Sacral monarchy’s legitimacy declined, forcing rulers to adopt standardized national forms

Evidence

Yet even in the age of Pope and Addison, Anne Stuart was still healing the sick by the laying on of royal hands, cures committed also by the Bourbons, Louis XV and XVI, in Enlightened France till the end of the ancien régime. But after 1789 the principle of Legitimacy had to be loudly and self-consciously defended, and, in the process, ‘monarchy’ became a semi-standardized model. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 79

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the later Islamophobia readings on how ‘common sense’ and legitimacy regimes get naturalized then re-naturalized — the withered principle marks a shift toward self-conscious construction that parallels how racial/national categories become explicit and defensible. — connects to: The nation was born from the decline of dynastic and religious legitimacy. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 40; Monarchy collapsed once its style no longer signified as royal costume — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 704; National self-identification made rulers subject to popular verdicts of treason — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on…, 346
• SEED: Angle: how a waning universal legitimacy forces the very self-justification that reveals a system to be constructed rather than given — applicable to how contemporary race-thinking similarly defends what once needed no defense.

Broader Connections

• Monarchy collapsed once its style no longer signified as royal costume #corroborates (0.90) — Hilary Mantel, A Memoir of My Former Self- A Life in…, 704
• National self-identification made rulers subject to popular verdicts of treason #expands (0.80) — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 346