King Charles III and Queen Camilla will be on a state visit to France from September 20 to 22.
A visit dedicated to transition. Charles III is due to begin a three-day state visit to France on Wednesday September 20, six months after having had to postpone his visit in the midst of the movement against pension reform. For what was to be his first official visit abroad as king, the program of the 74-year-old British monarch and 76-year-old Queen Camilla is marked by engagements and meetings with actors from the French civil society. And above all it will be punctuated by symbols.
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The first will undoubtedly be that of the transition, firstly, with the figure of Elizabeth II. In the shadow of this very Francophile queen, Charles III will follow in the footsteps of his mother, with the State dinner, Wednesday evening, in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles. The place welcomed Elizabeth II in 1972, during her second state visit to France. “A nod appreciated by the king“, according to the Élysée. Just like visiting the flower market, which bears the sovereign’s name, in the center of Paris.
Ecology and diplomacy
Another symbol: the ecological transition. Charles III has long shown his interest in the climate. Thursday afternoon, at the National Museum of Natural History, he will meet, along with Emmanuel Macron, entrepreneurs and creators specializing in sustainable development.
Political transition, finally: this visit coincides with the warming of relations between Paris and London, explains the Élysée. If as head of state of a constitutional monarchy, the British king must observe strict reserve, politics is never absent from these state visits and the trip of Charles III is no exception, confirming the gestures recent openness and appeasement of the British government. Charles III and Emmanuel Macron have already met, notably during the king’s coronation on May 6, and discuss “a warm relationship“, they say in their entourage. After the tense years under the government of Boris Johnson, the two heads of state will walk down the Champs-Elysées together, a few months before the 120th anniversary of the Entente Cordiale. Charles III must thus pronounce a speech before parliamentarians in the Senate, during which he should speak partly in French, as last March when he spoke in German before the Bundestag in Berlin during a trip which was to follow the one initially planned in Paris.
Charles and Camilla will then travel to Bordeaux, which was once under the control of the English King Henry II, and where 39,000 Britons now reside. They must visit a vineyard and meet firefighters who took part in the fight against the fires which ravaged the Landes department last year.