King Umberto II of Italy — the May King, voted out in a month

Umberto II was king of Italy for thirty-four days. He took the throne on 9 May 1946, when his father Victor Emmanuel III abdicated in a last attempt to save the monarchy by detaching it from the discredited old king, and he lost it on 2 June 1946, when Italians voting in a national referendum chose a republic over the crown by roughly 54 percent to 46. Confirmed by the courts, the result ended the reign of the man history calls the “May King.” On 13 June 1946 Umberto left Italy for Portugal rather than provoke civil conflict, and the House of Savoy, which had ruled the Kingdom of Italy since its unification in 1861, passed into exile.

The monarchy did not fall to revolution or invasion but to a vote, and the vote was a verdict on the institution’s record. The House of Savoy had presided over Italy’s defeat in the First World War’s aftermath, then over the rise and twenty-year rule of Benito Mussolini, whom Victor Emmanuel III had appointed prime minister in 1922 and whom the crown had sustained through the dictatorship, the racial laws, and the catastrophe of the Second World War. By 1946 the monarchy was inseparable in many Italians’ minds from Fascism and from the ruin Fascism had brought.

Umberto, more personally untainted than his father and seen by some as a more constitutional figure, was meant to be the dynasty’s fresh start. He was too late. The abdication came only weeks before the referendum, and a month of careful conduct could not erase decades of compromise. The country split sharply: the industrial north voted heavily for the republic, the poorer, rural south for the king. The republic prevailed, and the constitution that followed barred male Savoy heirs from even setting foot in Italy.

The fall of the Italian monarchy is a rare case of a crown removed peacefully, by ballot and within the rule of law, after the courts rejected the monarchists’ challenge to the count. Umberto never abdicated and never recognized his deposition as legitimate, styling himself king in exile until his death in 1983, but he never returned and never seriously attempted restoration. The May King became the model of a monarchy ended not by the sword but by the considered judgment of its own people.

King Constantine II of Greece — a failed coup, then a throne abolished

Constantine II was the last king of Greece. He acceded in March 1964 at the age of twenty-three and lost his throne in stages: politically in December 1967, when a botched counter-coup against the military junta drove him into exile; formally in June 1973, when the colonels abolished the monarchy by decree; and finally and legitimately in December 1974, when, after the junta’s collapse, a free referendum confirmed Greece as a republic by roughly 69 percent to 31. He never reigned again and lived most of the rest of his life in exile in London, returning to Greece only in his last years and dying in Athens in 2023.

The Greek monarchy, a foreign-rooted institution imported in the nineteenth century and never fully naturalized in Greek political life, had a long history of instability — kings had been deposed, restored, and exiled repeatedly across the preceding century. Constantine inherited this fragile crown and then, in his first years, helped destabilize it further. His clash with the elected prime minister Georgios Papandreou in 1965, and his role in engineering the fall of that government, triggered a constitutional crisis and mass protests that discredited the throne in the eyes of much of the public and poisoned civil-military politics.

When a clique of army colonels seized power on 21 April 1967, Constantine was outflanked. He swore in the junta’s government, lending it a veneer of legality, and then in December attempted his own counter-coup — poorly planned and poorly supported. It failed within hours, and he fled the country. He remained nominal head of state in exile for five more years until the junta, consolidating its dictatorship, abolished the monarchy outright in 1973 and staged a controlled referendum to ratify the change, which Constantine rejected as illegitimate.

The decisive verdict came only after the dictatorship fell. The Metapolitefsi of 1974 restored democracy, and the new government of Constantine Karamanlis put the question of the monarchy to a genuinely free vote. On 8 December 1974, Greeks chose a republic decisively. Constantine accepted that result, even as he disputed the junta-era abolition, and the institution that had been imported in 1863 was retired by the considered choice of the Greek people.