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With little concern for the safety of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, who were held captive in Paris, the Comte de Provence issued uncompromising counterrevolutionary manifestos, organized émigré associations, and sought the support of other monarchs in the fight against the Revolution. When the King and Queen were executed in 1793, he declared himself regent for his nephew, the dauphin Louis XVII, at whose death, in June 1795, he proclaimed himself Louis XVIII.

On May 2, Louis XVIII officially promised a constitutional monarchy, with a bicameral parliament, religious toleration, and constitutional rights for all citizens.

Louis XVIII’s reign saw France’s first experiment in parliamentary government since the Revolution. The King was invested with executive powers and had “legislative initiative,”

After 1820, however, the ultras exercised increasing control and thwarted most of Louis’s attempts to heal the wounds of the Revolution. At his death he was succeeded by his brother, the comte d’Artois, as Charles X.

Adolf Fredrik, Gustav III’s father, was described by one English contemporary as having ‘the title of king, with hardly the privileges of a subject’. Unlike his British counterpart George II, he had no power to summon or dissolve his parliament.

Gustav was an unimpressive figure physically, weedy and foppish, and slightly lame since birth, but when he addressed the members of the Riksdag he made them flinch with his phrases of masterful contempt

The new constitution that Gustav now promulgated, in place of that of 1720-72, brought Sweden more into line with contemporary Britain.

The main difference between the British and Swedish systems was that, whereas in Britain the monarch’s executive power was in practice delegated to ministers more industrious, more  proficient and, for the most part,  more intellectually gifted than their royal master, in Sweden it was Gustav III himself who was indisputably in day to day charge

No other of the Enlightened Despots was more fond than Gustav of the time-wasting rituals of court life, the levées, formal audiences and ceremonial entries and exits.

Whereas Napoleon, in his coup d’etat of 19e Brumaire 1799 broke down and began mumbling in front of the popular assembly he was trying to overawe, Gustav III easily faced down his opponents in the Riksdag

Gustav III may well have held a record among monarchs prior to the nineteenth century for the number of other crowned heads he met. What Louis XV and Louis XVI of France or Ferdinand IV of Naples thought of him is uncertain, though none of these Bourbons were exactly noted for their insight into character. Pope Pius VI pretended to be delighted with Gustav (the first Protestant monarch ever to meet a pope) and made him a Knight of the Golden Spur. The other Enlightened Despots, Frederick the Great, Catherine the Great and Joseph II, agreed in thinking Gustav charming in a wearying sort of way, and faintly ridiculous. Leopold II, Joseph II’s brother and successor, perhaps the ablest politician among the Enlightened Despots – he was still only Grand Duke of Tuscany when Gustav met him

the Swedish king was a positive menace with his incessant scheming and readiness to interfere in other governments’ affairs

all radical improvements in national character take place during the severest wars’. Russia, having annexed the Crimea, had embarked on a titanic struggle with the Ottoman Empire which was absorbing stupendous quantities of manpower and treasure. At the beginning of 1788 he began making plans to attack Russia from the rear.

Gustav found himself far from his capital, stuck with an army that would not obey him. He was rescued  by the Danish government declaring war on him. Hurrying back to Sweden, Gustav rode to Gothenburg, 250 miles cross country in forty-eight hours – the last sixty miles quite alone and on borrowed farm horses, in blinding hailstorms – to rally the defences of the city against the invading Danes

The senior Swedish officers rejected all the courses of action proposed by Gustav and his latest discovery, William Sidney Smith, a British naval captain who had turned up without the permission of his own government; they even, according to Smith, talked of ‘proposing terms of Capitulation independent of the King’.

Catherine, still preoccupied with the war with Turkey, was glad to patch up a compromise peace

While the Stockholm crowds stood outside cheering him, Gustav confronted the chamber of nobles with a new constitution, and when they howled it down he coolly ordered the secretary of the chamber to record their vote as yes: a piece of blatant illegality combined with intimidation that anticipates the tactics of twentieth-century dictators. In fact, apart from giving the King the power to make war without the Riksdag’s consent, the new constitution marked little advance on that of 1772

Eleven weeks after Gustav rammed his new constitution down the throats of the nobles, the Estates General met at Versailles and by the time of the peace settlement with Russia the French ancien régime was well on the way to dissolution.

