mean addressing the issues that IOTL fuelled the creation of these forces, but doing so in ways that circumvent them.

While better ideas in this regard are certain to be possible, I think a decent shot at this would some kind of semi-democratic/meritocratic parliament, with one house filled by commoners via sortition ("selection by lottery"), not election as we are used to in modern liberal democracies. Elections mean political parties, hence organisations with long-term leaders that can rally supporters and start issuing demands to the King, and it means election campaigns, which guarantees that debates about how the country should be run and who should run it dominate the social conversation. In contrast, if a lottery picks out a random cross-section of society (or at least the part of society considered suitable for the role) and puts them in the role of representing the people to the monarch for a year or two, then the people selected will not have much incentive to empower a house that they know they will leave before long, they won't have a party or an electorate to be loyal to (I can imagine some kind of council of judges to check against corruption or deliberatively harming behaviour of the members at the end of their terms to minimise malpractice), there would be an avoidance of polarisation of parliament into staunch monarchists and committed republicans, and the people might come to the mind that whatever issues are worth addressing is being done so by the parliament so it's not that worth worrying about kingdom-wide politics unless they happen to be selected themselves.

The upper house might have some representation of the First and Second Estates, but its main body would be life-appointees of the monarch, perhaps about 150 seats in size. If the purpose of the lower house is to keep the government in touch with the needs of the people, the upper house's purpose is to give the kingdom's government an institutional memory and a stable element that can minimise the impact of inexperienced and incompetent monarchs. As the upper house would contain members of a wide diversity of ages, and the monarch would typically wish to maximise their influence by appointing the fairly young, it would be expected for the upper house to change in its composition by only a few members in any year. Ministry positions would be picked by a combination of monarchial appointments as votes by the upper house - let's say the Foreign Ministry is run by a college of seven, with the monarch appointing four positions and the house three, or perhaps the other way around in certain conditions (like the monarch needs special concessions like new taxes for their projects, or it is the first few years of their reign and so need experience in government before being trusted with the dominant role in appointments).

Finally, a continuation or a strengthening of the localism of medieval government, which a large amount of leeway given to large urban areas. It's for the monarch to be the guy ready to swoop in and deal with corrupt city elders than to be the done levying taxes and leaving bread scarce. I think a pillar of the monarch's rule would be the yeomanry who would supply the bulk of the wealth and bodies for the monarchs core institutions for keeping social order; the professional army, the intelligence service, and the granaries. It's important for the monarch to not let the city and country unite in common cause: that would actually be a good reason for the king to allow some amount of social liberalism in the towns, to alienate the two places from each other.

It seems industrial colonial states like Britain and France are least likely to create such an arrangement

 

[GameBawesome]

Probably a romanticized and nationalistic version on how the Monarchy started, like a movie about Charlemagne liberating the Papacy and creating a new Roman Empire that civilized all of Europe or the Epic Tale of Zhu Yuanzhang and his quest to defeat the Yuan Dynasty. So it’s all be mythologized versions of actual history

 

[Drunkrobot]

How would such a system deal with industry and corporations?

It would have to find some third way in contrast to capitalism and socialism, I think, in a way that minimises the concentration of capital. Subsidiarity, or defaulting on having matters being dealt with by the smallest, most local, competent unit, would be a way of doing so. As @Fabius Maximus pointed out, the monarch in medieval society was often seen (occasionally justifiably) as having a common cause with the peasantry in wanting to keep the nobles contained, and industrialists would just be nobles whose 'estate' can grow faster by merit of already being large. Distributism is the closest "-ism" I know to seem to be economically complimentary to these goals, by endeavouring to turn the very poorest into small property owners that can either operate the means of production on their own or by cooperation and collaboration between each other, depending on the necessary intensity of use of capital. A king might do the political calculation that a war of expansion will just make his realm more difficult to govern, while the same cost of energy and wealth in breaking apart major nobles could allow him to turn many serfs into yeoman, whose families can produce the larger, more infantry-focused armies of the Early Modern world and after. Some kind of monarchy-backed banking focused on something similar to the OTL credit union model might then be able to provide the necessary credit to spur development. The focus would be on Appropriate Technology, perhaps assisted by something alike to the Antigonish Movement, to maximise the utility of a large rural population who possess some capital, but which their main asset is their labour and their latent ability to organise for economic action. This way, even as some kind of bourgeoisie and urban proletariat develops in the towns, the monarchy is able to modify its reliance on the nobility (the "nobles" now being much more numerous and humble) that it can better withstand direct challenges of its authority, and also defuse many of the internal weaknesses and precarities that served as fuel for those challenges to ignite.

