So I was reading an article about some graffiti on a sculpture in France and it had the line:
"A massive sculpture commonly referred to as "The Queen's Vagina," currently on display outside of Paris in the gardens of the Palace of Versailles, was spray-painted with anti-Semitic and royalist graffiti on Saturday night."
What does "royalist" mean in this context? Royalist in the context of the Revolution? Is that still a thing?
I realize there's a twenty year limit on conversation here, and that's fine. I would just like to know more about French royalist movements in general, leading up to the modern era. If I'm even understanding the use of the phrase.
"Royalist" refers to a legitimist movement in France that does indeed trace its roots back to the July Revolution of 1830. For the past nearly 200 years, French legitimists have been advocating the return of legitimacy to the French monarchy in accordance with the succession of the Bourbon line, which would today render a 41 year old banker from Spain named Louis de Bourbon (Louis XX) the new king of France.
The legitimist movement has existed throughout the five French Republics, experiencing ups and downs of influence throughout. One such "up" occurred during WWII in Vichy France, where my understanding is that they were a fairly prominent part of the French fascist movement.
In contemporary French politics, the Legitimists tend to gather around Catholicism and far-right parties, notably the Front National. Aside from the return of legitimacy to the monarch, legitimists advocate a lot of traditional far-right platforms, such as the rejection of the European Union to maintain French sovereignty and the maintenance of cultural and religious homogeny in France and Europe. However, their actual presence and influence both within FN as well as on French society as a whole is pretty minimal.
Royalists are a collection of fringe political movement that failed to gain any significant political traction in decades. However, they do exist in the far-right and hard line catholic universe. The movement is primarly divided between royalists claiming the Bourbon name from before the revolution, and the Orléanistes claiming heritage from the second empire period. They have no official recognition. In France, most nobility titles hold no value. In any case, it is a political fantasy with no social base backing it or explicit need for it apart from nostalgia and lyricism. Republicanism is hard coded in almost every aspect of French socio-political institutions since centuries. It's a total fantasy.