“If we want everything to stay the way it is, everything has to change.” The phrase that young Tancredi says to his uncle, Prince Fabrizio Corbera, in the novel El Gatopardo is the germ of a concept that political scientists commonly refer to as Gattopardism. The idea is as simple as it is twisted. From time to time, power has to initiate a supposedly revolutionary transformation so that in practice only the superficial part of the power structures is changed. The coronation of Carlos III, held at Westminster Abbey this Saturday, May 6, was a magnificent exercise in Gattopardism. The British king has transformed the face of the millennial institution he runs so that it will last for another thousand years.
Buckingham Palace and its powerful publicity apparatus have been bombarding the press for months with news of the changes the King has made to modernize his enthronement and coronation ceremony. The monarch reduced the guest list to just over 2,000 from his mother Elizabeth II’s 8,000; shortened the duration of the rite; he invited other crowned heads; it replaced British nobility with representatives of civil society – from all walks of life and walks of life; introduced a gospel choir for the first time in history; He chose newly composed choral music sung in the different languages of the islands and wore recycled historical clothing for reasons of sustainability and efficiency. He has even ruled that his consort Camila will not traditionally wear a crown as a gesture of empathy for the economic and social crisis the UK is going through. Not even the florists were spared the apparent Carolina Revolution, as they had to arrange without plastic and floral foam, a material that is neither compostable nor biodegradable.
But the truth is that nothing new happened at the coronation of Carlos III. The ceremony followed a script written more than 600 years ago in the Liber Regalis, a medieval manuscript containing the details of this rite. The king was anointed with holy oil behind the scenes so his subjects would not see his moment of communion with God. And then he was equipped with all the symbolic paraphernalia of the institution: horse spurs, dating back to the time of Ricardo Corazón de León; the Crown of Saint Edward, a replica of that commissioned by Edward the Confessor; the scepters and staves inlaid with diamonds plundered during the period of the Empire; the sovereign’s orb; the Chair of Saint Edward and the Stone of Destiny, a rock where, according to tradition, Jacob of Genesis saw the ladder connecting heaven to earth.
After the ceremony between the divine and the profane, the seventy-year-old kings boarded a 260-year-old golden carriage and returned to Buckingham, a palace with another 260 years of history, to star in the “Balcony Moment”. Following tradition, they went out to greet the people, as Elizabeth II did during her 70-year reign, and as George VI, George V, Edward VII and Queen Victoria did before her. On Tuesday, when the jewels return to the Tower of London and the Brits return to work, Carlos III will continue to enjoy the immense privileges accumulated by his ancestors and will continue his mission: to change everything so that everything stays the same.
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