LETTER FROM BRUSSELS

A ratings success: 34% of French-speaking Belgian viewers watched Paola, garden side, February 18. The public channel RTBF broadcast that day the film by director Nicolas Delvaulx, portrait-confession of an ex-queen, an unprecedented exercise in this country which a minister once said that he had “need for monarchy like bread”. But of a discreet monarchy, speaking little, entirely in its duty to “serve” the population. “Characteristic that royalty shares honorably with domesticity; quintessence of the profession, it is a cousin of slavery”, quipped the linguist Jean-Marie Klinkenberg in 2009.

We do not know, after eighty-five minutes of viewing, if the wife of Albert II – the monarch who abdicated in 2013 in favor of his son Philippe – really shares this definition of the function of king or queen. . But, obviously, the long story interspersed with multiple silences that she carried, against a backdrop of melancholy symphony and bucolic images, does not really resemble a fairy tale.

In 1959, a wedding worthy of the Windsors

Welcomed like a star by the crowd in 1959, when she was compared to Grace Kelly or Claudia Cardinale, Paola Ruffo di Calabria, daughter of an Italian war hero, was first adored, as the writer Patrick explains Roegiers (The Spectacular History of the Kings of the Belgians, Perrin, 2007). Journalists swooned over her beauty, spoke of her as“a muse painted by Botticelli”, dunes “beautiful”, of a Cinderella who has arrived to light up the sad palace of Brussels.

This is then occupied by Baudouin, the “sad king”, still single at this time. Albert, son brother, Prince of Liège, does not have his sense of the sacrificial vocation. He looks like a playboy, likes big motorcycles, fast cars and pretty women, like Paola, whom he met in Rome. Quickly, he forms with her a princely couple that attracts the attention of all the paparazzi on the planet. Even Baudouin will say of young Tuscany that it is “the greatest gift that Italy has given us”.

Confetti, flowers thrown from the balconies and cheers from 100,000 people: the wedding worthy of the Windsors, awarded in July 1959, is glamorous and the images are broadcast all over the world. Nicolas Delvaulx’s film forgets this “detail” but, in reality, Léopold III, father of Albert and Baudouin, who had to abdicate in 1951 under pressure from demonstrators denouncing his role during the war, dreamed of having this union celebrated in Vatican, by Pope John XXIII. The government, which was to block his agreement, had not been consulted. Tohu-bohu: the pope gives up, the palace bows before the will of the politicians, whom Leopold III will pursue until the end of his vindictiveness.

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