the links of the sovereign with the last nine French presidents

René Coty, Charles de Gaulle, Georges Pompidou, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande and Emmanuel Macron: Queen Elizabeth II has met all of these French presidents. In 1956, the sovereign was 30 years old. She has been Queen of the United Kingdom, Great Britain and Northern Ireland for 4 years. She then made her first official visit to France, a country she loved and which returned it well.

President René Coty organizes a gala dinner, during which the young queen gives a speech in French, a language she masters. Three years later, it was the monarch’s turn to receive a French President, Charles de Gaulle, in 1960. A head of state to whom she had great admiration. Twenty years earlier, the man of June 18 landed in London (England) to organize resistance to Nazi Germany. In 1972, the Queen Elizabeth II is in Paris again. The very Anglophile Georges Pompidou is then at the head of France. The United Kingdom is now part of the European community. Elizabeth II never gives her opinions, but her pro-European convictions are solid. In 1976, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing is invited to Buckingham with his wife. The monarch’s attitudes of the French president then make the Queen smile. In 1994, she showed greater complicity with François Mitterrand. Together, they work on the creation of the Channel Tunnel. Two years later, in May 1996, Jacques Chirac and his wife are in London. Years later, in 2008, Nicolas Sarkozy makes a state visit, but all eyes are on his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy. In June 2014, the Queen was welcomed to France by François Hollande to celebrate the 70th anniversary of D-Day. It was his last trip to France. Later, at the G7 in Cornwall, in 2021, President Emmanuel Macron takes a tender look at the Queen.