Pauline Laws

The Pauline Laws are the house laws of the Romanov rulers of the Russian Empire. The name comes from the fact that they were initially established by Emperor Paul I of Russia in 1797. Paul I abolished Peter the Great's law that allowed each reigning emperor or empress to designate his or her successor and substituted a strict order of succession by proclaiming that the eldest son of the monarch would inherit the throne, followed by other dynasts according to primogeniture in the male line. Paul thus implemented a semi-Salic line of succession to the Russian throne, which would pass to a female and through the female (cognatic) line of the dynasty only upon the extinction of all legitimately-born male dynasts (in this case, only the descendants of Paul I himself, not the Holstein-Gottorp 3rd cousins). Over time, the house laws were amended, and in the late Russian Empire, the laws governing membership in the imperial house, succession to the throne and other dynastic subjects were divided, with some being included in the Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire and others in the Statute of the Imperial Family (codification of 1906, as amended to 1911). In the spring of 1911, Princess Tatiana Konstantinovna of Russia became engaged to Prince Konstantin Alexandrovich Bagration (1889–1915), a Georgian by birth who served in the Russian Imperial Guard regiment and would die in World War I. She was to be the first daughter of the Romanovs who openly married a Russian subject or non-dynastic prince since the dynasty had ascended the throne in 1613. Her anxious father approached the Emperor Nicholas II and his empress, Alexandra Fyodorovna of Hesse, for approval. On 30 November 1910, Grand Duke Constantine Konstantinovich noted in one of his posthumously-published journals (From the Diaries of Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich, Moscow, February 1994) that he had received assurances that "they would never look upon her marriage to a Bagration as morganatic, because this House, like the House of Orléans, is descended from a once ruling dynasty.