Legitimism was a response of monarchy to its fall from power and delegitimation occasioned by revolution and the Napoleonic period: a theory of royal authority based on Christian theology in a period of secular upheaval; in this sense, it was a historical paradox. Like conservatism, which it was part of, it was a post-revolutionary construct, an ideology of continuity at a time when the historical continuum had been shattered. Legitimism was a product of the French Revolution (1789), …