I cannot allow that it is right to support rebels against their Lawful King

Despite the fact that Sweden was virtually bankrupt in the aftermath of the Russian war he now offered to land 16,000 Swedish and 8,000 Russian troops at Ostend, in Austrian territory, and to march on Paris to overthrow the Constituent Assembly, with the support of an Austrian army advancing from the Rhine. In June 1791 he went to Aachen and was greeted there as a saviour by the French royalist exiles. While he was there Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette made their bid to escape from Paris

Marie Antoinette’s brother Leopold, who had succeeded Joseph II as Holy Roman Emperor and ruler of Austria the year before, was enraged by Gustav’s interference: there were some too, including Gustav’s uncle Henry of Prussia, who believed that his schemes for an armed intervention in France were merely a cover for a secret plan to seize Norway from the Danes

On March 1st, 1792, Leopold died – poisoned, it is said, by an aphrodisiac of his own concoction – but Gustav was destined never to learn that there was no longer any challenge to his self-appointed role as leader of the monarchist opposition to the French Revolution

Gustav III was only forty-six when he died. That was at least eight years older than the most brilliant of his predecessors on the Swedish throne, Gustav II Adolf, Karl X and Karl XII – and if he had lived a normal span he would still have been king at the time of Waterloo.

The economic weakness of his country, the inveterate opposition of the social class that elsewhere might have been a king’s chief support, and the increasing influence of the revolutionary ferment in France may have meant that, even if he had lived, he would not have been able to go as far as he dreamed: he is one of the great might-have-beens of history.

Exercising full sovereignty, he pursued a foreign policy sometimes at variance with his father’s. After concluding a secret alliance with Savoy for a partition of the Duchy of Milan, Louis, recently widowed, married Charlotte, daughter of Duke Louis of Savoy, despite Charles VII’s prohibition (1451).

Installed as Philip’s guest, Louis could acquaint himself thoroughly with the working of the great Burgundian state, the ruin of which he was later to seek.

His first act was to strike at Charles VII’s ministers.

Louis XI’s major preoccupation was with the princes and great vassals of the kingdom, who were ready to form alliances with one another or with England against him. Former officers of Charles VII stirred up hostility against the King’s new men; Jean II, duc de Bourbon, and Francis II of Brittany emerged as the leaders of the malcontent nobility; Philip the Good’s son and future successor, Charles the Bold of Burgundy, supported the King’s enemies; and the King’s own brother, Charles de France, at first duc de Berry, became a tool of the rebels.

During the negotiations Charles learned of an insurrection in Liège, fomented by the French king’s agents.

Having already attacked Burgundy, Louis found himself facing a new host of enemies, including not only Charles the Bold, Edward IV, and Francis of Brittany but also, in the southwest, Charles de France, to whom Louis had granted the Duchy of Guyenne in 1469, Jean V d’Armagnac, and John II of Aragon, who hoped to recover Roussillon.

After 1475 it remained for Louis to destroy the power of Burgundy.

by the Treaty of Arras (1482), Louis retained full sovereignty over the Duchy of Burgundy, Picardy, and Boulonnais and possession of Franche-Comté and Artois as the dowry of Margaret of Austria, daughter of Mary and Maximilian, fiancée of his infant son and heir, the future Charles VIII.

Louis regarded war as a precarious enterprise and made it only with reluctance, though he maintained the standing army that Charles VII had instituted.

After Charles the Bold’s death there was no one to prevent Louis from exercising a virtual protectorate over Savoy, where his sister Yolande was regent, and he made himself the arbiter of the affairs of northern Italy.

Realizing they had a revolution on their hands, the Democratic Party’s wealthy ex-Confederates and newly arrived Northern industrialists swiftly put this cross-racial revolt down. They cut off credit to Populist activists and expelled them from their churches; lynchings spiked. They also patented the timeless rejoinders to “class warfare,” calling the Populists a “communistic ring” and, crucially, as one Alabama publication put it, “nigger lovers and nigger huggers.”

When the white have-nots revolted in successive decades, they appropriated the elite’s racist shibboleths — and took them so much further than the haves ever intended.

And even when the elites were in charge of the racism, they could not always control the monster white supremacy they had created. In Birmingham, the fire hoses and police dogs of Eugene Connor, known as Bull, a city commissioner installed by the “Big Mules,” not only hastened the end of legal segregation but also made his city kryptonite for economic development.

The axiom of unintended consequences is the same today, and explains why populism remains ideologically incoherent: Caught up in feel-good spasms of nativism, the base is willing to overlook the Trump administration’s elite, kleptocratic culture. And the tax-cut-hungry Republican establishment keeps sowing the whirlwind, under the assumption that, in Mr. Kennedy’s words, its base “would rather be poor than not be proud.”

But the Alabama psyche is complex, and Mr. Trump may have misread it at the now legendary rally in Huntsville where he tore into knee-taking black N.F.L. players — many of whom come out of Alabama football programs and therefore, Mr. Kennedy dryly observed, “are family.”

