For those depressed by our seeming never-ending winter of political horror, there is reason to be heartened, for we are entering a rightfully anti-monarchical moment. Take, for instance, the No Kings movement, born in response to Donald Trump’s authoritarian ambitions. Anti-monarchical movements have always required aesthetic subversion alongside political resistance. The history of such art, from toppled statues to revolutionary paintings, reveals what’s possible, and what’s needed.
Consider the 4,000-pound equestrian statue of King George III, bedecked in Roman imperial garb after the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, which stood for only six years in New York City’s Bowling Green Park after it was erected in 1770. Unveiled to mark the British victory in the recent Seven Years’ War, the statue looked out over the former Dutch cattle ground, circumscribed by a wrought-iron fence that still survives. In Smithsonian Magazine, Wendy Bellion describes the piece as the “biggest and brightest object in the colonial landscape,” a gold-leaf covered statue of the Hanoverian king in toga and laurels, while also noting that it was positioned so that his raised salute greeted soldiers in the British garrison across from the monument, while New Yorkers walking down Broadway faced the horse’s ass. On July 9, 1776, following a public reading of the recently signed Declaration of Independence, a furious crowd of colonials gathered at Bowling Green Park, toppling the statue with ropes and dismembering it with hammers and axes. Captain John Montresor, a British officer witness to the desecration, mournfully records how the statue was decapitated and the head put on a pike at Moore’s Tavern, while on July 13 The Pennsylvania Evening Post enthused that this symbol of “Tory pride and folly … was, by the sons of freedom, laid prostrate in the dirt, the just desert of an ungrateful tyrant!”
Unknown artist, “King Charles I” (c. late 17th–early 18th century), oil on canvas, held at the National Portrait Gallery in London (photo public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
The 18th century, certainly by its conclusion, was the great period of anti-monarchism, even while kings ruled over most of the planet. This was the time that Benjamin Franklin suggested that “Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God,” while the French philosopher Dennis Diderot took as his own slogan that “Man will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
Sentiments such as these erupted in a paroxysm of revolutionary and republican fury in what would become the United States, and then spectacularly in France, though anti-monarchical sentiment had deep roots in Western consciousness. During the 14th-century Peasant’s Revolt, when a rag-tag group of rebels marched on London, the radical Wycliffite priest John Ball asked, “When Adam delved and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?” George Buchanan, a 16th-century Scots Presbyterian theologian, developed a political theory of regicide, arguing in his 1579 A Dialogue on The Law of the Kingship in Scotland that “any individual from the whole mass of the human race can lawfully exact from [a tyrant] all the penalties of war.” With the 17th-century English Civil Wars (or the Revolution, depending on your political sensibilities), the Parliamentarians moved from theory to praxis, offering something unprecedented in European history when commoners took King Charles I to the scaffold in 1649. Poet, pamphleteer, and propagandist John Milton defended the execution in Eikonoklastes from that same year, arguing that “all men naturally were born free … and were by privilege above all creatures, born to command not obey.”
Unknown artist, “The Execution of Charles I of England” (c. 1649), oil on canvas, held at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh (photo public domain via Wikimedia Commons), ea
Through the Enlightenment, what had originally been a set of arguments against tyrants turned into one against kings. Where a Ball or even a Buchanan would distinguish between those categories, a Milton and then later a Diderot and a Robespierre would not. To such thinkers, all humans exist in a state of complete equality, so the idea of a benevolent despot is a contradiction. To be a king is to be a tyrant. This was a conclusion that was forged not in philosophical isolation but on the battlefields of Marston Moor, Naseby, and Worcester during the English Revolution, and later at Valley Forge and Yorktown for the Americans, not to mention the dais of the Place de Concorde in Paris, where the guillotine was set. The men who executed Charles I at Whitehall couldn’t have imagined that their war would have ended in this previously unthinkable event, and yet the belief that monarchy is unjustified and debased except in its most toothless and symbolic forms began then and would only take root and evolve over the course of the subsequent century.
If the patronage of monarchs produced art meant to valorize the dignity and divinity of kings, then the same forms could be used to iconoclastically subvert. An anonymous royalist painting of Charles I from the time of the civil wars shows him bearded and becurled as Christ, his hands upraised in a pose of benediction, while a heavenly hand reaches down from above to place a crown on his head. A contemporary Dutch painting of the king’s execution exhibited at the National Gallery of Scotland shows that same head having been lost, a gory and bloody tableau that, whatever the political position of the viewer (some in the crowd depicted are cheering, some fainting), at least admitted that Charles was, after all, simply a man. The destruction of King George III’s equestrian statue more than a century later, with the metal melted to cast bullets for the revolutionaries to be “assimilated with the brain of our infatuated adversaries” as the author at The Pennsylvania Evening Post put it, was its own form of performance art as protest, every choreographed action from the decapitation of the statue to its exhibition in a tavern a ritualized action commensurate with the symbolic import of the statue.
Crown: “I lost a head”; Guillotine: “I’ve found one” (1793) (photo public domain via BnF Gallica)
Artist Johannes Adam Simon Oertel, in a painting composed in 1853 now exhibited by the New York Historical, depicts an anarchic crowd assembled around the statue atop its pedestal; torch-bearing colonials have strapped ropes to the side of the piece and begun to topple it. Contrary to bad-faith bloviating from chuffed right-wingers about the removal of Confederate statues a couple years ago, Oertel’s painting reminds us that many Americans have always known what commemorations of tyrants deserve. The French, true to their sardonic reputation, marked the execution of Louis XVI with a representative cartoon showing a crown and a guillotine side-by-side, the former captioned “I am losing a head” and the later with “I am getting one.”
