Charlotte, Grand Duchess of Luxembourg
Charlotte was grand duchess of Luxembourg from January 1919 to November 1964, forty-five years, the sister who took the throne when her elder sister Marie-Adélaïde was made to abdicate for having been too friendly to the Germans in the first war. She kept it through the second by leaving. That was the opposite choice from the Danish and Belgian kings' and the one the country has since agreed was right. The accession was a referendum. The Chamber of Deputies and the streets wanted a republic in January 1919, the French wanted the country annexed to Belgium. The vote of September 1919 gave the monarchy under Charlotte seventy-eight per cent and an economic union with France, which France declined and Belgium accepted in 1921. The country kept its independence because the young grand duchess, who was twenty-three, was liked and her sister had not been. She married Felix of Bourbon-Parma the same year and had six children. She reigned through the interwar years of the steel and the Arbed company that was the whole economy. On 10 May 1940, when the Germans crossed the border at dawn, she left with the government by car for France, then Portugal, then London and Montreal. From there she broadcast to the country on the BBC and told Roosevelt, whom she visited, that the country existed, which the Germans, who annexed it in 1942 and conscripted its young men, said it did not. The general strike of September 1942 against the conscription was put down by the execution of twenty-one strikers. She came home on 14 April 1945 to a country that had been the Bulge's battlefield and that met her in the streets. The reign after the war was the one in which the country became the Europe it houses. There were Benelux in 1944, NATO in 1949, the coal and steel community whose High Authority sat in the city from 1952, and the European court and the investment bank, all of which her prime ministers, Dupong, Bech and Werner, did and she signed. She abdicated on 12 November 1964 in favour of her son Jean, at sixty-eight. She was the first sovereign of the house to leave the throne by choice. She lived twenty years at Fischbach. She died in July 1985 at eighty-nine. Her statue stands in the Place Clairefontaine in the capital. That is not a thing the country does for many people.
- Lived: 1896 CE – 1985 CE
- Nationality: Luxembourgish
- Roles: grand duchess, monarch