 

[HARRY]

There could action adventure movies with a wise cracking genealogist hunting for a distance relative to replace the king/queen of the villain nation if there is a war. Tracking down the burial site of a legendary former ruler to prove using D.N.A. that the current ruler is actually their descendant disproving the rumours circulated by a want a be king.

 

[Kellan Sullivan]

I'd imagine movie theaters would likely resemble opera houses with large ostentatious boxes for the higher elites. Going to see a movie in one of these theaters would probably be insufferable since the movie will be second to the Society games. So nobles showing up fashionable late and the noisy buzz of gossip as a new sensation appears. Read the Robert le Diable chapter from the Count of Monte Cristo for a taste

Would the high society type even GO to the cinemas if it were associated with the masses? Movie tickets are cheaper than theatre tickets after all

 

[Analytical Engine]

Would the high society type even GO to the cinemas if it were associated with the masses? Movie tickets are cheaper than theatre tickets after all

They might have their own private cinemas in their estates where they invite their friends to , or book the whole cinema for a private viewing.

 

[xsampa]

Would mass fashion be generally more unisex like OTL due to the fact that industrialization and factory work would likely push towards pants for women and shorter hairstyles than the pre-1920s that out of sheer pragmatism, while nobles still dress like Victorians (the fashion would change from decade to decade, but still more gendered than OTL)

 

[Rufus]

I would hazard a guess that a successful one would work to avert or minimise the creation of nationwide, bourgeois political forces. This would mean addressing the issues that IOTL fuelled the creation of these forces, but doing so in ways that circumvent them.

I’ve been thinking about alternatives to the dominance of liberalism for a while now, and I’ve had similar ideas in this regard. I think the most likely point in time where something like this could come about is the Napoleonic era. That was the time right between the end of the old feudal era and the new age of liberalism. And Napoleon was unique in that he was a revolutionary republican who became emperor; unlike traditional monarchs, he had no hang-ups about trying new things, and was quite aware how and why the Bourbons lost power. He was basically a living embodiment of both eras (or their synthesis, to use a Hegelian term). A France that offered an attractive counter to both feudalism and Anglo liberalism would have doubtlessly influenced the rest of Europe, and shown a possible new way forward.

 

[xsampa]

I’ve been thinking about alternatives to the dominance of liberalism for a while now, and I’ve had similar ideas in this regard. I think the most likely point in time where something like this could come about is the Napoleonic era. That was the time right between the end of the old feudal era and the new age of liberalism. And Napoleon was unique in that he was a revolutionary republican who became emperor; unlike traditional monarchs, he had no hang-ups about trying new things, and was quite aware how and why the Bourbons lost power. He was basically a living embodiment of both eras (or their synthesis, to use a Hegelian term). A France that offered an attractive counter to both feudalism and Anglo liberalism would have doubtlessly influenced the rest of Europe, and shown a possible new way forward.

But a lower house by sortition and the weird appropriate tech things?

 

[Don Corleone]

Movies are simply a format made possible by 20th century tech. Live theater is very similar in terms of content. So we have an answer in OTL - Shakespeare wrote his plays in a country ruled by monarchs.

 

[Rufus]

But a lower house by sortition and the weird appropriate tech things?

Something like sortition only looks weird to us today because all we’ve ever known is the ‘one man - one vote’ system. But many political thinkers in the past had misgivings about such a system. The American founders where famously wary of democracy, which is why they came up with things like the electoral college. It’s definitely possible that something like sortition might have been introduced as an alternative to mass democracy, perhaps in response to an even more chaotic French revolution.

As for technology, I would expect these kinds of things to develop organically, over time. The way we use technology today is the result of a number of social, political, cultural and economic developments that interacted with and influenced each other over the course of decades and centuries. If you change some of those developments in the past, and move them in an entirely different direction, then it would be all but guaranteed that our current economic system, and the way technology is used, would be quite different.