Gruesome images of executions are one thing, but the animating spirit of democracy is entirely another. Eugène Delacroix’s Romantic masterpiece “Liberty Leading the People” from 1830, which marked the toppling of Charles X, the revanchist Bourbon pretender who’d previously ascended a restored French throne, may be a cliché, but images become such for a reason. Here, a crowd of bayonet-brandishing revolutionaries march through debris and bodies, led by the bare-breasted goddess Liberty bedecked in a Phrygian cap holding aloft the tricolor of the Republic. The assembled revolutionaries look diminutive next to this ideal of human equality and freedom more majestic and beautiful than any mere mortal who claims to be a king anointed by God. As historian Gordon Wood put it in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1993), during this period, “Equality became so potent … because it came to mean that everyone was really the same as everyone else … in a basic down-to-earth and day-in-and-day-out manner.”
Anti-monarchical and democratic art — the optimistic, inspiring, even utopian revolutionary aesthetics of the barricade and parliament alike — is replete in subsequent artistic history. In France, where the divide between right and left has always in some sense refought their revolution, such art has always had a particularly partisan gloss, but in the United States, where 1776 is historically understood as the foundational event of nationhood itself, the fighting is over the legacy of the Revolution itself. Both the Tea Party of more than a decade ago and the No Kings movement of today have used revolutionary imagery to make their case, divergent though their politics may be.
Eugène Delacroix, “Liberty Leading the People” (1830), oil on canvas, held by the Louvre Museum (photo public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
Despite a multitude of clever protest signs, no clear image has coalesced around the No Kings movement, which isn’t to say that that’s not going to happen (because it’s certainly necessary). A free downloadable poster depicts Donald Trump as a statue in New York Harbor holding aloft the tiki torches identified with the infamous and deadly Unite the Right Rally from 2017 with the phrase “NO KING” emblazoned over the top, while another poster features an abstracted crown (evocative of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s use of that symbol) with an “X” over it. Unfortunately, too much of the art, so far, embraces cringey, normie liberalism; way too much of it relies on AI. What the No Kings movement needs — a movement with the potential to be as consequential as #Occupy was — is a visual aesthetic as urgent, recognizable, and distinct as Shepard Fairey’s iconic “Hope” poster from 2008.
Despite those current deficiencies, the entire style of the No Kings movement makes a cogent argument that American Revolutionary iconography belongs more to liberals and the left than the right. No matter how loud the jingoistic bromides on the right, the reality is that the GOP has embraced an aesthetic where national symbols are mutilated into variations such as the “Blue Lives Matter” flag; Trump is unironically celebrated as a monarch. When MAGA court-philosopher Curtis Yarvin gushes about the possibility of “CEO-Monarchs” and his patron Peter Thiel (also the man who created J.D. Vance’s political career) writes denunciations of democracy, it’s time to march on Bowling Green again.
A reference to Trump’s anti-immigrant comments (photo Hrag Vartanian/Hyperallergic)
Because if there was ever a moment with a groundswell of anti-monarchism, it’s ours. Not just in the rhetoric of the No Kings movement, which provides a necessary and effective rejoinder to the ever-encroaching fascism of the Trump administration, but in the growing and diverse consciousness that identifies what exactly is at stake. Anand Giridharadas in The New York Times writes about the cross-partisan anger over the Jeffrey Epstein horror, arguing that “People are right to sense that, as the emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good.” A kind of post-modern aristocracy that’s royalism in all but name, no more evident than in the accumulated wealth of an increasingly powerful 1% and the sickening inequities between that class and the rest of us. Today, when wealth isn’t even expressed in the material terms of wheat stored by pharaohs or gold hoarded by chieftains, the near-imaginary riches accumulated by Thiel, Jeff Bezos, or Elon Musk signify a privatized form of power — unaccountable, undemocratic, and effectively monarchical. Tesla executive shareholders recently voted to gift Musk a pay package that could exceed a trillion dollars. For context, counting to a million would take somebody around two weeks to complete; to count to a trillion you’d need 31,689 years.
Demonstrators in front of the Trump Hotel in Chicago (photo by Alek S. via Flickr)
Economically, these sums of money are more in the realm of string theory than arithmetic. Such sums are so difficult to wrap one’s mind around that it’s more accurate to interpret it as what it really is — a kind of financial divine right of kings, the number in a bank account merely an expression that Musk’s life is worth more than the rest of ours. Crowns or not, kings are very much an aspect of late capitalist life. But as author Ursula K. Le Guin put it at the National Book Medal ceremony in 2014, “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable — but then, so did the divine right of kings.” Today they’re the same thing, but, as she adds, “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.”
Arturo Di Modica’s “Charging Bull” (1989) (photo by Sam Valadi, CC BY 2.0)
The Epstein Class doesn’t view us as citizens, but as subjects, though they use the word “consumer.” Imagine what it would be like to withhold that consent, to not purchase anything on Black Friday, to envision a general strike? Where King George once stood, there is now a different statue: Arturo Di Modica’s monument to capitalist excess, “Charging Bull” (1989). It sits on Wall Street pawing and snorting, an idol in need of its own spiritual toppling.
