Abdication of King Constantine

On 12 June 1917 the first reign of King Constantine I came to an end. In the morning the high commissioner of the protecting powers, Charles Jonnart, received the Greek government’s formal reply to his ultimatum: the king would leave the country together with the heir to the throne, and he named his younger son, Alexander, as his successor. In the afternoon, as French troops were already landing at Piraeus, the royal family slipped out of the palace in Athens, which was surrounded by a crowd that wanted to stop them. Two days later Constantine sailed into exile. Under pressure from France and Britain, Greece lost the ruler who since 1914 had kept it out of the war.

Departure, but not abdication

The British chronology of the war and the British official history of the war at sea (Newbolt) state that on 12 June the king abdicated in favour of his second son. Strictly speaking, however, Constantine did not sign an act of abdication. The reply that Prime Minister Alexandros Zaimis handed to Jonnart said only that the king “had decided to leave the country” with the heir to the throne and was naming a successor. The British writer George F. Abbott, who was sympathetic to the king, stressed that this was a departure, not a renunciation of the crown. According to the biographer of the royal family John Van der Kiste, Constantine explained to his son that he was only holding the crown in his name. For years afterwards the royalists regarded him as the only legitimate ruler and the new king as a kind of regent.

The heir to the throne, Crown Prince George, was out of the question, because the Allies considered him a Germanophile like his father. The throne therefore went to the 23-year-old Alexander, the second son of Constantine and Queen Sophia, sister of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Abbott pointed out that the “restoration of constitutional truth” began with the violation of one of the fundamental principles of the Greek constitution, the succession to the throne by seniority. Sources differ about the moment of the oath. According to Van der Kiste, Alexander took the oath as early as the afternoon of 11 June in the palace ballroom, in the presence of Archbishop Theoklitos of Athens, his father, his brother and the prime minister, without any ceremony. The government communiqué published on 12 June, quoted by Abbott, spoke of an oath taken “today at noon”.

On 12 June Constantine’s farewell proclamation was posted in the streets of Athens: “Obedient to necessity and fulfilling my duty towards Greece, I leave my beloved country together with the heir to the throne, leaving my son Alexander on the throne.” The king asked that his decision be received calmly, since the slightest disorder could lead to disaster. The new king’s first proclamation announced that he would follow “in the glorious footsteps of his father”. The British official history of the Macedonian campaign (Falls) notes that this was not what the Allies had counted on. The words alluded to Constantine’s victories in the Balkan Wars and were meant to reassure the royalists. The proclamation was signed by Zaimis, and Alexander himself reportedly saw it only two days later.

The last night in Athens

From the moment news of the commissioner’s demand spread through the city, Athens lived in suspense. On the afternoon of 11 June the shops were closed, bells rang, and a crowd of men and weeping women gathered outside the palace, shouting: “Do not go!” The king received one delegation after another and told each that he was leaving for the good of the country and that any resistance would be extremely dangerous for the state. Abbott, drawing on a royalist pamphlet published in Geneva and the account of a British weekly, writes that the crowd kept watch all night. At about half past four in the morning the royal car drew up at a side entrance, but guardsmen lay down on the ground in front of it and the family had to turn back. Two further attempts to leave also failed.

On the morning of 12 June the bells rang again, and thousands of people surrounded the palace. Jonnart, alarmed, decided that it had to be shown clearly that the king had already been replaced. In the afternoon French units began to come ashore at Piraeus and took up positions between the port and the city. According to Abbott, the commissioner told Zaimis that the departure could not be delayed any longer and that if the Greek police could not cope with the crowd, he would send machine-gun companies from Piraeus. At about five in the afternoon the royal family managed to leave: part of the crowd was lured to a side door, and the king slipped out through the main entrance. He drove to the summer residence of Tatoi north of Athens. Despite the fears, the day ended without bloodshed. The British Rear-Admiral Hayes-Sadler, who watched events from the battleship Implacable, reported that the calm was owed above all to “the powerful influence of the King”, who assured the people that his departure was only temporary and that an attempt to stop him would destroy the monarchy and the nation.

Into exile

Constantine spent his last hours in Greece at Tatoi. Falls writes that the royal family embarked on Thursday 14 June at the small port of Oropos on the strait separating Attica from Euboea, far from Athens, to avoid demonstrations. Some accounts, John Buchan’s among them, speak of a departure as early as the early morning of 13 June. On the royal yacht Sfaktiria, escorted by French destroyers, the king, the queen, the heir to the throne and the other children except Alexander sailed to Italy, to Messina, and from there went on to Switzerland. The same day Jonnart announced the lifting of the blockade that the Entente had imposed on Greece since December 1916. In a proclamation to the Greeks he gave assurances that the powers had no intention of infringing the constitutional monarchy, would allow no reprisals and would not impose general mobilisation on the country.

These assurances were soon put to the test. Under pressure from Jonnart, the Zaimis government expelled the most determined opponents of the Entente from the country. According to Abbott, about thirty people, among them the former prime minister Dimitrios Gounaris, the former chief of staff General Viktor Dousmanis and Colonel Ioannis Metaxas, were deported to Corsica, and about a hundred and thirty others, including the former prime ministers Stefanos Skouloudis and Spyridon Lambros, were placed under surveillance. The king’s brothers, Princes Nicholas, Andrew and Christopher, had to leave for Switzerland with their families. The former foreign minister Georgios Streit, regarded as one of the king’s most pro-German advisers, left of his own accord together with him.

Why Constantine had to go

Constantine had returned from the Balkan Wars in 1913 as a victorious commander and was then extraordinarily popular. When the Great War broke out, however, he refused to let Greece enter the war on the side of the Entente, as Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos wanted. Twice, in March and in October 1915, he brought about his resignation, although Venizelos had a majority in parliament. The Allies, who from the autumn of 1915 had been fighting on Greek soil around Salonika, regarded him as a covert ally of Germany. This conviction was strengthened by the surrender of Fort Rupel to the Germans and Bulgarians in May 1916, and above all by the fighting in Athens on 1 December 1916. Since the coup in Salonika in August 1916 there had been two governments in Greece, which the Greeks call the National Schism. After the fall of the Tsar the king lost his last defender among the Entente powers, and the new French government was determined to remove him.

The official reason was the violation of the constitution, of which the protecting powers were supposed to be guarantors ever since they had placed Constantine’s father, George I, on the throne in 1863. Falls admits that this was a justification rather than the real cause. Abbott wrote that the intervention had no legal basis whatsoever and that the dethronement was demanded not because it was lawful but because France wanted it. General Maurice Sarrail, for his part, complained that the British had only reluctantly given him five hundred soldiers for the Thessalian expedition. Revolutionary Russia, formally one of the three protecting powers, took no part in the action, and at the beginning of July its government declared that the form of government in Greece should be decided by the Greek people alone.

Significance

Falls concluded that since the Allies had been unable to untie the Greek knot, they cut it. He judged, however, that British hesitation had brought an unexpected benefit, because it delayed action until the moment when it was easiest. Three months earlier the removal of the king would probably have met armed resistance. In June 1917, despite deep indignation in Athens, no one resisted, and the division of Greece into two states came to an end. At the end of June Venizelos returned to Athens and took the head of a government that broke off relations with the Central Powers. The Greek army gradually began to take its place alongside the Allies on the Macedonian front.

Alexander’s reign lasted a little over three years. The young king had in practice no power, and in October 1920 he died after being bitten by a monkey in the park at Tatoi. After Venizelos lost the elections and a plebiscite, Constantine returned to the throne in December 1920, but after the defeat in the war with Turkey in 1922 he abdicated, this time for good.