The House of Romanov ruled Russia for just over three hundred years, from the election of Michael Romanov as tsar in 1613 to the abdication of Nicholas II in March 1917; sixteen months after that abdication, on the night of 16–17 July 1918, the last tsar, his wife, their five children and four members of their household were shot and bayoneted to death in the cellar of a requisitioned merchant’s house in Yekaterinburg. The dynasty did not so much fall as exhaust itself, and then was extinguished.
Nicholas II had inherited an autocracy that he believed it his sacred duty to preserve undiminished. He ruled an empire of roughly 170 million people across a sixth of the world’s land, and he met its mounting strains — defeat by Japan in 1904–05, the revolution of 1905, and finally the catastrophe of the First World War — with concession offered too late and withdrawn too soon. By 1917 the army was bleeding, the cities were starving, and the dynasty had isolated itself behind the peasant mystic Grigori Rasputin, whose hold over the Empress Alexandra had become a public scandal.
When food riots and a soldiers’ mutiny erupted in the capital, Petrograd, in late February 1917 (Old Style), the monarchy collapsed within days. Nicholas abdicated on 15 March 1917 (New Style) for himself and, on medical advice concerning his haemophiliac son, also for the boy. His brother declined the throne. A 304-year dynasty ended without a battle for it.
What followed was captivity, and then murder. Held under the Provisional Government at Tsarskoye Selo, moved to Tobolsk in Siberia, and finally confined in the Ipatiev House in Bolshevik-held Yekaterinburg, the family was killed as anti-Bolshevik forces closed on the city. The five children — Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and the thirteen-year-old Alexei — were murdered with their parents. The killing of the children removed any line of legitimist restoration and turned a deposed family into martyrs whose remains, identity, and fate would be contested for the rest of the century.
Louis XVI ruled France for eighteen years, from his accession in May 1774 to the abolition of the monarchy on 21 September 1792; four months later, on 21 January 1793, the deposed king — stripped of his titles and tried under the commoner’s name “Louis Capet” — was guillotined before a crowd of some twenty thousand in the Place de la Révolution in Paris. He was the first reigning European monarch executed by a revolutionary tribunal of his own subjects, and his death severed any path back to the Bourbon throne.
Louis had inherited not a tyranny but an insolvency. The French crown of the 1770s commanded perhaps twenty-eight million people and the most prestigious court in Europe, yet its finances were chronically broken: a tax system that exempted the nobility and clergy, debt swollen by French support for the American Revolution, and a monarch without the will to force reform through the privileged orders. When his ministers’ attempts to tax the elite failed, Louis was compelled in 1789 to summon the Estates-General, an assembly that had not met since 1614 — and in doing so he opened a door he could not close.
The Estates-General became the National Assembly, the Bastille fell on 14 July 1789, and within two years France had a constitution that reduced the king to a salaried executive. Louis never reconciled himself to it. His attempted flight to Varennes in June 1791, halted and dragged back to Paris, destroyed the fiction that he accepted the Revolution; thereafter he was a suspect monarch presiding over a war he was believed to want France to lose. On 10 August 1792 the Tuileries Palace was stormed, the monarchy suspended, and the king imprisoned.
What followed was a trial whose verdict was effectively settled in advance. The newly elected National Convention, having proclaimed the Republic, found Louis guilty of conspiracy against liberty by an essentially unanimous vote, then condemned him to death by the narrowest of margins — 361 of 721 deputies, the bare majority. The guillotine that killed him had been adopted as a humane and egalitarian instrument; it made the king’s death indistinguishable in method from a commoner’s, which was precisely the point.
Wilhelm II reigned as German Emperor and King of Prussia for just over thirty years, from his accession in June 1888 to his abdication in November 1918; his fall came not by execution or coup but by military defeat, when the collapse of Germany’s war effort in the First World War triggered a revolution that swept away the monarchy in a matter of days. On 9 November 1918 his chancellor announced the abdication without waiting for the Kaiser’s consent; the next day Wilhelm crossed into the neutral Netherlands, where he lived in exile until his death in 1941. His departure ended the Hohenzollern dynasty’s centuries of rule and the German Empire that had existed only since 1871.
Wilhelm fell because the war he had helped bring about and could not win destroyed the prestige on which his throne rested. He was an intelligent but erratic and insecure monarch — vain, impulsive, given to bombastic speeches and military display, his self-image bound up with the army and navy that defined imperial Germany. He had dismissed the architect of German unity, Otto von Bismarck, in 1890, and pursued an aggressive, unpredictable foreign policy that isolated Germany and drove a naval arms race with Britain.
When the July Crisis of 1914 escalated after the assassination at Sarajevo, Wilhelm’s government issued Austria-Hungary the “blank cheque” of unconditional support that helped turn a Balkan quarrel into a continental war. Once that war began, however, the Kaiser steadily lost real authority. By the later years of the conflict, effective power had passed to the military command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff, and Wilhelm — nominally supreme warlord — was sidelined, “out of sight and neglected,” a figurehead presiding over a war machine he no longer controlled.
The end came with defeat. As the German armies broke in the autumn of 1918, sailors mutinied at Kiel, revolution spread across the cities, and the war could not be ended while the Kaiser remained. At the army’s headquarters in Spa, General Wilhelm Groener told Wilhelm to his face that the army would march home in good order under its commanders but would not fight for his throne. The monarchy was declared finished; Wilhelm fled abroad, and a republic was proclaimed in Berlin.