Also important to that redemption narrative is the South’s belated prosecution of civil rights era crimes, and one of its major protagonists is Doug Jones

While his appeal to black voters is self-evident, Mr. Jones is also culturally correct by Southern-white standards, a deer-hunting, bourbon-drinking, “Roll, Tide!” product of a Wallace-supporting household in Birmingham’s steel-mill suburbs, who did well as he did good. He is inarguably less “embarrassing” than Mr. Moore to the polite circles frequented by Mr. Strange

Defiance is now an epidemic as pervasive as opioids, and Alabama has transformed from backwoods to bellwether. While the press plays the defeat of Mr. Trump’s tepidly endorsed candidate as a debate over the prestige of his coattails, the president has swung the sacred trust of his office, the legacy of Lincoln, behind a candidate whose very existence confirms a republic in peril.

The donation is the latest in a string of high-value reparations payments from white people who have unearthed ties to racism and slavery in their family history — finding details such as the value assigned to enslaved people in a ledger, and notes identifying a grandmother as a member of the Ku Klux Klan.

The money brings a significant boost for Change Today, Change Tomorrow, which has grown remarkably since Ryan first started the organization as a way to secure school supplies for teachers. Its programs now range from providing hot meals and snacks for students to public health outreach for new parents and menstruation products for those who need them, as well as making food deliveries — including fresh produce from a Black-owned farm.

The donor's identity has not been revealed, but the nonprofit said the person lives in the South.

Among those receiving reparations is Soul2Soul Sisters, a Colorado group co-founded by the Rev. Dawn Riley Duval. The money helped her organization grow — and like Ryan, Riley Duval says reparations are absolutely necessary, given the ties that have long bound racism and economic inequality in the United States

The donor who wired money to Change Today, Change Tomorrow is calling for other white people to pay reparations, even if their ancestors didn't own enslaved people.

The leaders of Change Today, Change Tomorrow echoed that sentiment. And they acknowledged that, given the sum heading their way, it wasn't until a wire transfer had taken place that it seemed real. Now, they added, they have more work to do.

Referring to the reparations payment, she added, "We don't have the luxury to kind of just sit on it, so it's literally money that's going to go right back into the community."The donor has never lived in Kentucky, Croney said, adding that the person found the organization by searching around on the internet. Louisville has played a prominent role in the national discussion on racism and police violence since last year when police officers shot and killed Breonna Taylor in her home. Activists are still calling for accountability in that case.

The divisions only continued during the 1790s, when newspapers began making reference to the progressive “left” and traditionalist “right” of the French assembly.

with the Bourbon Restoration and the beginning of a constitutional monarchy in 1814, liberal and conservative representatives once again took up their respective posts on the left and right of the legislative chamber.

“center left,” “center right,” “extreme left” and “extreme right.”

France’s “left” and “right” labels filtered out to the rest of the world during the 1800s, but they weren’t common in English-speaking countries until the early 20th century.

Democrats and Republicans traditionally sit on opposite sides of the House and Senate chambers.

Riding the waves of mutability has always been possible if the frame of mind in government and society is adequately supple and responsive. Reliance on ancient nostrums, and expectations that old solutions will remain good enough, are almost inevitably fatal.

Civilisations that become dependent on large, widespread and complex supply networks and reciprocal markets usually generate their own fragilities. If one part of such a network fails, the effects cascade in a series of chain reactions through all apparently powerful participants in the system

The end of the Bronze Age c.1200 BC, perhaps triggered by drought in Anatolia, may have precipitated one such domino collapse, as the Hittite empire, the Mycenaeans, the Mesopotamian states and Pharaonic Egypt all either fell apart or shrank to an unrecognisable impotence.

Volcanoes are the unexpected killers. Their spewing of ash into an atmosphere whose winds distribute it around the globe has repeatedly destroyed summers, devastated crops, induced famines and collapsed societies

In his hands, the triumph of the West, with the unconscionable horrors of the Atlantic slave trade at its heart, takes on the appearance of an alarming fusion of Faust and Midas. For centuries, Europeans felt they could do no wrong. They could use the world, its people and beauties. They could transform it as they wished, shifting its plants, animals and populations where they wanted, and there would be no consequences. Or at least, as in those two myths of the cult of ‘entitlement’ – a word Frankopan repeatedly uses of the transforming empires – the consequences were hidden from the perpetrators.

His story of destruction over the past two centuries is one of arrogant myopia which led in the 20th century to ‘a sequence of catastrophes unparalleled both in human history and in that of the natural world. The suffering of the past 100 years has been by far the greatest in recorded history in terms of its scale and its horror’.

The assumption that man must conquer nature was allied to the capital and industrialised capacity to bring it about. Humanity became its own climate. Its own actions created the world in which it lived

The value of this book is as an act of deep understanding, recognising not only scientifically but culturally and philosophically that we are epiphenomena – not dominators of the Earth but products of it

Bleakly and soberingly, Frankopan recognises from the long line of precedents that the prospects are for a world of war and suffering. The destructive changes are already ‘baked in’. Success does not breed success, he says, but more often than not ‘sows the seeds of ruin’.