In 1852, Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine celebrated the coming era of a new king. ‘The centuries of his banishment are drawing to their destined close, and the hour and the man are at hand to re-establish his ancient reign,’ it wrote. ‘Already the martial moustache, the haughty imperial, and the daily expanding whiskers, like accredited heralds, proclaim the approaching advent of the monarch Beard.’

Over the following years, Britain experienced a veritable beard revolution. Once seen as uncouth and dangerously revolutionary, the beard became an essential display of virile Victorian masculinity. In the latter half of the 19th century, across the western world, facial hair saw a similar rehabilitation. Prince Albert, Napoleon III, Lincoln, Franz Joseph, Bismarck; the few western leaders of the era who didn’t sport some kind of facial hair stood firmly in the minority.

In the 21st century, things seem to have come full circle. It is difficult to imagine the dry lawyer Keir Starmer sporting the light revolutionary beard of a Jeremy Corbyn. Or a serious bureaucrat-turned-autocrat like Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping the comical Borat-style moustache of Belarus’ Lukashenko or Venezuela’s Maduro. Not even macho right-wing populists dare adorn the thick beard worthy only of jihadis, ayatollahs, and Hindu nationalists.

Why are our male politicians so averse to the natural growth of hair on their face? So inimical to being anything but ‘clean-shaven’? Perhaps the better question to ask is: what happened to all the political moustaches?

Unlike what Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine predicted in 1852, the coming of the Monarch Beard was just the prelude to the reign of Emperor Moustache. It was the cultivated whiskers on the upper lip that became the most popular form of political facial hair in the late 19th century, lasting well into the 20th. A silent but striking change reflective of deep changes in the nature of politics across the western world and beyond.

Political facial hair has always been governed by its own kind of political logic not necessarily in line with general ‘consumer trends’. Facial hair reflects deeply held cultural conventions that dictate how every single adult man in a society should publicly present himself. For few is this more important than those hoping to lead their fellow man and woman. As a private citizen is transformed into a carefully-cultivated political personality, they must conform to the political-aesthetic expectations of the time.

Well before the follicular revolution of the late 19th century, when most Europeans had little choice in deciding who ruled them, the faces of male rulers looked much like ours today. The long 18th century was, as one historian put it, ‘the most smooth-faced century in western history’. As aristocratic Europeans donned powdered wigs, tutored their sons in French, and threw Voltaire onto their shelves, facial hair was the inevitable casualty.

The Habsburg Empress Maria Theresa – who ruled from 1740 to 1780 – was so insistent in her demands that her courtiers be clean shaven that she shaved one unfortunate Hungarian’s moustache herself. Officers in her Austrian army largely followed the lead. The French Revolution, which brought a temporary end to the old regime, stopped at the chin. Even the common sans-culottes were rarely portrayed as anything but clean shaven, perhaps to leave their reputation unblemished. Nonetheless, the wars of the revolution unleashed a cascading series of events that would radically transform the nature of political facial hair in the western world.

This revolution came not from France, however, but its Habsburg arch-enemy. The Habsburg monarchy fought in all but one of the seven coalition wars that pitted revolutionary France against shifting alliances of anti-revolutionary powers. Most it lost, but eventually the combined forces were too great. Russians, Prussians, Austrians, Brits, and countless others fought side by side to bring down Napoleon’s European Empire.

One type of soldier proved to be especially popular – the Hungarian hussar. This type of mounted light cavalry drawn from the huge Pannonian kingdom ruled by the Habsburgs was so impressive that it was emulated across the continent. The British were latecomers when in 1806 the Tenth Light Dragoons became the Tenth Royal Hussars. But they made sure that their hussars would be no less ferocious than those of any other army.

From 1806, members of the Tenth Royal Hussars were required to sport ‘Hungarian-style’ moustaches. Since the 17th century, Hungarian aristocrats wore moustaches as an emblem of their martial prowess. The centrality of whiskers to their identity was only reinforced by the contrast with the clean-shaven Austrian bureaucrats who flooded in to administer the country in the late 18th century.