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the second and last Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty, ruled Iran for thirty-seven years, from his accession in September 1941 to 16 January 1979, when he left the country he could no longer hold and went into a wandering exile from which he never returned. Within weeks the monarchy he embodied — and the 2,500-year tradition of Persian kingship he claimed to inherit — had been swept away by a revolution that placed the exiled cleric Ruhollah Khomeini at the head of a new Islamic Republic. The Shah did not abdicate and was not deposed by a parliament; he was overwhelmed by a popular uprising that crossed every class and faction of Iranian society.
He had ruled an oil-rich state of roughly thirty-five million people, modernized at speed and policed by fear. From the early 1960s his “White Revolution” pushed land reform, female suffrage, and industrial growth from the top down, financed by surging oil revenue, while his secret police, SAVAK, jailed, tortured, and silenced dissent of every stripe — secular, leftist, and religious alike. The result was a country transformed physically yet starved of any legitimate channel for political life. When the pressure broke in 1978, there was no loyal opposition to absorb it, only the street and the mosque.
The revolution built through 1978 in waves of strikes and mass demonstrations met by repression, including the killings of “Black Friday” in September. By the winter the oil workers had struck, the economy had seized, and the army’s will to fire on its own people had drained away. The Shah, gravely ill with cancer he concealed from his people, vacillated between concession and crackdown until both failed. He flew out of Tehran on 16 January 1979; Khomeini returned in triumph on 1 February; the monarchy was formally abolished by referendum that spring.
What followed for the Shah was humiliation and a slow death. Refused durable refuge by allies who had once courted him, he moved through Egypt, Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, the United States, and Panama before Anwar Sadat gave him final asylum in Egypt. His admission to the United States for cancer treatment helped trigger the seizure of the American embassy in Tehran and the hostage crisis that defined the new order’s confrontation with the West. He died in Cairo on 27 July 1980 and was buried in the Al-Rifaʿi Mosque, a king without a kingdom.
Puyi, enthroned as the Xuantong Emperor of the Qing dynasty in 1908 at the age of two, was the last emperor of China. His reign as a true sovereign lasted barely three years and ended on 12 February 1912, when, in the wake of the Xinhai Revolution, the regent Empress Dowager Longyu signed the abdication edict on his behalf. With that document the Qing dynasty ended and so did more than two thousand years of imperial rule in China, replaced by a republic. Puyi was six years old and understood almost none of it.
The fall of the empire did not end Puyi’s strange career as a figurehead. Under the Articles of Favorable Treatment he kept his title and lived on inside the Forbidden City as a pensioned ex-emperor until a warlord expelled him in 1924. From there he drifted into the orbit of Imperial Japan, which exploited him as the centerpiece of its conquest of Manchuria: installed as chief executive of the puppet state of Manchukuo in 1932 and crowned its “Kangde Emperor” in 1934, he was a sovereign in name and a prisoner of his sponsors in fact, signing whatever Tokyo placed before him.
When Japan surrendered in 1945, Puyi was captured by Soviet forces, held in the USSR, produced as a witness at the Tokyo war-crimes tribunal, and in 1950 handed to the new People’s Republic of China. There he underwent nearly a decade of imprisonment and political “reeducation” at a war-criminals’ facility before being pardoned in 1959 and recast by the Communist state as living proof of redemption: an emperor remade into an ordinary citizen.
He spent his final years in Beijing as a gardener and then a literary archivist, and as the author of an officially shaped memoir, From Emperor to Citizen. During the Cultural Revolution he was reportedly shielded from the worst of the Red Guards by Premier Zhou Enlai. He died of cancer and related illness on 17 October 1967, leaving no heir — the last occupant of a throne that had not truly existed for fifty-five years.
Haile Selassie I, the last emperor of Ethiopia’s Solomonic line, was deposed in Addis Ababa on 12 September 1974 by a committee of junior officers and soldiers known as the Derg, and died in palace custody on 27 August 1975 — almost certainly strangled on the orders of the military government, ending a dynasty that traced its claim, by tradition, back through seven centuries to King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. He had reigned, as regent then emperor, for nearly six decades. He fell not in a single coup but in a slow unravelling — a “creeping” revolution that stripped his authority away piece by piece over eight months before a small car carried him from his own palace.
Crowned in 1930, Haile Selassie had become one of the towering figures of the twentieth century: the modernizer who gave Ethiopia its first written constitution, the exile who stood before the League of Nations in 1936 to indict Fascist Italy’s invasion of his country, the founding patron of the Organisation of African Unity, and — without his knowledge or wish — the messianic figure of the Rastafari movement, who took their name from his pre-coronation title, Ras Tafari. Abroad he was an icon of African independence. At home, by the 1970s, he presided over a feudal and impoverished empire that had stopped reforming and an emperor who had grown old and remote.
The collapse began with hunger. A drought and famine in the northern provinces of Wollo and Tigray in 1972–74 killed tens of thousands; the government concealed it, and when foreign film of starving Ethiopians was juxtaposed on television with footage of the emperor’s lavish court, the regime’s moral authority was destroyed. Through 1974 army mutinies, strikes, and student protests spread, and a committee of soldiers — the Derg — methodically arrested ministers, abolished institutions, and isolated the emperor until nothing of his power remained.
What followed was captivity and murder. The 82-year-old emperor was held in a wing of his Grand Palace as the Derg consolidated into a Marxist dictatorship under Mengistu Haile Mariam and began the killings — sixty senior officials shot without trial that November, and, in the years after, the mass terror of the “Red Terror.” Haile Selassie died the following August. The official cause was respiratory failure; the truth, set out in a later trial, was that he had been strangled in his bed. His body was hidden under a palace floor and not recovered until 1992, after the Derg itself had fallen.