For a republic that dispatched most of its own royal family to the guillotine 227 years ago, the French have an enduring fascination with the British monarchy, writes Kim Willsher in Paris.
The Queen’s speech on Sunday was broadcast live on three television news networks with simultaneous translation and followed by 2.35 million viewers an estimated 8.6% of the watching public, according to the media observatory, Médiamétrie.
BFMTV reported its audience rose by more than half a million viewers for the speech.
Stéphane Bern, France’s leading royal expert, wrote in Le Figaro that the Queen’s speech had “moved not just the British nation”.
She is a symbolic figure. When we say “the Queen” we immediately think of the “Queen of England”. She is a kind of mater dolorosa (sorrowful mother: a reference to the image of the Virgin Mary holding a dying Jesus), the soul of the nation.
Bern was particularly impressed by the queen’s “humility” in thanking NHS and other frontline workers.
“I found her very elegant. She was taking a back seat, unlike the politicians,” Bern said.
In another interview, Bern added the Queen had “underscored British values of calm, camaraderie and self-discipline”.
She is like a rock in a storm, here we have a woman who has reigned for 68 years and who will soon be 94 years old, who has known the war...and made reference to it.
The fondness of older French people for the monarch, always referred to as “La Reine d’Angleterre” (the Queen of England), has been transmitted to a younger generation via the hugely popular Netflix series, The Crown.
This fascination has been widely documented in the French media. In 2016, Adelaïde de Clermont-Tonnerre, a French editor, said she was astonished to hear people shouting “Long live the Queen”, when Elizabeth II visited Paris in 2014.
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