A royal poisoning at the Elysée Palace. We came close to tragedy on December 2, 2014. Heir to Jean-Baptiste-Jules Bernadotte, Marshal of the Empire who became King of Sweden and Norway in 1818, Charles XVI Gustave was then in Paris with his wife, Queen Silvia, for a state visit. As befits such an occasion, President François Hollande gives a banquet on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré in honor of the couple.
All the pomp of the Republic is out. But the next day, the queen is bedridden, “indisposed”, explains her husband diplomatically. The culprit is quickly identified: a Breton lobster lacking in freshness.
Resentful, the king? Nine years later, when the royal court announced the arrival in Sweden of President Emmanuel Macron and his partner in October – a visit since postponed to January 30 and 31 following the attack in Brussels – Charles XVI Gustave recalled this crime of lèse-majesté, in a major daily maintenance economical Dagens Industri. “Everyone got sick”he assures, mocking the kitchens of the Elysée, which “had undoubtedly prepared [le homard] in the afternoon and served it at dinner”. Faced with such a calamity, the Macron state visit, the first since the arrival of Chirac in 2000, can only be a success: ” I am calm. It will be alright “confided Charles XVI Gustave to the newspaper.
Protocol role
It must be said that the monarch, aged 77, has seen others. He has just celebrated his jubilee. A record for longevity in the history of the Scandinavian kingdom. His reign had its ups and downs. But the results are positive: all polls show that a majority of Swedes want to keep the monarchy. And even if its abolition still appears in the program of the Social Democratic Party, no political group dares to demand it.
Fifty years ago, the situation was completely different. When his grandfather, King Gustav VI Adolphe, took his last breath on September 15, 1973, many people doubted the young prince’s abilities. His father, Crown Prince Gustavus Adolphe, died in a plane crash when he was 10 months old. Little appreciated by the Swedes, his mother, Princess Sybilla, daughter of Duke Charles-Edouard of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, a close friend of Adolf Hitler, had sunk into depression. He was said to be intellectually limited – during his childhood, his dyslexia was considered mental retardation –, more interested in parties and girls than in state affairs.
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