The French and the Queen

For once, Emmanuel Macron found the right words—and they were in English. He addressed the “citizens of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth” to eulogise the late Queen Elizabeth II: “To you, she was your Queen. To us, she was the Queen. To us all, she will be with us forever … Her wisdom and empathy have helped us all to steer a path through the historic ups and downs of the last seven decades: with her passing, we all feel an emptiness.” His oration was uncharacteristically short—two and a half minutes altogether—heartfelt, and resonated with both the French and the British public, something that had hitherto never happened under his divisive presidency.

Like most French citizens, Emmanuel Macron has no personal recollection of a time when Elizabeth II wasn’t on the throne. Longevity counts for a lot in national affections; but the truly special relationship between France and the daughter of George VI was built on much more. The accretion of years, Republics (Fourth and Fifth); the memory, then the forgetting of the Second World War; the perception that Britain, thanks to a monarchic system the French would never want here, was better at managing the traumas of societal change. This unassuming young woman who grew up with us, our parents, our grandparents, as remote as a Japanese emperor and seemingly as close as a television personality, became the rare embodiment of what a monarch should be: the British lion’s own unicorn.

Unlike British prime ministers, Elizabeth II never threatened Breton fishermen, the EU Court of Justice, French farmers, or a large chunk of our Navy moored at Mers-el-Kébir. Unlike some of her forebears, and, notoriously, her eldest son, now King Charles III, she never expressed a political opinion or a personal mood. She never espoused a cause (that modern word so beloved of her latest granddaughter-in-law), restricting herself to words of gentle praise that nevertheless, over the decades, delimited the space where her true self operated: curiosity, kindness, a love of nature and animals, shrewdness, a crystallised warmth apportioned with a faultless sense of timing; and a great deal of charm. During the Covid crisis, the Queen’s short address of April 5, 2020, reminded a nation enmeshed in endless technocratic injunctions that courage and hope can be transmitted with few words. Her four-minute message was only broadcast on all-news channels here: nevertheless, it was viewed by two and a half million viewers, who found in it a comfort that Emmanuel Macron’s weekly half-hour flights of philosophy did not provide. In short, we fell in love with her by stealth, and discovered the full depth of our sentiment on September 8.

Charles de Gaulle, who imposed the most monarchical of all our constitutions with the Fifth Republic, liked to say “the French have a taste for princes, but they look for them abroad”; he was able to appreciate the part played by King George VI and his wife while leader of the Free French in London. (Famously, François Mitterrand quipped in 1984 that he had to be “Margaret Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth at the same time”.)

Many British commentators were quick to surmise that to us French, the Queen represented the best parts of the monarchy we lost. But that’s a misreading. We don’t hanker for our untender, absolutist, rash or conniving kings—and those were the best ones. Elizabeth II did not so much embody a system we lost 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 convert to Catholicism who 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 prosperity after years of massacres. Approachable, happy to greet visitors while playing with his children on the floor, he’s the only one of our monarchs to share 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.

Duff Cooper, the wartime minister, compulsive diarist and one-time ambassador to Paris, wrote in his elegant biography of Talleyrand that the difference between the French and English monarchical systems lay in the fact that the British aristocracy won the 1688 Glorious Revolution, in effect seizing actual power and ushering in parliamentary monarchism, whereas the Fronde of French nobles, led by Louis XIV’s own cousins Anne Marie Louise d’Orléans, the Duchess of Montpensier and the Duc de Condé, failed miserably thirty years earlier. Crucially, it so scared the fifteen-year-old Louis XVI that his entire policies for the next six decades were devoted to creating an absolutist, centralist model where the smallest decision rested on the King alone. (The French like to joke that the political role of the monarch is so irrelevant in Britain that the country can afford to periodically go and shop for the next one in Germany.)

Neither her subjects nor the French ever expected of the Queen the smallest expression of absolutism. (Even as the titular head of the Church of England—an office Pope Francis once described to the Parisian journalist Caroline Pigozzi as “the same job as mine”—she has refrained from any intervention on doctrine or liturgy, traditionally leaving it to her prime ministers to appoint bishops.) The French gaze in delighted wonder at such non-interventionnisme. It’s utterly alien to us. It belongs in the realm of fantasy, something we know will never exist in our continuum, like cricket, chocolate without calories—or unions deferring strike days because of a national period of mourning, as the British ones did in September.

Naturally, 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 her 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 didn’t).

Whether receiving Carla Bruni in faultless Dior grey wool and pillbox hat, or Brigitte Macron styled-to-the-gills 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 glimpse that style could be something other than fashion. We respected it precisely because it, too, was so alien to us.

And of course, she was the living memory of our fateful last century. She knew them all: de Gaulle of course, but also René Coty, the most unassuming of our presidents, a nice Social Democrat of the Fourth Republic, whose homely wife Germaine, who cooked his meals at the Élysée 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 Elizabeth II, 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.

As her long life came to mean so much to us, it also surprised us that the monarchy embodied by Elizabeth could, finally, reveal itself as perhaps a purer (or perhaps more immediate) expression of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. (That ten-mile queue you could see from space, where David Beckham stood in line for twelve hours!)

Our papers, from Libération to Le Monde, gave her as much real estate as the British ones. “We loved her so much,” Le Parisien tabloid splashed on a full-page picture on September 9. The Eiffel Tower went black. French and British flags flew at half-mast in front of the Élysée Palace and of all but six of France’s 34,968 city halls. (Leftist anti-monarchists trying to make a point, and roundly abused for it.) And it wasn’t just officialdom. Ordinary citizens, for years, gave any television program on the royal family huge ratings. Six million watched Prince Philip’s stark funeral at St George’s Chapel last year. Close to 10 million followed the 2011 and 2018 royal weddings. The Queen’s funeral ceremonies, spread over several days, beat all those to flinders—over half the French population tuned in at one stage, fascinated that pomp, done right, was the opposite of pompous.

The inglorious disappearance of Boris Johnson has certainly done a lot for the recovering French-British relations, over-personalised by his constant spats with Emmanuel Macron. But the death of Elizabeth II, and the rare moment of global unity it sparked, will have made it possible for France and Britain to face together a more dangerous world, from Ukraine to the China Sea. It is an inestimable gift which, like so many things Elizabeth II said and did, comes at the exact right moment.

Anne-Elisabeth Moutet is a French journalist, writer and columnist.