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.
Farouk I, the last reigning king of Egypt and the Sudan, ruled for sixteen years, from his accession in 1936 to the dawn of 26 July 1952, when a group of nationalist army officers — the Free Officers, led from behind the scenes by Gamal Abdel Nasser — forced him to abdicate and sail into exile. He left aboard the royal yacht Mahroussa the same evening, nominally surrendering the throne to his infant son, proclaimed Fuad II. Within a year the monarchy was abolished outright and Egypt declared a republic, ending the dynasty founded by Muhammad Ali Pasha in the early nineteenth century.
Farouk’s fall was not a foreign conquest or a popular revolution in the streets but a swift, almost bloodless military coup that toppled a discredited crown. He had come to the throne at sixteen amid genuine affection — “the beloved king” — and squandered it. His reign became a byword for indolence, gluttony, and corruption: extravagant spending and a compulsive collector’s hoards set against a country of mass poverty, all under the heavy hand of British influence that the king could neither escape nor effectively resist.
Two humiliations sealed the dynasty’s fate. In February 1942 British tanks surrounded the Abdeen Palace and the British ambassador compelled Farouk, at gunpoint in effect, to appoint a government of London’s choosing — exposing the crown as a puppet and shaming the nationalist army officers who watched. Then the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 ended in defeat, which those same officers blamed on the king’s corruption and the rotten state of an army equipped, it was said, with faulty weapons. The conviction that the monarchy was both servile and incompetent crystallized into the conspiracy that overthrew it.
Farouk lived out his exile in Italy and Monaco as a famous wastrel, his bulk and his appetites the stuff of tabloid legend, and died in Rome on 18 March 1965, collapsing after an enormous late-night meal. He was forty-five. The crown he lost was never restored; the republic that replaced it, under Nasser, reshaped Egypt and the wider Arab world.
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.