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His Serene Highness Prince Rainier III of Monaco (he has 23 other titles) reigns over Monaco's 467 acres with, of course, Princess Grace of Philadelphia and Hollywood. Grace, 46, spends most of the week at the family's residence in Paris, where Princess Caroline, a bright, outgoing, levelheaded beauty, attends the Sorbonne, and Sister Stephanie, 11, goes to private school. Rainier, meanwhile, devotes full time to affairs of state, which include going to all Monacan soccer games, usually with Son Prince Albert, 18. A 1918 treaty provides that Monaco will become a French protectorate when the Grimaldi dynasty runs out, which seems, by grace of Grace, an unlikely happening.
Big or small, the royal houses appear in many ways to be ingenious waxwork shows, as relevant to contemporary problems as alchemy or elephant worship. In the eyes of their critics, their appeal is to nostalgia rather than innovation, to complacency rather than initiative. Paul Johnson, biographer of Elizabeth I, argues that "the monarchy is the bastion of the class system. It is very difficult to divorce the monarchical system from the pyramid supporting it, and I suspect the pyramid itself is an extreme embarrassment in the economic and social sense."
Royalty is also criticized—and envied—for its opulent ways.
In fairness, royalty does save elected officials the tedious and time-consuming burden of entertaining foreign dignitaries, ribbon cutting and showing the flag abroad—an obligation that can hardly be written off as caviar living.
In constitutional terms, as some American founding fathers —notably John Adams—believed, a hereditary monarchy can confer a sense of continuity upon elected governments and assure legitimacy to a new chief executive who, like Gerald Ford or James Callaghan, may not have been popularly elected.
Returning from a year in the U.S., Author Anthony Sampson finds that royalty has greater political validity than he perceived when he wrote his popular Anatomy of Britain in 1962. Says he: "One thing I realized at the time of Watergate was that the U.S. is more of a monarchy than I thought, that there was a deep, suppressed fear of regicide in the U.S. I feel much more comfortable now with the constitutional elements we have in England for getting rid of Prime Ministers and providing the mechanism for choosing the next one."
Nor has the symbol been entirely shorn of substance. Any Prime Minister has to take seriously the monarch's right to advise and warn. Though Anthony Eden ignored Elizabeth's judgment that Britain should not make its disastrous 1956 Suez intervention, and was himself ruined by that adventure, the Queen strongly influenced Harold Wilson's decision to stop short of sending troops in countering Rhodesia's declaration of independence in 1965. Comparable governmental decisions have reflected the judgment of the Dutch and Belgian monarchs, and may possibly be seen in Spain in the future. In any event, both the ceremonial and less apparent counseling roles of the monarchy are repeatedly approved in