It was during her traditional New Year’s speech that the Queen of Denmark, Margrethe II, announced on Sunday, December 31, that she would abdicate. “On January 14, 2024, fifty-two years after succeeding my beloved father, I will step down as Queen of Denmark. I will leave the throne to my son, Crown Prince Frederik,” she said during her televised vows.
Unifying and popular, the sovereign, widowed since 2018, had undergone major back surgery in February which prevented her from appearing in public until April. “The operation (…) gave rise to reflections on the future, on the question of whether it was time to transfer responsibilities to the next generation,” confided the queen, 83 years old.
On the throne since the death of her father Frederik IX on January 14, 1972, she was the first queen of Denmark ? Margrethe I was only officially regent in the Middle Ages (1375-1412). Margareth II, nicknamed “Daisy”, could never have become crowned because the Constitution prohibited, until 1953, the throne being occupied by a woman. To the detriment of his uncle Knud and his son, the law was then changed by referendum, under pressure from Danish governments concerned with modernity.
The last queen of Europe
This polyglot and French-speaking intellectual – she studied at Cambridge and the Sorbonne – contributed to gradually modernizing the monarchy. On the death of her distant cousin Elizabeth II, Margrethe became the only queen to reign in Europe. More than 80 percent of Danes identify as monarchists, and they turned out in their thousands to celebrate his jubilee of fifty years of rule last year.
“Many of us have never known another monarch. Queen Margrethe is the very embodiment of Denmark and, over the years, she has put into words and feelings what we are as a people and as a nation,” responded Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, in a press release.
The basis of her popularity is that “the queen is not at all political, she unites the nation instead of dividing it,” historian Lars Hovebakke Sorensen explained to Agence France-Presse during the celebrations. of her fifty years of reign in 2022. “She managed to be a queen who unified the Danish nation through many changes: globalization, the advent of a multicultural state, economic crises (…) and the pandemic of Covid-19,” he explained.
Translator of Simone de Beauvoir
Costume designer and scenographer, the queen, born in Copenhagen on April 16, 1940, regularly goes in the summer to the Lot, to the Château de Cayx. The sovereign bought it in 1975 with her husband, who died in 2018, Prince Henrik, Henri de Laborde de Monpezat, a noble diplomat born French and originally from this region.
She had also tried her hand at translation, under a pseudonym and in collaboration with her husband, by translating, in 1981, a novel by Simone de Beauvoir, All Men Are Mortal.
But it is especially in drawing and painting that she stands out. Margrethe has illustrated numerous literary works, such as the 2002 reissue of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. His paintings have been exhibited in prestigious museums and galleries, in Denmark and other countries.
