Few royals can say that they plotted against one facist dictator and wished that they had taken a gun to a meeting with another, but such is the case for Queen Marie-José, the last Queen of Italy, who reigned for just 35 days.
Born Princess Marie José Charlotte Sophie Amélie Henriette Gabrielle of Belgium on 4 August 1906, she was the youngest child and only daughter of the future King Albert I of Belgium and Duchess Elisabeth of Bavaria. A beautiful, intelligent child, she always had a passion for the arts, and in particular music, studying the violin under Eugène Ysaÿe, dubbed ‘The King of the Violin’.
During the First World War, she was sent to the UK to study in an Essex convent, before moving to Florence, Italy to study at an all-girls boarding school, College of the Santissima Annunziata. It was during her time here that she first met her future husband, Crown Prince Umberto of Italy, Prince of Piedmont, who she had been promised to since her childhood, after a marriage was arranged by their parents. Indeed, her marriage prospects had been widely written about and speculated on throughout her youth, being one of the few daughters of a reigning Royal Family, with many now abolished.
The couple were wed in 1930 in a fairytale ceremony - the beautiful Princess and the dashing Prince - at Pauline Chapel at the Quirinal Palace in Rome, Italy. Yet the day did not get off to a good start. Defying superstition, Umberto insisted on seeing his bride ahead of the ceremony, to check everything was perfect with her dress (which he had actually helped design, too). When he discovered that the sleeves had been sewn on the wrong way, he demanded that they be changed, slowing down proceedings (they were instead removed, with white gloves worn to cover her arms).
It was at her wedding that Marie-José first showed that she was unwilling to be cowed by Italy’s facist dictator, Benito Mussolini. While her father-in-law, King Victor Emmanuel III, and the House of Savoy at large were blind to the danger he proposed to the country (and the monarchy), refusing to speak out against his racial policies amongst other things, the new Princess of Piedmont stood up to him - refusing to sign her name on the wedding register as the more Italian sounding, ‘Maria Giuseppina’, as Mussolini had advised, signing her own name instead.
During the Second World War, she began to plot against Mussolini, attempting to negotiate a peace with the United States behind the backs of her in-laws through a meeting with the future Pope Paul VI, and meeting regularly with anti-facist intellectuals. She made contact with opponents of the regime, including the Italian Resistance, who she supplied with both money and arms. After her death, Mussolini’s son made claims that the two had actually had an affair, and in a 1993 interview she did acknowledge his strength, saying: ‘He was a lion. I, too, am a lion. And we both feared one another.’
When Adolf Hitler invaded her homeland of Belgium, she was swift to act, organising a meeting with the man himself in order to plead for better treatment of her brother, King Leopold III, who was confined to one of his castles, and his people, who were starving. Despite his refusal, he was quite impressed with her beauty, later saying she had eyes ‘the colour of the German sky’. For her part, she was not so impressed, saying later she wished she had taken a pistol to kill him, adding, ‘I think I would have had the strength to do it.’
By the time that her husband ascended to the throne on 9 May 1946, Italy was in the midst of a constitutional crisis, with the House of Savoy no longer as popular with the Italian people as it had been just a decade earlier. The couple themselves were seen as better than King Victor Emmanuel, who had stood down in their favour, but sadly the die was cast and it was too late. A referendum was set for 2 June, and the monarchy was abolished by the vote. King Umberto and Queen Marie-José had reigned for just 35 days.
Following the abolition of the monarchy, the royal couple were exiled, and banned from returning to the country ever again (as were any male heirs - the couple had four children, one son and three daughters). They first settled in Portugal, but soon separated, with Marie-José choosing to take the children with her to Switzerland instead. Due to their Catholic upbringing, neither believed in divorce, so were never formally separated despite living apart until Umberto’s death in 1983. They even still attended events together occasionally.
From Switzerland, she spent her time pursuing her interest in the arts, even setting up a musical foundation, Fondation du Prix de Composition Reine Marie-José, which still awards prizes to talented musicians to this day. She lived in Mexico for a few years with her daughter, Princess Marie-Beatrice, and her grandchildren, but died of lung cancer at a clinic in Geneva at the age of 94.
The outpouring of grief by the Italian public after her death was said by many to be what paved the way for her grandson, Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy, Prince of Venice, to be allowed to return to Italy just a year later in 2002, having never set foot on his home soil.