The current covid crisis and the lockdowns that many countries are doing in response are actually a good example. Suddenly many people are working from home, or students are doing online classes, while many companies are finding out that they don’t really need huge office buildings for their employees, when many of them can do their jobs just as easily from home. It’s safe to say that some of those changes will be permanent, even after the whole crisis is over. Just think about the consequences when millions of people no longer have to commute between home and work/school. What effect will this have on cities or suburbs? Will there be less and less difference between them over time? And it’s not like this all happened due to some technological breakthrough or anything like that; the technology for this (internet, PCs) has existed for quite some time. These changes have come about purely as a result of political decisions; without covid and the lockdowns, working from home would’ve probably remained a niche for a long time. Now imagine policies on that scale being enacted 200 years ago, and how this would change the economic and technological landscape in the present.

 

[Drunkrobot]

@Rufus My assumption of a time period for this to happen was in the Early Modern, around the 15th and 16th centuries. The later you go, the more that processes like enclosure will have ruined the "soil" for the system I'm suggesting, and which will only be able to be made viable again through revolutionary change - an early PoD might be able to manage with a gradual enfeeblement of the major nobility, while a later one would require its destruction or replacement.

I think a similar situation of that faced by Henry VII of England is a good opportunity, a kingdom that has suffered a long period of civil conflict, with multiple factions endlessly taking the throne from each other, until a contender who by no means has the best claim but is suitably intelligent (and paranoid) seizes it against the odds, and they make it the project of their life to solidify their power. One way to do so is to dramatically increase the selectorate, the population which can potentially form part of the monarch's government, while at the same time increasing the ruling coalition, which they'll likely have to do anyway to defuse the immediate desire for further rebellion. The key factor is that the electorate has to grow by much more than the coalition, so that the major nobles both find themselves less individually important in the government of the kingdom, and more replaceable should they step out of line. A few rebellions, ones that the monarch could even instigate deliberately, would provide for the seized land that they can use to create their new class of loyalists. Then, it's a matter of gradually hollowing out the nobles power bases until the monarchy is able to force even greater concessions out of them - I submit the examples of Louis XIV and the Tokugawa Shogunate as references. If you are a noble born and raised in the monarch's palatial capital, and that place could provide more delights than your "home" ever could. then you're going to be more likely to accept it when the monarch interferes in your power there, from enforcement of partible inheritance for your children to extension of royal-controlled courts in your area with the purpose of protecting the commoners from abuse; so long as your income to support your lifestyle in the capital stays the same or increases, then you're probably not going to raise trouble about it. Eventually, the central government is seen as the more promising fount for riches and prestige than ones own lands, even to the extent of gifting land to the monarch or inviting more of a royal presence in exchange for positions, titles, marriages, and being able to spend more time in the capital or in royal service attaining these things.

 

[BetterCallPaulson]

I'd imagine most films centering around a US President would center around a UK Monarch (or Prime Minister if we are talking about constitutitonal monarchies)

 

[Jurgen Wullenwever]

with the premiere of Verdi's Un Ballo in Maschera (which plays off in Sweden in the original), the Savoyard government felt that the concept of showing a king being shot on stage was too inflammatory, so Verdi had to move the setting from Stockholm to Virginia, and make the king a mere governor instead. Despite the fact that Gustaf III (on whose assassination it is based) had nothing to do with Italy (and the era in which this happened IRL was during a decade where Gustaf wasn't the only king to be killed).

As a side note, this particular king was very active in foreign affairs, and he visited Italy from October 1783 to May 1784, meeting the Pope, the Emperor, the local rulers and even the Jacobite pretender, so he seems to have had a lot to do with Italy.

 

[chornedsnorkack]

If the popular monarchies and revolutions are some how avoided, there would probably be a lot of class distinctions in movies. The nobility and the royalty would want to set itself apart from the dirty masses. That can of course take a lot of forms. A parallel would probably be food where elite menus changed depending what was available to the common people.

I'd imagine movie theaters would likely resemble opera houses with large ostentatious boxes for the higher elites. Going to see a movie in one of these theaters would probably be insufferable since the movie will be second to the Society games. So nobles showing up fashionable late and the noisy buzz of gossip as a new sensation appears. Read the Robert le Diable chapter from the Count of Monte Cristo for a taste

What did actual Edwardian cinema look like in Berlin, Vienna or St. Petersburg? Where did nobles go?

 

[snerfuplz]

What did actual Edwardian cinema look like in Berlin, Vienna or St. Petersburg? Where did nobles go?

Unfortunately movies of the 1910s were very short and seen as low class for a while. The first movie palaces were opened to cater to the elites. They initially did seem to be modeled after the old opera house but not sure if they had private boxes. Movie palaces survived into the 1920’s so that may have examples of how they were designed