Charles zi Britannia (The 98th Emperor): The emperor who erased a country’s name and called its people by a number

In the sixth episode of Code Geass: Lelouch of the Rebellion (Sunrise, 2006-2008), the Holy Britannian Empire holds a state funeral for Prince Clovis, viceroy of Area 11, killed by the masked rebel Zero. His father, the 98th emperor, Charles zi Britannia, takes the rostrum and, instead of a eulogy, delivers a defense of inequality: men are not born equal, and the struggle among them is what drives history forward. The crowd answers with the chant of “All hail Britannia!”. The empire that speaks this way rules a third of the planet and has conquered Japan for its deposits of sakuradite, a strategic mineral; the country has lost its name and become Area 11, and its inhabitants, the Elevens, live in ghettos without political rights while Britannian settlers occupy the modern cities. Postcolonial criminology helps to read that speech for what it is: the justification of a crime.

// The theoryThe crime that was called civilization

Postcolonial criminology, developed by authors such as Biko Agozino and Chris Cunneen, starts from an observation: criminology was born in the age of empires and for a long time studied the crimes of the colonized, not those of the colonizers. For this school, colonialism was a system of organized violence, with massacres, expropriations and emergency laws, that presented itself as civilization. It draws on the work of Frantz Fanon, who in The Wretched of the Earth (1961) described the colonial world as a world cut in two, with a border drawn by the police and the army.

// The subjectA Darwinist on the throne

Charles is an outsized character: a thundering voice, grandiose speeches and a worldview without nuance. He truly believes what he preaches: that the weak deserve to lose and that struggle is the engine of everything. That conviction makes him indifferent to suffering, including his children’s. But Code Geass adds another layer: his secret plan, Ragnarök, reveals that he also despises the world he rules and wants to replace it with another. He is a tyrant who does not even love his own empire.

The series shows him applying to his children the same law he applies to peoples. In a flashback in the episode “Attack Cornelia”, the young Lelouch comes before the throne after the murder of his mother, Marianne, and reproaches him for not protecting her; Charles replies that to him the boy has been dead from the moment he was born, and sends him and his sister Nunnally to Japan as political hostages, shortly before invading it. Years later, in the second season, when Lelouch falls into his hands, Charles uses his own Geass to rewrite his memory: he erases his being Zero, his mother’s death and even Nunnally’s existence. The man who took a country’s name takes his son’s memories. In secret, with his brother V.V., he runs the Ragnarök Project, a plan to destroy the “god” of collective consciousness and merge all minds into one, and even there he keeps shouting the same thesis: people are not equal. Lelouch stops him at the last moment by using his Geass on that “god”.

// The crackFiction mixes eras

Code Geass takes elements from many real empires, from the British to the Japanese, and combines them into a fictional one. That makes the colonial logic recognizable, but it also simplifies it: real empires justified themselves with ideas of civilizing mission, religion or progress, not just the law of the strongest. Charles says out loud what real colonizers usually disguised.

The series also has its own irony: the victim Japan of Code Geass was, in real history, a colonial power in Asia. Postcolonial criminology does not divide the world into good and bad peoples; it studies power relations that any state can reproduce.