The ends of princesses have a way of causing even republican history to stand still. The death last weekend in a London hotel of Leila Pahlavi, the youngest daughter of the last Shah of Iran, will no doubt come to stand for the misfortunes not only of her family but of the millions of Iranians now in exile.
The princess, who left Iran at the age of nine when the Pahlavis' half-century of rule was ended by Islamic revolutionaries in 1979, was found dead on Sunday evening in her suite at the Leonard Hotel in London's West End. Police said they were investigating her death but had found no suspicious circumstances.
Whatever the cause of death, Leila was known to have suffered for a long time from depression. In a brief statement from Washington, her brother, former crown prince Reza, said Leila had suffered "a long illness". Her mother, Farah, the last empress of Iran, said from Paris: "For the past few years, Leila has been very depressed. Time had not healed her wounds. Exiled at the age of nine, she never surmounted the death of her father, His Majesty Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi." This depression was diagnosed by exile sources as the monarchical strain of a peculiar condition: a compound of loneliness, disorientation and homesickness that affects many of the three million or more Iranians scattered around the Arab Gulf states, Germany, Sweden, France, London and California. For Iranians, only Iran has any reality.
In addition, Leila's family has been unable to exploit the weaknesses of the Islamic regime in its homeland. Last week's landslide election victory by President Mohammed Khatami for a second term cannot disguise the stagnant living standards and cultural isolation that have been the experience of the 60 million people in Iran in the past 20 years.
Yet very few either inside or outside the country expect to see the restoration of the Pahlavi family to the Peacock Throne. A majority of Iranians has been born since the revolution and shows neither loyalty nor animosity to the family. Leila's elder brother, Reza, has struck Iranian observers as well-meaning but diffident.
Leila Pahlavi was born on March 27th, 1970, at the Military Hospital, Tehran, which was promptly renamed after her. In the same year, an alteration in the way oil was priced set off a chain reaction in Iran of rapid economic development, social disintegration and political oppression that was to culminate in her father's flight in January, 1979, and Ayatollah Khomeini's triumphant return from exile.
Refused a haven by all his former allies - including Lady Thatcher's Britain, which sent a former ambassador in disguise to the Bahamas that May to break the news to the Shah in person - Mohammed Reza died of leukaemia in Cairo on July 27th, 1980.
Leila Pahlavi lived at first in Paris and then was educated at colleges in the US. Although she inherited her mother's good looks, she did not marry and that was considered extremely unusual. An interview with the French edition of Hola! to coincide with her 30th birthday in April, 2000, which may have been designed to change public perceptions, unwittingly revealed a melancholy young woman closely attached to her mother and her father's memory. Exiles say she had a real passion for Iranian works of art. She divided her time between the US, France and London, but, as she told Hola!: "I remain as Iranian as if I'd never left home."
During her exile, the Islamic republic inaugurated by Khomeini in 1979 has been a failure in both its Islamic and republican projects. Islamic Iran has neither established a Muslim paradise that will speed up the return of the Messiah nor has it brought Iranians material prosperity. After eight years of bloody and futile war with Iraq, Khomeini's death in 1989 inaugurated a vicious political conflict that paralysed the government and economy. Meanwhile, the country has drifted off the international map. Living standards have only just kept up with the increase in population, with the result that Iran (and its once confident middle class) has slid down the economic scale.
Iran's economic peers of 1979 - Turkey, Malaysia, even the despised Arab states - have far outpaced it.
Mohammed Khatami's first landslide victory in 1997 brought better treatment of religious minorities, greater freedom of expression, warmer relations with the Arab states and an improvement in the country's dismal reputation overseas. But the conservative clerics who control the main economic and political institutions have blocked the movement for reform. Iran is in a diabolical equilibrium. The reformist group around President Khatami, including many of the disillusioned revolutionaries of 1979, cannot reform, while the hardliners or conservatives cannot stage a coup.
The question is whether Khatami can use his immense mandate in the June election from the young in Iran to push through a reform of the judiciary, the ministries and the stagnant economic fiefdoms, and introduce what he calls a "civil society". Or rather, to what extent is he ready to risk the ramshackle political order known as the nezam (or system), by which the Islamic clergy is supposed to play the dominant role in government for all time?
In this tremendous drama, which is now entering its second act, the Pahlavis, like the other exile groups, are mere spectators. Of the two chief opposition groups, the Islamic leftists known as the Mujahedin-e-Khalq, bloodied in two all-out battles with the Islamic regime in 1981 and 1988, have lost credibility since moving their headquarters to Baghdad. They are regarded now as simply agents of the highly centralised and brutal regime of Saddam Hussein, capable of activating or infiltrating assassins in Iran, but with no popular following.
Despite living in the US, Leila's brother, Reza, has been at pains to steer clear of foreign entanglements. Yet he has no base of support in Iran either. In his press conference at the National Press Club on January 24th of this year - an open attempt to exploit the domestic stalemate in Iran - Reza struck Iranian observers as restrained to the point of reluctance.
Reza told reporters he had been born into the monarchy, and had not chosen his course in life. He said the Iranian people should decide in a referendum what form of government they wished to have. If they chose a democratic republic, he would accept their choice and renounce his claim to the throne. He seemed to have in mind the kind of role played by King Juan Carlos of Spain in introducing democracy in 1978. His value to Iranians, he said, was in his "name recognition".
THAT is not to be exaggerated. The Pahlavis were always regarded as parvenus in the long history of Iranian monarchy and as subservient to foreign powers. Leila's grandfather, Reza Khan, was a Cossack officer who seized power from the Qajar dynasty and then, under the benign and sentimental eye of the British, crowned himself king. When he appeared to lean towards the Axis powers in 1940, he was ousted by the Allies in favour of Leila's father.
Mohammed Reza himself was driven into exile by the nationalists under Mohammed Mossadegh in the early 1950s, but was restored to power again by British and US agents in 1953. Perversely, it was only with the quadrupling of crude oil prices in the 1970s that Mohammed Reza was to emancipate himself from British and US control, but by then it was too late.
While many in Iran would no doubt like to see the end of clerical rule, they would almost certainly prefer not a restoration of the monarchy but a democratic republic. It is the reputation of Mohammed Mossadegh, not that of his old adversary of 1953, that is rising in Iran.
The issue is complicated by the trend in the Arab world towards what might be called "republican monarchies". The sons of men who overturned the old British-installed Arab monarchies are now seeking to inherit their fathers' rule. That has already happened in Syria and may well also happen in Iraq, Egypt and Libya. However, none of those Arab rulers has so far put a crown on his head.
Meanwhile, there is no longer British pressure for a restoration of the monarchy, or indeed British pressure for anything in the Middle East.
Ultimately, Leila's death has less to do with politics and more to do with the complex of social realities we know as culture. Modern Iranian life is marked by a terrible symmetry. Iranians in Iran are desperate to leave, while Iranians outside Iran are desperate to return. The exiles have enjoyed worldly success, but those who have stayed enjoy Iran, and each group envies the other.
"Leila loved Iran," the former empress said on Monday. "She has left us without seeing her country again. Beyond the grief of a mother, this will always be a regret for me that nothing could ever fill."
A society united by strong family ties was detonated in 1979. The generations were split apart and scattered all over the world. That, far more than the complexion of the regime in power in Tehran, was the real significance of both the Iranian Revolution and the lonely death of Princess Leila.