France’s emotional adieu to her favourite queen
‘We loved her so much”, splashed the Le Parisien tabloid yesterday above a full-page picture of Queen Elizabeth II; and for once, it was not hyperbole. The French are devastated by her death. Politicians of all stripes expressed their respect and sense of loss with a rare grace, starting with Emmanuel Macron, who for once found les mots justes, in a short, heartfelt message en Anglais to the British people. “To you, she was your Queen. To us, she was The Queen. She will be with all of us forever,” the president said. The Élysée flew the Union flag next to the Tricolour. The Eiffel Tower went black.
But it wasn’t just officialdom. Ordinary citizens, who for years gave any TV programme on the Royal family huge viewing ratings, have been talking of little else. Six million watched Prince Philip’s funeral last year. Close to 10 million followed the 2011 and 2018 royal weddings.
Many of my friends and colleagues who’ve seen me comment on British affairs over the years sent messages of condolence, sadness, shock. They range from a society hostess to the 83-year old retired professor of veterinary medicine who as a 19-yearold Communist helped organise the music for the Paris mourning rally at the death of Stalin in 1953 with two million people in attendance. (A couple of years later, when she was duly expelled from the Party, one of the reasons given at the kangaroo trial by her former comrades was that she’d picked Handel’s Messiah to play on the part of the route: too bourgeois, too religious, too British.)
The political strategist John Mcternan, who got the news while spending time with friends in Prayssac, a village in the southwestern Lot department, introduced as “un Britannique”, got the same grave condolences from the local butcher, and from the winemakers at Domaine de l’antenet, as he would for a family bereavement.
A friend’s secretary was crying yesterday; not with showy, gusty sobs but quiet slow tears rolling down her cheeks. “It’s absurd but I felt that she’d always be there, and now I feel a loss even though I would never have stopped before to consider that the Queen of England meant something to me. But she did.”
British commentators were quick to point out that to us French, the Queen represented the best parts of the monarchy we lost. But that’s a misreading. We don’t regret our untender, absolutist, rash or conniving kings — and those were the best ones.
Elizabeth II did not embody a system we lost so much as the monarchy we never had. Our Kings did not do humility (and to be fair, we might not have respected them if they did).
The exception was Henri IV, the beloved former Protestant who converted to Catholicism and ended the savagery of the Wars of Religion in France. He famously said he wanted every French family to be able to “put a chicken on the table each Sunday”, a modest dream of “affluence” after years of massacres. Approachable, happy to greet visitors while on the floor playing with his children, he’s the only one of our monarchs who shared with the Queen humility and dedication to the common good: for his pains, he was assassinated by a fanatic in 1610. His successors learned that lesson too well.
Of course we were delighted that the Queen loved France, visited our country more often than any other, bought horses at Chantilly and raced them at Longchamp; that she spoke excellent French and welcomed our awestruck visiting presidents with a twinkle in the eye, as if to let them know — the Sarkozys and Hollandes and Macrons — that it was both serious and a bit of a joke, but she at least would not have to face new elections soon. Did them good, we thought, because we both welcome and reject authority (which she had) and pompousness (which she hadn’t).
Whether receiving Carla Bruni in faultless Dior grey wool and pillbox hat, or Brigitte Macron styled-to-thegills in stiff Louis Vuitton, the Queen never changed, in her well-cut Angela Kelly numbers in bright colours, designed for her subjects not herself. It let us see that style could be something else than fashion. We respected it precisely because it was so alien to us.
And of course, she was the living memory of our fateful last century. She knew all the presidents: Charles de Gaulle of course, but also René Coty, a nice, unassuming Social Democrat of the Fourth Republic, whose homely wife Germaine, who cooked his meals at the Elysée and greeted journalists in an apron, was the butt of elegant Parisian wags. She died of a heart attack in 1955, prompted, said some, by the heartlessness of the comments, and the young Queen Elizabeth, who’d enjoyed washing dishes after her husband’s traditional Balmoral barbecue, sent a heartfelt letter of condolence to her stricken husband. That, too, is what we liked – she made them equal, the ragingly egocentric hero and the quiet, dutiful lawyer.
Even your unions postpone strikes to respect and share in your grief. We’d never seen someone like her, and we never will again. But we feel, as a last gift, that she’s brought us French and Britons closer than we’ve been for years.