Over the past several years, I have noticed an increasing number of thoughtful Catholics expressing nostalgia for monarchy. Reading Helen Castor’s Joan of Arc: A History reminded me how different monarchy looks when viewed not as an idealized abstraction, but as a functioning political system inhabited by real men and women with ordinary ambitions, rivalries, loyalties, and sins.¹
This essay does not argue for or against monarchy as a form of government in the abstract. The Catholic Church has long recognized that multiple legitimate forms of civil authority can serve the common good, provided they are ordered toward justice and the true good of persons. Nor is this a critique of the theological reality of Christ the King or the queenship of Mary. Rather, the purpose is to examine hereditary monarchy honestly through the lens of history and then compare those realities with the constitutional principles articulated by the American Founders. We do so with three distinct but overlapping perspectives: (1) history, what Castor demonstrates about fifteenth-century France; (2) political philosophy, what the Founders, especially in the Federalist Papers, argued regarding hereditary rule and constitutional republicanism; and (3) Catholic theology, what the Church teaches concerning legitimate civil authority, the common good, and the Kingship of Christ.
The World Joan Inherited: The Vicissitudes of Hereditary Monarchy
Helen Castor’s great strength is showing readers the dynastic succession disputes, competing royal houses, civil war, questions of legitimacy, political marriages, factionalism, and institutional instability before Joan ever appears on the scene. Joan’s mission becomes more understandable precisely because of that context.²
In the decades leading to Joan’s arrival at Chinon in 1429, France was not simply at war with England. It was tearing itself apart. The madness of Charles VI created a power vacuum that invited rival claims. His wife, Isabeau of Bavaria, played a central role in the Treaty of Troyes (1420), which disinherited their son, the dauphin Charles (later Charles VII), in favor of Henry V of England and his heirs through marriage to the French princess Catherine. Legitimacy itself was in doubt; rumors about the dauphin’s paternity were credible enough in a court where royal infidelity was an open secret. Burgundian and Armagnac factions turned French against French. Political marriages intended to secure peace instead multiplied competing claims across borders. Hereditary succession, far from guaranteeing stability, became a mechanism for endless intrigue, civil war, and foreign intervention.
These were not aberrations. They were recurring realities of a system in which the health, sanity, virtue, and marital alliances of a single bloodline carried the fate of the realm. Castor’s evidence-first narrative lets the documents speak: letters, chronicles, and contemporary testimony reveal a world of fragile truces, shifting loyalties, and the constant threat that one king’s death or one queen’s rumored infidelity could unravel the kingdom. Joan stepped into this maelstrom as an instrument of divine providence, but the structural weaknesses of hereditary monarchy remained.
Ideals are easy to romanticize. Institutions are not. Institutions should be judged not only by their ideals, but by how they function across generations of imperfect human beings.
The Founders’ Critique: Why a Constitutional Republic
The American Founders were steeped in exactly this European experience through colonial governance, historical reading, and direct observation of monarchical politics. They were not abstract theorists dreaming of a republic in a vacuum. They were practical statesmen who had seen (and studied) the realities of hereditary rule up close.
The Federalist Papers articulate this repeatedly. In Federalist No. 69, Alexander Hamilton contrasts the limited, accountable powers of the proposed U.S. President with the expansive, hereditary authority of the British King, highlighting the dangers of personal rule untethered by law. Across the executive papers (Nos. 67–77), the authors emphasize deliberate institutional safeguards: no hereditary succession, no lifelong tenure, checks and balances, and separation of powers. They sought to avoid the factionalism, intrigue, and instability that plagued European monarchies precisely because power was tied to bloodlines and personal favor rather than fixed constitutional limits.³
This was not a rejection of authority or order. It was a prudential judgment about human nature. A constitutional republic, representative, limited by written law, and structured to diffuse power, was designed to channel ambition, protect liberty, and promote the common good without depending on the perpetual virtue of a royal line. The Founders built safeguards precisely because they understood the realities Castor describes so vividly in Joan’s France.
Catholic Teaching: Authority, the Common Good, and Christ the King
Catholic theology does not conflate any particular political form with the Gospel. The Church has recognized monarchy, aristocracy, and republic as potentially legitimate when rightly ordered. What matters is whether a regime serves justice, protects the vulnerable, and acknowledges the limits of temporal power.
The social Kingship of Christ and the queenship of Mary stand above every earthly regime. They judge all systems, monarchical or republican, by how well they conform to natural law and the dignity of the human person. The Founders’ constitutional design, with its emphasis on ordered liberty and checks on power, can be seen as compatible with this vision: a prudent attempt to account for sin while pursuing the common good. It does not replace the City of God, but it can serve it in the City of Man.
Conclusion: Judging Institutions by Their Fruits Across Generations
Joan of Arc’s world, as Helen Castor presents it, does not romanticize monarchy. It reveals its human costs. The American Founders, confronting similar realities, chose a different path, not out of utopianism, but out of reasoned caution. Thoughtful Catholics today can evaluate both without forcing a false choice between historical fidelity and theological hope.
We give thanks for the saints God raises in every age, including the Maid of Orléans. We also give thanks for the wisdom that seeks stable institutions capable of enduring across generations of imperfect human beings. In the end, our true allegiance is to Christ the King, whose reign perfects every just political order while transcending them all.
Notes
- Helen Castor, Joan of Arc: A History (New York: Harper, 2015).
- Ibid.
- Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist No. 69, in The Federalist Papers, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: New American Library, 1961), 415–23.