Marie José of Belgium

Marie José of Belgium
Queen consort of Italy
Tenure	9 May 1946 – 12 June 1946
Born	(1906-08-04)4 August 1906 Ostend, Belgium
Died	27 January 2001(2001-01-27) (aged 94) Thonex, Switzerland
Burial	Hautecombe Abbey, France
Spouse	King Umberto II of Italy (m. 1930–1983; his death)
Issue	Princess Maria Pia Vittorio Emanuele, Prince of Naples Princess Maria Gabriella Princess Maria Beatrice
Full name Marie-José Charlotte Sophie Amèlie Henriette Gabrielle
House	Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (until 1920) House of Belgium (1920 onwards)
Father	King Albert I of Belgium
Mother	Duchess Elisabeth of Bavaria

Marie José of Belgium (Marie-José Charlotte Sophie Amélie Henriette Gabrielle; 4 August 1906 – 27 January 2001) was the last Queen of Italy. Her 35-day tenure as queen consort earned her the nickname "the May Queen".

Early life

Marie José, aged 9

Princess Marie-José was born in Ostend, the youngest child of King Albert I of the Belgians and his consort, Duchess Elisabeth in Bavaria. During the First World War, she was evacuated to England where she was a boarding pupil at the Brentwood Ursuline Convent High School in Brentwood, Essex.

In 1924, Marie José attended her first court ball. For the occasion she was given an antique pearl and diamond tiara that had originally been owned by Stéphanie de Beauharnais.^[1]

Marriage and children

Monza, September 1930. Princess Maria José of Belgium steps down from Borzacchini's Alfa Romeo car with the help of Prospero Gianferrari.

On 8 January 1930, she married in Rome Crown Prince Umberto of Italy, from the House of Savoy, and so became Princess of Piedmont (Italian: Principessa di Piemonte).

Among the wedding gifts was a turquoise and diamond parure, worn by the bride at her pre-wedding reception,^[2] and a diamond bow worn as a sash decoration at state occasions.^[3]

The couple had four children:^[4]

• Princess Maria Pia of Savoy (24 September 1934), who married Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia on 12 February 1955 and was divorced in 1967. Four children were born during the marriage. She remarried Prince Michel of Bourbon-Parma in 2003.
• Vittorio Emanuele, Prince of Naples (12 February 1937), who married Marina Ricolfi Doria on 7 October 1971. They have one son.
• Princess Maria Gabriella of Savoy (24 February 1940), who married Robert Zellinger de Balkany on 21 June 1969 and was divorced in November 1990. They have issue.
• Princess Maria Beatrice of Savoy (February 1944), who married Luis Reyna-Corvallán y Dillon on 1 April 1970, and has issue.

Princess of Piedmont

In October 1939, Princess Marie-José was made President of the Red Cross in Italy. The Princess and Duchess of Aosta attended the ceremony where Marie-José was installed as President of the Italian Red Cross.

During the Second World War she was one of the very few diplomatic channels between the German/Italian camp and the other European countries involved in the war, as she was the sister of Leopold III of Belgium (kept hostage by the German forces) and at the same time close to some of the ministers of Benito Mussolini's cabinet. A British diplomat in Rome recorded that the Princess of Piedmont was the only member of the Italian Royal Family with good political judgment.

Mussolini's mistress, Claretta Petacci, claimed in her diary that in 1937 the then princess and wife of the heir to the throne tried and failed to seduce the dictator at a beach resort near Rome. However, Mussolini's son, Romano, claims that the princess and dictator entered into a sexual relationship.^[5]

In 1943, the Crown Princess involved herself in vain attempts to arrange a separate peace treaty between Italy and the United States; her interlocutor from the Vatican was Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, a senior diplomat who later became Pope Paul VI.

Her attempts were not sponsored by the king and Umberto was not (directly, at least) involved in them. After her failure (she never met the American agents), she was sent with her children to Sarre, in Aosta Valley, and isolated from the political life of the Royal House.

She sympathized with the partisans, and while she was a refugee in Switzerland, smuggled weapons, money and food for them. She was nominated for appointment as chief of a partisan brigade, but declined.

Queen for a month

Styles of Queen Marie José
Reference style	Her Majesty
Spoken style	Your Majesty

Following Italy's defection to the Allied side in the war, her discredited father-in-law, King Victor Emmanuel III, withdrew from government. Her husband became acting monarch under the title of Lieutenant General of the Realm. He and Marie José toured war torn Italy, where they made a positive impression. However, King Victor Emmanuel III refused to abdicate until only weeks before the referendum.

Upon the eventual abdication on 9 May 1946 of her father-in-law, Marie-José became Queen consort of Italy, and remained such until the monarchy was abolished by plebiscite, on 2 June 1946.

Umberto and Marie-José had been widely praised for their performance over the last two years, and it has been argued that had Victor Emmanuel abdicated sooner their relative popularity might have saved the monarchy. Following the monarchy's defeat (54–46%), she and her husband left the country for exile on 13 June 1946.

Exile

In exile, the family gathered for a brief time on the Portuguese Riviera, but she and Umberto separated. She and their four children soon left for Switzerland where she lived most of the time for the rest of her life, while Umberto remained in Portugal. However, the couple, both devout Catholics, never divorced. The republican constitution not only forbade the restoration of the monarchy, but also barred all male members of the House of Savoy, as well as former queens consort, from returning to Italian soil.

Death

For some time, she lived in Mexico with her daughter, Princess Marie-Beatrice, and her grandchildren.^[6]

Marie-José returned to Italy after her husband's death in 1983. She herself died in a Geneva clinic of lung cancer at the age of 94, surviving her two brothers and some of her nieces and nephews.^[7]

The funeral was held at Hautecombe Abbey, in Savoy in the south of France, and attended by 2000 guests. Among them were Albert II of Belgium, Juan Carlos I of Spain and Farah Pahlavi, the last Empress of Iran.^[8] She was buried in Hautecombe Abbey alongside her husband.

Musical foundation

Like her mother, Queen Elisabeth, Marie-José inspired a musical contest. In 1959 she established the Fondation du prix de composition Reine Marie José. It awarded its biennial prizes for the first time the following year. The first prize at the 1960 Concours was awarded to Giorgio Ferrari for his Quatuor à cordes avec une voix chantée. Subsequent prize winners have included William Albright (1968), Georg Katzer (1978), and Javier Torres Maldonado (2000). The 2017 prize was awarded to Jaehyuck Choi.^[9]

Honours

Portrayal of Marie in the arts

Ancestry

See also

• Academia Belgica

References

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Marie-José of Belgium.

• Genealogy of the Royal Family of Belgium (House Saxe-Coburg-Gotha) at the Wayback Machine (archived 28 October 2009)
• "The May Queen", eurohistory.com; accessed 5 June 2018.
• "Queen Marie José international musical composition prize", reinemariejose.ch; accessed 5 June 2018.
• short biography in the February 2001 issue of La Rondine; accessed 5 June 2018.