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Title: Royal Babylon: The Alarming History of European Royalty by Karl Shaw ISBN: 0-7679-0755-8 Publisher: Broadway Pub. Date: 29 May, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.27 (22 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: Things we weren't supposed to know
Comment: I have to admit I wasn't expecting much from an author whose previous works, according to the bio on the back cover, include 'Gross,' 'Gross II,' and 'The Mammoth Book of Tasteless Lists.' However, I was very pleasantly surprised. Compared to 'A Treasury of Royal Scandals,' by Michael Farquhar, which covers much of the same ground in a far more tendentious fashion, 'Royal Babylon' is a very good book.
The sell-copy on the book's cover makes 'Royal Babylon' sound like nothing more than recycled gossip and titillating stories about Those Nasty Royals. It's actually a somewhat more systematic history than that, with in-depth profiles of several monarchs and thumbnail sketches of many others. Shaw also charts thoroughly the recurring incidences of mental and physical illness in the massively inbred family trees of European royalty, and tells tales of drunkenness and debauchery that never made it into the official history books.
Unlike Farquhar, Shaw doesn't moralize about monarchy as an institution, or argue that his findings invalidate the very idea of having a hereditary head of state. In fact, he makes the important distinction (on pages 125-127) that in a constitutional monarchy like Britain, having a nut -- to use the clinical term -- on the throne, while still not a good thing, has far fewer negative repercussions than it does in absolute monarchies like Prussia or Imperial Russia.
An eye-opening and disturbing element of Shaw's history is the body-count of people whose lives were taken or destroyed at the whim of a monarch. Throughout the book, people are beaten, starved, frozen, marched to death, or handed back and forth like trading cards. Thousands died in the construction of St Petersburg. Tall men from across the continent were kidnapped to Prussia to form Frederick William I's Potsdam Giant Guards. Other monarchs laughed at, or even enabled, this 'eccentricity.' As another review on this page notes, however, the death toll from monarchs is still far less than that exacted, in the twentieth century alone, by leaders acting in the name of the People. It may be outside the scope of Shaw's history to point that out, but it's still important to keep in mind that monarchies have tended to be far less sanguinary than 'dictatorships of the proletariat' are.
I wish Shaw had included an index. But apart from that failing, this is a decent general survey of the seamy underside European royal history. Fans of the contemporary House of Windsor will want to read the evidence that suggests the domestic tableau of the post-Victorian British monarchy hides some secrets every bit as dark and troubling as those of the Wittlesbachs, Hohenzollerns, or Romanovs.
Rating: 4
Summary: Trashy, but a good read nonetheless
Comment: No legitimate historian would be caught dead with this book. Shaw has gone through a bookcase of European history books and assembled all the trashy tidbits, especially where sex or personal hygiene is concerned. The end result is a very, very strange book. Focusing mainly on European monarchs of the 1700s and 1800s, the author details the shocking excesses of the royals, with an emphasis on the sexual. Attention is mainly on the monarchies of Britain (before the reign of Elizabeth II), France, Germany, and Russia, with secondary attention on Belgium, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and Austria. The people discussed are all long-dead; look elsewhere for a recounting of the Charles-and-Di story. The author assumes the reader has some background in European history. Historians will sneer at this book, but it kept me amused during a long day of flying and sitting in airports. It also reminds us that the potential to abuse power is bottomless, and it reminds us why we fought a revolution to get rid of the British monarchy (oops, I forgot -- I live in Canada).
Rating: 2
Summary: Interesting but hardly side-splitting
Comment: This account of European royalty between the 17th-20th centuries has some interesting stories about the eccentric and often deplorable behaviour of the members of various royal families. There is an emphasis on sexual misbehaviour, and Mr. Shaw's own prejudices show up quite clearly. He obviously has a strong distaste for the idea of women having sex past a certain age, Catherine the Great comes in for particular censor for being still interested in sex while in her sixties (ugh!)He refers sneeringly to George I's mother as a "flabby, toothless crone"She was a very old lady at the time, but that's no excuse, evidently, for being flabby and toothless. I suppose Mr Shaw thinks she should have been working out at the gym, or something. Camilla Parker-Bowles is refered to dissaprovingly as 'Prince Charles's forty-five year old mistress' (one feels Mr Shaw would dissaprove of her less had she been in her twenties).Mr Shaw seems to feel that hereditary power, combined with in-breeding, is the cause of the bad behaviour of monarchs, though as a previous reviewer pointed out, that hardly explains the deplorable behaviour of such non-hereditary monarchs as Napoleon, Hiter, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao etc. An intersting book if you don't mind the constant dwelling on (sometimes wildly exaggerated) disgusting details. The blurb on the back of the book describes this volume as 'side-splitting' but it is hardly that. Midly amusing perhaps. If you want a side-splitting history book, try 'The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody' by Will Cuppy.
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