The Atlantic

Why Britain Can’t Quit the Monarchy

The Crown is dead, long live the Crown.
Source: Illustration by Matteo Giuseppe Pani; Source: Getty.

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present and surface delightful treasures. Sign up here.

Last year’s best-selling book in Britain—more successful than Britney Spears’s or —was Prince Harry’s extraordinary memoir, . The more than 700,000 people who bought a copy were presented with an intimate account of the cruelty of life in the royal zoo. And then, having read the sad story of a family torn apart by press intrusion and emotional dysfunction, of those 700,000 people started seriously agitating for republicanism. In May, the protests at the coronation of King Charles III were small and scattered (and repressed). One year into the new king’s reign, of Britons

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