Charlene of Monaco’s state of health has been worrying for several months. Why is his situation arousing so much interest? We asked ourselves the question in Pop it, our pop culture decryption of the week.
How is Charlene of Monaco? This question has fascinated the tabloids since her return from South Africa, her country of origin, in November 2021. She had to stay there for several months for health reasons, her ENT problems preventing her from traveling by plane. If, once back in Europe, the princess made an express visit to Monaco, she is now resting in Switzerland in an undisclosed place.
Result: on November 19, 2021, the princess was unable to respond to the Monegasque National Day. However, this isolation is a choice of the princess. “She was aware that the only thing to do was to rest and to follow a real medically supervised treatment”, told her husband, Prince Albert, at People. Royalty has affirmed the importance of psychological and physical help given to the former swimmer. And if the rumors about addiction problems have been coming back for years, the relatives of the princess remain discreet about the reasons for this hospitalization, which echoes other dark events in Western royal families.
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The Rock and its cursed women
The women of the principality have often suffered. They are regularly victims of the archaic values of Monegasque royalty, but also of misogynistic media treatment. It is impossible not to mention Grace Kelly, who had to stop her acting career at the age of 27 to marry Rainier III.
Died in a car accident, her tragic fate had unprecedented repercussions on her children, especially Stéphanie of Monaco, who was in the vehicle. “I was seventeen. I had just lost my mother, and I was accused of having killed her. How can you not feel guilty when everyone looks at you like they’re like ‘How come you are still alive?’ ”, she confided to Gérard Miller, director of the documentary Monaco, The rock was almost perfect, broadcast on France 3 in 2014. No wonder, then, that Charlene’s condition arouses so much public fear.
A story reminiscent of Princess Diana
Women belonging to royalty touch our hearts, for they experience lives as golden as they are painful in some respects. On the British side, the death of Princess Diana, adored in the 90s for her non-conformism and her status as role model, mourned the whole world. Like Diana, whose blond hair and skinny figure she shares, Charlene of Monaco is faced with terrible rumors about her chaotic engagement ten years ago, but also about the fragility of her couple, not to mention the fact that her husband Albert II had illegitimate children.
So many situations unfolding under the meticulous and incisive eye of the media. “People are very quick to say, ‘Oh, why isn’t she smiling in the photos?’ Well, sometimes it’s hard to smile. They don’t know what’s going on in the background ”, Charlene confided to the South African magazine Huisgenoot in 2020. A statement that inevitably evokes Lady Di and the impact that her status has had on her health, both physical and mental.
Charlene of Monaco and her career made of excess
If Charlene of Monaco fascinates, it is also because of her ambivalence and a career marked by certain excesses. Nicole Coste, ex-companion of Prince Albert and mother of Alexandre, one of his illegitimate children, denounced last year the treatment of her son within royalty. “Hangsbefore the engagement period in 2010, I experienced things that alerted and shocked me. Charlène de Monaco, for example, changed my son’s room, taking advantage of his father’s absence to install him in the employees’ wing. As a mother, I cannot find words to describe these acts “, she confided in the columns of Paris Match, in September 2021.
What to show that beyond her sufferings, the princess remains a full member of an often reactionary elite, braced on traditions and practices of another time. Isn’t it this duality between glamor and violence that we like so much in The Crown, Netflix series that plunges us into the heart of the elite? From there to imagine that one day, Charlene and the Rock will be entitled to their sitcom, there is only one step.
Mélanie deciphers pop culture from a societal angle and questions the female gaze in films or even series, because everything is a question of gaze, she …