‘Her death is as saintly as her life’. Media representations of royal deathbeds in Belgium, 1850–1910

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the media representations of the deathbeds of Queen Louise-Marie (1850), King Leopold I (1865), Queen Marie-Henriette (1902) and King Leopold II (1909) of Belgium. Print and visual media made the dominant ideals of the ‘beautiful death’ and the ‘good death’ tangible and visible by representing the last moments of Belgian kings and queens. Whether these representations showed the royal family in a positive or a negative light depended on the degree of compliance between the final acts of the king/queen and the dominant deathbed paradigms. The historical process of mediatisation affected the public perception of these four royal deaths and changed considerably in form and scale as time passed. Romanticised illustrations and descriptions of the deathbeds of Louise-Marie and Leopold I in weekly French illustrated newsmagazines and Belgian dailies successfully projected the ideal of ‘the family on the throne’ for a mid-nineteenth century bourgeois readership. Regarding the Catholic model of the ‘good death’, the pictures and descriptions of the deathbed of Louise-Marie served as a modern version of devotional ars moriendi-literature. On the other hand, Leopold’s religious sentiments during his final moments became the object of discussion and conflicting interpretations. The remarkable gap between the idealised model of the beautiful death in the bosom of the family and the lack of family affection during the last moments of Marie-Henriette and Leopold II led to mediatised scandals against the background of a growing culture of yellow journalism in the early twentieth century.

KEYWORDS:

• Belgium
• royal deaths
• political culture
• media culture
• nineteenth century
• Catholicism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The ritual expressed a masonic world view which, although staunchly anticlerical, did accept the existence of a non-defined supreme being, and which believed in the immortality of the soul and the rewarding of the just (Tyssens, 2012).

2. The marriages of princesses Louise and Stephanie with relatives proved to be deeply unhappy. Louise left her husband, Prince Philippe, and ended her life in debt. Princess Stephanie’s husband, Archduke Rudolf, was found dead with his mistress in 1889.

3. When Leopold I died, only 55 per cent of the Belgians was able to read. At the time of Leopold II’s death, this percentage had grown to more than 80 per cent (Van den Dungen, 2005, p. 245).

4. In the 1890s, the acquisition of private telephones had become a necessity for Brussels editorial offices to directly publish the latest news (Van den Dungen, 2005, p. 156).

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Christoph De Spiegeleer

Christoph De Spiegeleer received his PhD in modern history from the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. He is currently active as Research Fellow of Liberas/Liberaal Archief in Ghent. His research interests relate to the history of the Belgian monarchy and modern funerary culture, with a particular focus on the connections between these subjects and political culture and national identity on a European level. His work on the Belgian monarchy, liberalism, socialism and funerary culture has appeared in journals such as Contemporary European History, Mortality, Death Studies and Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire.