The idea of the principality of Monaco being at war is an ostensibly absurd one, akin to Tuvalu becoming the world’s most visited country or North Korea winning a “Most Transparent Democracy” contest. Yet a conflict of sorts did break out on the fringes of the Côte d’Azur in 1963 when France, which surrounds three sides of this sovereign nation of a princely one square mile, demanded that its Lilliputian neighbor accept French taxation.
Hostilities never became physical. No yachts in the marina were sunk, and the croupiers’ jackets in the Monte Carlo casino remained unencumbered by additional military fatigues. The solution was typically stately and mutually advantageous, as J. Keith Nolan and Gordon. S Blair explained in an issue of The Business Lawyer the following year. “In May of 1963,” they wrote,
the crisis was resolved by a new tax treaty between the two countries. While Monaco emerged from the dispute with its independence and some of its former tax advantages, the treaty called for the imposition of a business profits tax for the first time in the country’s history, thus raising doubts as to the continued utility of the principality as a site for international business.
Those doubts proved to be unfounded. Business and pleasure with an added injection of Medieval-era royalty has long been the tripartite locus for Monaco’s continued existence.
Monaco’s history dates to 1297 when François, a member of the exiled Grimaldi family from Genoa, seized the fortress of the Genoese rulers of the area. As Kendall W. Stiles explains in a chapter from his 2018 book, Trust and Hedging in International Relations, the Grimaldi’s proved themselves adept from the outset at negotiating with far larger powers to avoid their territory being swallowed up.
“From the beginnings, the Grimaldi princes entered into arrangements with various local sovereigns, as well as France and Spain,” Stiles writes,
thereby ensuring their protection and the recognition of their sovereign rights, at least internal sovereignty.… In 1542 a treaty with Spain would have made the principality a fiefdom, but the Grimaldi’s insisted on language that at least gave lip service to their sovereignty. A Spanish military unit was deployed in the territory and the Grimaldi’s self-proclaimed title of “Prince” was formally recognized.
The Grimaldi hold on Monaco even managed to survive the French Revolution, though the uprising resulted in the French deposing the royal family for two decades. But following the defeat(s) of Napoleon, the principality returned to the family in 1814, Stiles writes. In 1815, Monaco became a Sardinian protectorate before receiving independence once again in 1861.
But what were the quotidian habits of princes who were required to rule over a territory so small that you could walk from one end to the other in less than an hour?
Albert I, who ruled Monaco from 1889 until his death in 1922, devoted his spare time to oceanography, exploration, and science. He was no mere hobbyist dilettante, founding the Oceanographic Institute of Paris (now renamed Ocean House) and the still-extant, world-renowned Oceanographic Museum of Monaco.
In an obituary published in The Geographical Journal, Hugh Robert Mill wrote that
perhaps the most striking of his [Albert I’s] inventions was the deep-sea trap, a sort of glorified lobster-pot by which he enticed into his net many deep-sea fishes that had hitherto always succeeded in escaping the trawl. His discovery of the gigantic cuttle fish, on which the sperm whale feeds, was another very remarkable achievement.
The discovery of the giant cuttlefish alone seems like enough of an accomplishment on which to build an oceanographic career.
It was the marital choice of Albert’s great grandson, Rainier III, that propelled Monaco from a sunny backwater to a destination favored by A-listers and the paparazzi corps. One of the world’s biggest movie stars thanks to her roles in The Country Girl and High Society, Grace Kelly became Princess Grace in 1958, abandoning her Hollywood career when she married the prince. The nuptials ushered in an era during which the movie-star princess, the Monte Carlo casino, and the nascent Grand Prix conspired to make Monaco a place of glamour and sometime excess.
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In an entry for Orbits, the obituary column for Film Comment, Richard Corliss argued that Kelly “conquered Hollywood because she acted as if she didn’t need, or particularly want, what it had to offer.” However you styled her character, her
shyness, or reserve, or insolence, [it] made her seem the epitome of ageless elegance; thus she proved herself the equal of all those male stars old enough to be her father (James Stewart, Clark Gable, Bing Crosby, Cary Grant).
Yet the private life of the royal couple was rumored to be a far from felicitous one, with many stories of infidelities trickling out before and after the princess was killed in a car crash in 1982 at the age of fifty-two.
In her recent book, An Intimate Look at Broadway, Hollywood, and the Age of Glamour, actor Nancy Olsen Livingston opined on the personal tribulations that the former silver screen heroine may have endured in her longest starring role as that of Rainier III’s spouse.
“I don’t believe she had any idea what it would be like to live the isolation and loneliness of this small piece of geography called Monaco, surrounded by borders that weren’t easy to cross, especially when you were the Princess,” Olsen writes. The culture into which Kelly married “completely accepted and condoned the multiple affairs the Prince was rumored to be having, which took place even at the palace. […] I don’t know what more she had to live for in this prison environment.”
Today, Monaco sells itself as one of the most ostentatiously dazzling of Mediterranean destinations, a retreat where, arriving via yacht or helicopter, those with deep enough pockets can strut the boardwalks of the marina to a soundtrack of popping champagne corks.
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Yet something of an older, more reserved, and perhaps less tolerant Europe still remains underneath the glitz. As Charles Mercier writes in his book, Christianity in Western and Northern Europe, Monaco has an ecclesiastical commitment to the Roman Catholic Church that is unique on the continent. Monaco “is the only country on the European mainland to grant Catholicism the status of ‘state religion,’” he explains. In addition to
the financing of Catholicism by the state, and the participation of the Archbishop of Monaco in official ceremonies…the Catholic authorities are consulted by the public authorities on subjects with a moral and religious dimension. Thus, abortion is still partially illegal in the Principality.
For its 38,000 citizens, and the many visitors that travel to the second smallest country in the world, Mammon may appear to be the ruling creed. Look closer, however, and there are strictures that are wedded to an age that long precedes motor sports and movie stars.
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