Ranavalona III
Ranavalona III was the last sovereign of Madagascar, crowned at twenty-two as the French were bombarding her coast and deposed by them fourteen years later. She was born Razafindrahety in 1861, a great-niece of the first Ranavalona, and was chosen for the throne in 1883 by the prime minister Rainilaiarivony, who had married her two predecessors and now married her, and who governed in fact while the queen reigned in form. The kingdom she inherited was the Merina state, Protestant since 1869, with a written constitution, a cabinet, mission schools and a small European-trained army, and it had spent twenty years playing Britain against France. Britain gave up the game in 1890, recognising a French protectorate in exchange for Zanzibar, and France sent an expedition in 1895 that lost more men to fever than to fighting and took Antananarivo in September after shelling the palace. The queen signed the protectorate treaty and kept her title. She lost the substance the following year, when a rising in the countryside - the Menalamba, the red shawls - gave General Gallieni his reason to abolish the monarchy. He executed two of her ministers by firing squad, exiled her prime minister, and in February 1897 put her on a ship for Réunion and then Algiers. She lived there for twenty years on a French pension, visited Paris, and was photographed in Parisian dress at the exhibitions. She petitioned repeatedly to go home and was refused every time. She died in Algiers in 1917 at fifty-five. Her remains were returned in 1938 and buried in the royal tombs at Antananarivo, where the French had already reinstalled the Merina kings as a tourist attraction, which is the kind of thing that happened to her.
- Lived: 1861 CE – 1917 CE
- Nationality: Malagasy
- Roles: queen, monarch, head_of_state