Emulating these fierce eastern warriors entailed looking the part as much as acting it. Moustaches in post-Napoleonic Europe had a thoroughly martial association, but also one that represented the cream of the crop. Cavalry officers were generally drawn from the upper classes, with the units themselves being seen as more elite than their horseless counterparts. It did not take long for a moustache to become an object of envy for officers in other branches of the military.

Official regulations that had once prohibited any kind of facial hair yielded one after another across Europe, eventually allowing all officers to sport moustaches, broadening their scope while only reinforcing their prestige. By mid-century the sporting of a moustache was a common expectation of officers, with some regiments also requiring it of the rank and file. Bavaria and Spain even banned civilians from growing a moustache under threat of arrest.

So strong was the martial association that a British magazine noted in 1843 that ‘no gentlemen [could think of wearing a moustache] any more than he would think of sporting the uniform of the Tenth Hussars’. Yet it was also difficult to keep martial and civilian entirely separate in a world where the aristocratic political class was so intimately intertwined with the upper ranks of the military.

This was given an added dimension in the 19th century by the militarisation of European monarchies. As the century progressed, they showed an increasing predilection for appearing in military uniform, with officers still given precedence in most courts over middle-class commoners. Those born to wage war and those born to rule were, after all, the very same people.

This was especially true in Hungary. It had a large and powerful nobility, which sat in county assemblies as well as a general diet, the latter in particular providing ample opportunity for ostentatious displays of patriotism that inevitably included the wearing of an impressive moustache. But it was a custom that extended well beyond the considerable noble population. Travelling around Hungary in the early 1830s, the English travel writer John Paget met a confused young girl who could not believe that men did not wear moustaches in England. ‘Why, you must all look like great girls then!’

Paget could hardly believe how large some of the moustaches were. One man’s whiskers he estimated at a foot long from end to end, ‘as stiff, straight, and black as wax could make them’. One regiment of the hussars even allegedly gave its officers extra pay to compensate them for the wax needed to uphold such a gargantuan moustache. Even Paget felt obliged to grow one while in Hungary, lest he be confused for a great English girl.

While moustaches were on a limited ascent in the years before the revolutions of 1848, beards remained decidedly on the fringes. They often faced bans and suspicious looks, embraced as they were across the continent by the adherents of countercultural movements such as German nationalism, Slavophilism, and socialism, which scorned the aristocratic establishment, their smooth faces, and silly martial whiskers.

As revolutionaries and conservative governments clashed in the revolutions of 1848, so, too, did their political fashions and all they represented. Conservative governments discouraged the growth of facial hair for commoners in the 1850s, only heightening its attraction for oppositional liberals. And Hungarian patriots, whose war for independence had been crushed in 1849, grew moustaches with more vigour than ever.

The leader of that failed struggle, Lajos Kossuth, toured England and the United States in the early 1850s. He roused adoring crowds with liberal speeches given in an archaic English he had learned from reading Shakespeare. Many were so smitten by this great liberal revolutionary that they wanted to look like him. Since ‘Kossuth’s arrival in this country’, wrote an Indiana journalist, ‘we do not recollect ever having seen so many whiskerandos.’

Perhaps even more important for Europeans was the emergence of Napoleon III. He had been raised in exile after the fall of his uncle’s regime earlier in the century, eventually becoming an officer in the Swiss army and donning the requisite moustache. He tried twice to take control of France before slinking back into exile, but the events of 1848 finally opened the door for him to win power. He was a political figure from a new age. One entirely unlike the clean-shaven one that preceded it. A romantic revolutionary officer elected president by a democratic assembly, rather than a prince ruling by divine right, he was the first major western ruler since the 17th century to have facial hair.

In 1859 he faced down a ruler of a very different sort near the Lombard town of Solferino, but one that, like him, was a product of the revolutions. Franz Joseph took control of the Austrian Empire at the age of 18 in 1848, presiding over a victorious counter-revolution and the establishment of a ‘neo-absolutist’ system. Solferino was the last battle in European history where both monarchs led their armies into the field, both wearing the brave martial whiskers that had become de rigueur for their class.

