Marie Jose, the last Queen of Italy, who died on January 27th aged 94, was an independent-minded royal whose opposition to Fascism might have offered a last chance to save the discredited House of Savoy and therefore the Italian monarchy. She was known as "the May Queen" because she and her husband, King Umberto II, reigned for just 27 days, from May 9th 1946.
On June 2nd that year, Italians voted in a referendum to abolish the monarchy, mindful of King Victor Emmanuel III's close association with Fascism and the disasters it had brought on their country.
Republicans won the vote by only a narrow margin and a plan, proposed by the philosopher Benedetto Croce, to replace Umberto with his infant son Victor Emmanuel, and have the beautiful and unconventional queen act as regent, might possibly have tipped the balance in favour of the monarchy.
The daughter of Albert I, King of the Belgians, Marie Jose was related through her Wittelsbach mother, Elizabeth, to Mad King Ludwig of Bavaria and to Empress Sissi of Austria. A free-thinker and of artistic disposition, she found life in the rigidly regimented court of Savoy stiflingly dull.
A fairy-tale wedding at the Quirinale Palace in 1930 was arranged, more for the benefit of the Fascist regime than for that of the monarchy. Though it produced four children, the union between the luminously beautiful young woman and the handsome Prince Umberto was only apparently happy. And Marie Jose's friendship with anti-Fascist intellectuals poisoned relations with her difficult father-inlaw.
"You know, I don't have much to do with the House of Savoy," she confided to a journalist in 1940. "It's not a family, it's a Frigidaire."
Marie Jose took her royal duties seriously, serving for a while with the Red Cross in Libya. With the arrival of the second World War, she was the first - and only - member of the Savoys to appreciate that Mussolini was leading the country to ruin.
She made contact with opponents of the regime, holding a secret meeting with Croce under the guise of an archaeological visit to Pompeii, and with the allies via Monsignor Giovanni Battista Montini, the future Pope Paul VI. She appears to have been simultaneously attracted and repelled by Mussolini, who tolerated her political plotting as he judged it to be of no practical consequence. In a 1993 interview, she spoke of his magnetic physical presence and fierce temper.
"He was a lion. I, too, am a lion. And we both feared one another."
There was no such sympathy for Hitler, who was struck by her beauty and complimented her on her eyes, "the colour of the German sky".
She met him on a visit to Berchtesgaden in 1940 to plead for the release of food to the starving Belgians, and for a more humane treatment for her brother Leopold, who was confined to one of his castles. The answer, on all counts, was "nein".
Having read Mein Kampf, Marie Jose appreciated what Hitler represented, and said she might have killed him if she had had a pistol. "I think I would have had the strength to do it," she said.
Following the abolition of the monarchy, she sailed to Portugal to await her husband. But in exile, the couple drifted apart, the ex-king remaining in Portugal, his consort living in Switzerland, ostensibly for health reasons. A keen painter, competent pianist and chain-smoker, Marie Jose devoted her maturity to travel, and to writing books about the early Savoys. Like her father, who died in a climbing accident, she loved skiing and walking in the mountains. She was a refreshingly rebellious royal, who prized her own liberty and despised her husband's deference towards his father.
"It seemed as though we were in China, with all that bowing," she remarked. She did actually visit China, her reception by Mao earning her the epithet of the "communist queen". e herself returned for a visit in 1988, after the government ruled that a widow could not be considered a consort and lifted the ban.
Most of Marie Jose's Savoy relatives have done little to add lustre to the family reputation, and her son, Prince Victor Emmanuel, has often been his own worst enemy when it came to pleading his case with Italian public opinion.
Marie Jose was an eccentric acquisition to the Savoys, and gave Italians a glimpse of an alternative monarchy with a human face. For all her commitment to public service, however, she was almost certainly better off ruling only for a month. Being queen, she once remarked, is so boring.
She is survived by four children, Maria Pia, Victor Emmanuel, Maria Gabriella and Maria Beatrice. Her husband died in 1983.
Princess Marie Jose Charlotte Henrietta Gabriella of Saxe-Coburg, former Queen of Italy: born 1906; died, January 2001