There was royal influence over Church appointments and churchmen
often manned the royal administration. However, the power of
the Church to place a kingdom under an interdict (preventing the
faithful from taking part in the full range of religious observances)
constituted in many ways a more powerful weapon than the armies
of kings, or the emperor.
It was only after the development of the modern idea of state
sovereignty (e.g. as by Bodin in his Republicof 1576) and especially
after the assumption of leadership over the Christian Church in their
countries by Protestant kings (starting with Henry VIII) that the
more radical idea of the divine right of kings became established. As
parliamentary forces in seventeenth-century England increasingly
stressed the idea of popular sovereignty, the Stuart kings were
increasingly attracted to the idea that countries could only have one
sovereign and that he held authority from God not man. In countries
like France in which republics were founded, the restoration of the
power of an executive, rather than figurehead, monarchy became
increasingly the trademark of anti-democratic and ultra-conservative
forces.
In other countries that retained a monarchy, a pro-monarchist
position might be combined with a more moderate stance (as in
nineteenth-century Germany where Bismarck combined social
reformism and nationalism in a politically powerful combination
with monarchism). Paradoxically, in recent years in Spain the
monarch has used his appeal to the right to help engineer a return to
constitutional democracy.The radical right: Nazism and fascism
In contemporary circumstances, however, the forces which are
generally seen as furthest to the right are not those of monarchism
but those of fascism or Nazism. In many ways such movements are
the furthest removed from the democratic centre since they deny the
legitimacy of the idea of democracy and of universal human rights,
whilst the extreme left – in the shape of communists – have generally
claimed the symbolism of democracy and frequently claimed to be
more democratic than liberal democrats.
Hitler’s ‘National Socialist’ Party was not without a populist
strand in that the ‘Führer’ (leader) was seen as representing the true74 IDEOLOGIES