“At 7:05 a.m. this morning, February 3, 2024, His Royal Highness Victor-Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy and Prince of Naples, surrounded by his family, died peacefully in Geneva. » It is with this sober press release that the House of Savoy announced, on Saturday, the death of Victor-Emmanuel, a few days before his 87th birthday.
Born in Naples on February 12, 1937, he was only 9 years old when he went into exile after the Italians chose the republic by referendum on June 2, 1946. Nicknamed “the king of May”, because he reigned for barely more than a month, his father, Humbert II, intended to abdicate in favor of his son, but he did not have the leisure to do so.
The emerging republic shamed this royal family, symbol of more than twenty years of compromise with fascism. Many do not forgive Victor-Emmanuel III (1869-1947), king from 1900 to 1946, for having accommodated the ascension of Benito Mussolini, and in particular for having signed the racial laws of 1938. Italy postfascist turns its back on the House of Savoy. Coming into force on 1er January 1948, the new Italian Constitution “prohibits the former kings of the house of Savoy, their wives and their male descendants from entering and staying in the national territory”.
After a short stay in Portugal, it was in Switzerland that Victor-Emmanuel essentially spent his time in exile. The prince is bored. His youthful years were those of a high roller. A lover of speed, he almost killed himself at the wheel of his Ferrari and had several stays in hospital. We find it in summer in the posh evenings of Saint-Tropez (Var) or in winter in Crans-Montana, in the canton of Valais.
It was in the chic Swiss resort, in 1957, that he met Marina Doria, a former world water skiing champion, daughter of a Swiss food industry industrialist. Her father opposed their union, because Marina Doria was not of noble ancestry, but, in 1969, Victor-Emmanuel found a stratagem: he signed a decree proclaiming himself king, creating a tailor-made title of duchess for Marina Doria. Their civil marriage took place in Las Vegas (Nevada) in 1970, the religious wedding a year later, in Tehran, in the presence of the Shah and Princess Pahlavi, with whom he established close ties of friendship.
Troubled reunion
The summer of 1978 marked a break in the life of the exiled prince. While on vacation at his property in Cavallo, in Corsica, Victor-Emmanuel finds himself the protagonist of a brawl: an Italian boater has borrowed the inflatable boat moored to his yacht. Furious, the prince wants to scare him with a rifle. Not far from there, a young 19-year-old German, Dirk Geerd Hamer, takes a stray bullet. He died a few weeks later. The scandal made the front page of the international press. It was the beginning of a long legal procedure, which ended in 1991, before the Paris Court of Appeal. The prince is acquitted of homicide, but is convicted of violating weapons laws.
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