"What is a Republic?"

"My government will continue to make the case for Scotland to remain part of the United Kingdom." I'm sure the Tory royalists in the House of Lords, always more Bourbon than the Bourbons, squirmed with pleasure as the Queen read this section of her speech in Westminster today.

Although just a technically correct designation of the Westminster government, one can't help but feel that the hand that framed the speech took especial care to ensure this line read my government. Salmond, the ardent royalist swain, has done his dardnest to eliminate the monarchy as a wedge issue in the campaign, but somehow you doubt that she is a natural ally of those of us who favour Scottish independence. The delivery was, as always, bone dry but one might detect a small twinkle in the royal eye. I doubt they appreciated that line in Bute House.

Historical mischief makers like to recall an incident from Maximilien Robespierre's childhood, imputing to it a deep biographical significance. While a student in Paris' Lycée Louis-le-Grand in 1775, the future Incorruptible was selected to offer Latin greetings to the newly-crowned French monarch, Louis XVI. Rain pelting down, the King kept to his carriage, leaving the drookit Robespierre kneeling in the Parisian muck. 

After scant acknowledgement of the schoolboy's Latin peroration, the regal carriage scudded off. Leaving behind it, you imagine, both a sense of anticlimax and of cloying dampness. Over the years, hostile biographers have suggested that Robespierre boxed away this slight in his belly, wreaking his future small-minded vengeance for the humiliation by voting for the death of the French monarch in 1793.  Thanks to Baroness Orczy and Thomas Carlyle and others, posterity has handed down to us a vision of this man as an inveterate republican and a patriotic shortener of kings. Interestingly, however, Robespierre's views on the role of a monarch in a republican constitution were rather more nuanced than the decisive, dividing logic of the guillotine's blade. "What is a republic?", he asked.

"I have been accused, in the midst of the Assembly, of being a republican - too great an honour, for I am not. If I had been accused of being monarchist, I would have been dishonoured, for I am not that either. I would first like to point out that for many people the words "republic" and "monarchy" are entirely without meaning. The word "republic" does not signify any particular form of government, it belongs to any government of free men who have a patrie. Now, one may be free with a monarch, as with a senate. What is the present French constitution? It is a republic with a monarch. It is therefore neither monarchy nor republic, it is both one and the other." Quoted in Marisa Linton "Robespierre's political principles" (1999) in C Hayden and W Doyle (eds) Robespierre, 45.

This all changed after King Louis' monstrously inept attempt to flee the country, culminating in the monarch's execution in Paris after his trial before the French National Convention. When I was somewhat younger, I was more of a razor-edged Republican myself, all for deposing the British monarchy, impatient with its stuffy air of hierarchy - and its various contemptible hangers on, stuffed tabards and sundry gong-seekers, creeps and toadies. The foppery of honours - in particular knighthoods and peerages - still irritate me with the same intensity. I attach similar suspicions to any great state occasions, with their beanpole solemnity and gaudy livery, shuffling processions and feudal atmosphere and eccentric collections of toy soldiers, Grooms of the Stool, Keeper of Her Majesty's Butter Beans. One BBC commentator suggested that today's state opening of Westminster was important because it "reflects our values" as a people. I despair, and in such moments, my inner Jacobin wrecker can re-emerge.

But what is a Republic? As was his usual wont, the Incorruptible was one for searching hearts and minds, concerned with public manners and civic virtue, rather than emphasising ways in which formal political structures determine, or debauch the character of a country. Up to a point, I'd agree. Despite the First Minister's enthusiasm for the House of Windsor, it is undeniable that there is a republican strain in the SNP, much of which is distinctly associated with antipathies towards the British Establishment, of which the Monarchy is taken to be an elbematic character.  Even the wistful, recalling Romanticism of calling Lizzie "Queen of Scots" - a pose first adopted, I think, by David Steel as Presiding Officer at the opening of the Parliament in 1999 and fondly perpetuated since by Salmond and others - cannot efface such cherished hostilities.

Then there are also folk of a more virulently egalitarian strain, whose objections to the monarchy rest, not on a reaction to High Britannic flummery, but the claim that royalty and nobility perpetuates structures of class hierarchy, sustaining a patrician elite.  An elected president cannot make subjects of her people.  At least that's the theory.

I'm conscious, however, that on your travels in Europe, you encounter many monarchical curiosities, many of them dating from the period after Robespierre suffered the complete fracture of his own neck at the hands of Monsieur de Paris, and Napoleon began his European adventures. Take the Netherlands. Their first King was Napoleon's brother, Louis and the monarchy in its current form - with some disruptions - dates from the 1800s. Anyone who has been in the Netherlands in April cannot but remark on the amazing popularity and public display of the Orange-festooned Dutch celebration of their Koninginnedag.  Although one should be cautious about deducing attitudes towards monarchy and its influence on society from this public debauch, the roiling the sea of orange it hardly smacks of a society whose class divisions are exacerbated by the residents of the Koninklijk Paleis in Amsterdam.

A populist monarchy, and a country governed by a republican spirit, need not be incompatible.  For that matter, think of the Scandinavian monarchies, Norway, Denmark and Sweden (although Finland is a Republic, with an elected president). Sweden's furnishes us with one of the most ironic accidents of history. The House of Bernadotte still rules, owing their name to Napoleon's scheming and disgruntled Gascon Marschal Jean-Baptiste, who eventually waged war on his former master. The interest of these examples, in part, is that many Scottish nationalists deeply antipathetic to monarchy would look to Nordic inspiration for their independent Scotland, in particular the egalitarianism and social-democracy often associated with the politics of those nations.

Although events like the Queen's Speech still flash me the scarlet, like Robespierre, I find myself wondering, what is a Republic?