I'm the man who brrrrrrrroke the bank at Monte Carlo!

Monaco is a perplexing place.

I visited Monaco on my 21st birthday, after a night clubbing in Nice, a day in Cannes (skip it) and Antibes/St-Juan-Les-Pins (go), and a week-long séjour in Corsica (if you have the means, I highly recommend it). I took a bus from Nice--it's not hard. And I arrived at the cleanest city I'd ever seen.

Monaco is immensely inviting. Exceedingly modern and well-trimmed, supposedly reserved for the well-heeled but with so many public services that it must be open to the public. A tiny, bustling city that employs more people than even live there (most of whom do not have a need for employment to pay the bills). And Monegasques do not pay taxes. Once just a haven for gambling, Monaco is a thriving city of high-rises, a mini Hong Kong or Manhattan, but lacking any of the typical urban blights.

Monaco is also a huge medieval throwback. The Grimaldi family has ruled Monaco for seven centuries (should their line cease, Monaco reverts to French control, making their reproductive health of utmost importance), and under their rule, Monaco is very much not a free country. Video cameras cover every square inch of the principality. Walking around barefoot and/or shirtless is prohibited, and there are numerous signs which will remind you of this fact. Every building (such as their world-class aquarium, which is really there because one royal was very fond of boating) is named after some royal, and probably exists only because that royal was instrumental in saying "I want to put X here..."

And that's so what's interesting about Monaco from an IR perspective--it's the only state I know in which people (there are, after all, only 32,000) truly do have a personal relationship with their leader, which goes beyond the cult of personality and actually stems from the fact that their leader has a day-to-day effect in their lives. Take, for exmaple this exchange which I once had with a cashier at a gift shop in the city:

Me: Does this store belong to the principality?
Cashier: No, no, this store belongs to the Prince!

The importance of this distinction cannot be understated. We Americans have a way of abstracting our government, making it more than simply the person in charge, mostly because the person in charge changes, but also because we don't feel that the government is really subject to the whims of one person. We de-personalize the government--it's the way people in most states operate.

Not so in Monaco. If there were ever a true embodiment of "l'état, c'est moi," it's Monaco, ironically. Proof that monarchy, though it's backwards, medieval, and strange, sometimes works.

His Highness Prince Rainier III (Rainier Louis Henri Maxence Bertrand Grimaldi), husband to the late actress Grace Kelly, and responsible for Monaco's transformation from gambling mecca to bustling gem of modernity, died today. He was 81.

He will be succeeded by his son, His Highness Prince Albert II (Albert Alexandre Louis Pierre Grimaldi).