The queen is dead, long live the king! we claim since the death of Elizabeth II.
Like many people, I only knew Elizabeth Windsor as Queen. Like many people glued to their television screen, I attended, in the early morning of July 29, 1981, the wedding of Prince Charles (now King Charles III) to the “commoner” Diana Spencer. And like many people, I was infinitely sad to learn of her sudden death on August 31, 1997. I really loved this woman, this outsider who has used her title of princess to support causes such as the fight against HIV, landmines, etc. In fact, my respect for royalty is limited to Lady Diana Spencer, as well as King Edward VIII, who himself chose to abdicate for love rather than stay in line to “serve.”
I have always had difficulty with castes; besides, I am still waiting for a geneticist to demonstrate to me the supreme value of royal blood. […] I try to see what distinguishes us, us poor subjects, from this “illustrious family”, from what we know of it: ceremonial marriages, numerous divorces, adulterous relationships, a prince who steeps himself in a pedophilia scandal, cousins who are claimed to be dead (Nerissa and Katherine Bowes-Lyon) rather than having to admit that royal blood does not immunize against intellectual disabilities. Basically, a wealthy but ordinary family, which we “botox” and “photoshop” in an attempt to remove the wrinkles of the torments of life that are incumbent on us all, but whose traces we want to erase from the portraits officials and in history books. As we said in 1622, if it is true that “the walls have ears”, a pity that they were not provided with speech, had they become walls, to share with us what was going on there , and what else is going on there.
It is paying a heavy price to have to comply with all these medieval customs to see oneself decked out with a title that is only royal in name. Very little for me, the fact of being only a “subject”, and even less of passing on to posterity with, for only surname, a number.