Marie-José

Marie-José, the last queen of Italy, died on January 27th 2001, aged 94

Her coronation, Marie-José said later, was rather a fussy affair. Her dresser had recalled that at Marie-José’s wedding years earlier (pictured) her veil had come adrift three times while she was walking down the aisle. Madam would not want that to happen again, would she? Probably Madam did not care. She gave the impression of being indifferent to ceremony. But she submitted to the nagging of her attendant and everyone at the coronation said that no one in the history of Italy had looked more queenly. Marie-José and her husband Umberto were crowned on May 9th 1946. On June 2nd, Italy voted in a referendum to become a republic. The couple stood down after reigning for 27 days, Italy’s last king and queen.

Like much that happens in Italy, the events of that early summer in Rome were political. The previous Italian king, Victor Emmanuel III, who had co-operated with the dictator Benito Mussolini, had abdicated, hoping to save the monarchy. His son Umberto and Marie-José would, he said, provide a fresh start.

But the Italians wanted a fresher start. They were tired of being the despised underdogs of Europe. In the second world war, while the Germans had easy victories in western Europe, Italian armies were defeated in North Africa and Greece. When Italy surrendered to Britain and the United States in 1943, Germany took over much of the country until its own defeat in 1945.

The monarchy could not be blamed for Italy’s military incompetence, but it was associated with a discredited era. Umberto himself did not look all that fresh: he had been an army general. The monarchists’ hopes had really rested on the popularity of Marie-José Charlotte Sophie Amélie Henriette Gabrielle of Saxony-Coburg, a royal name if ever there was one. It could not be said that they liked her: she was a rarity among the royals of Europe, politically of the left. But ordinary Italians loved the stories that were told of her rebellious ways.

Admirers of Marie-José tend to portray her as a resistance heroine standing up to the iniquities of Mussolini. It is an understandable sentiment in a country seeking to atone for inventing fascism. La Repubblica, a newspaper not known for monarchist sympathies, gave three pages this week to the death of “the rebel queen”. Marie-José’s parents were the king and queen of Belgium, regarded as a liberal-minded couple for their time. Her mother Elisabeth was, at the age of 82, the first European royal to visit the Soviet Union, an enterprise that earned her the nickname the Red Queen.

With Marie-José’s native Belgium swiftly annexed in 1940 (as it had been in the first world war), she had good reason to loathe the Germans, whom she called pigs and liars. She went to see Hitler at his retreat in Berchtesgaden to plead, without success, for food for starving Belgium. Her main recollection was that he ate chocolate throughout the interview.

Count Ciano, Mussolini’s foreign minister, noted in his diary that Marie-José asked him to use his influence to try to stop Italy entering the war on Germany’s side, but it is unclear whether he followed it up. The king, her father-in-law, told her to keep her “nose out of family politics”.

She had her little victories. She refused Mussolini’s request to Italianise her name to Maria Giuseppina. But it is unlikely that Mussolini saw her as a threat. He valued her as the head of the Italian Red Cross. She accompanied the Italian army on its invasion of Abyssinia (later Ethiopia) in 1935 and was said to have “healing hands”. The picture that emerges of her in the troubled 1930s and 1940s is of a divided personality, loyal to her husband’s country but disturbed by a Europe run by tyrants. When she saw Allied bombers over Rome, she wrote of them as “white liberating birds”.

She had talent with words. After the war, when she chose to live apart from her husband, she made her home in Geneva and built a career as a writer. Exile, she remarked, was one of the many inconveniences of royal life, and it had to be endured with dignity. One of her books is a history of Italian royalty. Republican Italy continues to be fascinated with monarchy. The popular picture weeklies rely on stories of royal escapades.

Should Italy decide to have a monarch again, Victor Emmanuel, aged 63, one of Marie-José’s four children, or Emmanuel Filiberto, a grandson, would have claims. But neither has even been allowed back to Italy. When Romano Prodi became prime minister in 1996, he was inclined to allow them to come home but his government fell before he could get parliament to agree. Mr Prodi is now president of the European Commission, but not even

Brussels has divine right over royal matters.

Marie-José saw little likelihood of a royal rebirth in Italy, or indeed anywhere else that had banished monarchy. When she was a child Europe was awash with kings and queens. Her mother’s native Germany had some 20 principalities in the 19th century, each with its monarch. Marie-José thought that her father had got it about right in a changing Europe: “There will be many more unemployed in our trade.”