The Fall of the Monarchies

*A retelling based on **The Promised Day Is Come** by Shoghi Effendi. The words in quotation marks are Bahá'u'lláh's, as quoted in that book.*

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In *The Promised Day Is Come*, the long letter he addressed in March 1941 to the Bahá'ís of the West, Shoghi Effendi traces the fate of the sovereigns to whom Bahá'u'lláh had written from Adrianople and 'Akká, and of their dynasties.

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*The French Empire of Napoleon III.* Bahá'u'lláh had addressed the Emperor twice; the second Tablet foretold that his kingdom would be thrown into confusion and pass from his hands. The Emperor was overthrown in 1870, after the disaster of Sedan in the Franco-Prussian War, and his empire gave way to the Third Republic.

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*The Russian Empire of the Czars.* Bahá'u'lláh had addressed Czar Alexander II, acknowledging the help a Russian minister had given Him during His imprisonment and calling the Czar to the recognition of the new Revelation. Alexander II was assassinated in 1881. His successors maintained a tradition of unqualified absolutism, and the dynasty fell in the Revolution of 1917, in the midst of the Great War.

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*The German Empire of the Hohenzollerns.* In the Kitáb-i-Aqdas Bahá'u'lláh addressed William I directly: "O King of Berlin! ... Take heed lest pride debar thee from recognizing the Dayspring of Divine Revelation." The Hohenzollern dynasty was overthrown in November 1918, in the wake of the German defeat in the First World War, and William II went into exile.

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*The Austro-Hungarian Empire of the Habsburgs.* In the same Book Bahá'u'lláh reproved Emperor Francis Joseph, who had visited Jerusalem while Bahá'u'lláh was a prisoner in 'Akká: "Thou passed Him by, and inquired not about Him." The Habsburg empire collapsed in 1918 and was dismembered into successor states.

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*The Ottoman Empire of the Sulṭáns.* The Ottoman rulers, who had banished Bahá'u'lláh from Baghdád to Constantinople, Adrianople and 'Akká, lost first the Sultanate, in 1922, and then the Caliphate, which was extinguished soon after.

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*The Persian Empire of the Qájárs.* The Qájár dynasty, under which the Báb had been executed and Bahá'u'lláh imprisoned and banished, was deposed in 1925.

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The Guardian saw in these events the fulfilment of Bahá'u'lláh's warning in the Súriy-i-Mulúk: "If ye pay no heed unto the counsels which, in peerless and unequivocal language, We have revealed in this Tablet, Divine chastisement shall assail you from every direction, and the sentence of His justice shall be pronounced against you." And he recalled Bahá'u'lláh's words: "From two ranks amongst men power hath been seized: kings and ecclesiastics."

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*A retelling based on **The Promised Day Is Come**. For the fuller account, see the original.*

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