This scene-setting chapter charts out the challenges Europe’s monarchies had to face in the wake of the French Revolution and the key means they employed to achieve their survival – among them an alliance with nationalism and imperialism, constitutional development and public relations techniques. It also introduces royal heirs as individual agents – and the process of succession more widely – as an essential part of this political arsenal. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the main contexts within which the lives and functions of a nineteenth-century heir had to unfold: the constitution, the royal family, the public sphere and the court.