By the 1860s political facial hair was rapidly becoming the norm across the western world, where politics had moved into the streets. The model once set by rulers in pristine salons and palaces was no longer sufficient, the clean-shaven face no longer the ideal. While beards made their appearance, it was the moustache that best conveyed both the patriarchal authority and masculine strength required in the tempestuous and uniformly male political world of the late 19th and early 20th century. It was emblematic of the fusion of the old regime and the new. As social distinctions between downwardly mobile nobles and upwardly mobile commoners became amorphous, and the power once monopolised by the former class shared between the two, moustaches became just one of many ways that their synthesis was put on display.

It was so central to the European political personality that it survived into the 1950s, decades after the moustache had fallen out of fashion for the general public. Great early 20th-century national patriarchs, such as Czechoslovakia’s Tomáš Masaryk or Poland’s Józef Piłsudski, were practically defined by their moustaches. So, too, were the totalitarian personalities of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin, the former with his comically tiny modernist moustache, the latter with his thick martial whiskers.

But just as the moustachioed officers were on the rise in the early 19th century, the new ideal of the ‘clean-shaven’ man was ascendant in the early 20th. It was this kind of man that exhibited the ‘youthful energy and disciplined reliability suited to corporate and professional employment’, in the words of a leading beard historian. As the centrality of corporate, bureaucratic, and professional employment to western life grew, the fortunes of the moustache declined.

To many Europeans at the time, this spurning of facial hair represented the ‘Americanisation’ of their faces, but it would be better described as their modernisation. It is not for nothing that Mussolini kept his face as smooth as his bald head. As a young journalist, he had sported a thin moustache, but reinvented his image as he became, in the wake of then First World War, the leader of the fascist movement, which presented itself as a modern alternative to the failed politics of parliamentary politicians, aristocrats – and their moustaches – that had led Italy to national catastrophe.

Max Weber remarked that the ‘absolute monarch’ was ‘powerless in the face of the superior knowledge of the bureaucratic expert’. The German Emperor Wilhelm II – who wore one of the more absurd moustaches of his era – thought the same, sending his chancellor a news clipping in 1913 that said: ‘Germany is a patriotic land governed by fearful meticulous bureaucrats, who hate doing anything and are only plagued into activity by the experts.’ He wrote: ‘It’s true’.

The last moustachioed US president left office in that same year, just before the country embarked on its 20th-century path to becoming a great bureaucratic world power. The great empires of modernity – the United States and the Soviet Union – led the way when it came to redefining the modern politician as a clean-shaven primus inter pares among bureaucrats. After Stalin’s death, the martial dictator’s moustache would never again be emulated.

Humbled by the destruction of the Second World War, European nations redefined themselves as co-operative democratic nation-states rather than rapacious imperial powers. After the comforting sight of one last moustachioed prime minister – Harold Macmillan – Great Britain ditched the custom after Suez.

In the western world of today, facial hair has been banished from the politics almost outright. It has been left to the enemies of the Pax Americana and its clean-shaven standards of middle-class respectability to sport the moustaches and beards that a century ago were standard fare for any man aspiring to a position of power.

The modern male politician is not a domineering individualist blazing a trail through the institutions of state. He is a collaborative cog in a well-oiled bureaucratic machine, where personal magnetism is frowned upon, where the rule of the collective takes precedence over the rule of the individual, and where women are treated as no less equal for their inability to grow a moustache.

This is what most voters would prefer. Few Britons, Americans, or Germans are waiting for a magnetic moustachioed strongman to lead them to the promised land (magnetic strongmen with eccentric hairstyles may be another story). Nor do they necessarily want a scruffy revolutionary to overturn the rule of the managers and return it to the nebulous people.

If the history of facial hair is anything to go by, the return of King Beard or Emperor Moustache to the world of politics will take much more than a stray MP or VP. They will arrive with the coming of a totally new kind of politician, a totally new kind of politics. One that emerges from a totally new kind of society, where the standards set by the political leaders of the world of yesterday no longer suffice.