Prince Michel of Bourbon-Parma – obituary

So far back into the mists of history does this go, that Duke Roberto’s first marriage, to Princess Maria Pia, daughter of King Ferdinando II of the Two Sicilies, was solemnised by Pope Pius IX in 1869. Michel’s father was a son of the second marriage, to Princess Maria Antonia, daughter of the one-time King Miguel of Portugal and the Algarve. Michel’s mother was Princess Margrethe, only daughter of Prince Valdemar of Denmark, third son of King Christian IX, known as the father-in-law of Europe.

There were three sons, Jacques, who died in a car accident in 1964, then Michel, and finally André, who died in 2011. The daughter Anne married King Michael of Romania and died in 2016, aged 92.

Until 1940 Michel was brought up in Paris, where his father worked for a propane gas tank manufacturer. But Prince René was also something of a gambler, who ran through not only his own inheritance but that of his wife. Michel’s mother brought him up to be sure to receive a cheque at the end of each month. They holidayed at Bernstorff Castle in Denmark, where Michel learnt Danish and sailing.

The family fled the Nazi invasion and moved to New York, where his mother worked in a hat shop on 57th Street. Michel attended the Jesuit school, Saint-Jean de Brébeuf in Montreal, but caused a disruption when his brother was being punished, was locked in a room and told he could not go home for Christmas. He escaped and ran away.

After a stint working in the East Asia Company, at the age of 17, he sought his parents’ approval to join the US Army. They were reluctant but he declared that he wanted to get Hitler out of France.

He presented himself at the French Embassy who told him they had no army in the USA but sent him to Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. He earned a commission as a 2nd lieutenant.

Known to speak fluent English, French and Dutch, he was immediately approached by a man (revealed to be William Casey who went on to be Director of the CIA) inviting him to join the OSS (Office of Strategic Services).

When told the pay would be double what he was then getting, he replied: “I’m in.” He was sent to Camp David for training in covert operations and later to Milton Hall near Peterborough.

He served in Operation Jedburgh, a clandestine action in which the SOE, OSS and other forces combined to drop agents into enemy occupied territory. These were hazardous missions from which many never returned. As the Prince later put it: “80 per cent of them just disappeared.”

His mission was to be part of a three-man sabotage team code-named Quinine, alongside the legendary (Sir) Tommy Macpherson and Sergeant O A Brown, radio operator, parachuted in to operate behind the German lines on June 8 1944, just after the Normandy landings – specifically to prevent the German Das Reich Armoured Division reaching Normandy.

His activities included planting bombs in cow pats and rigging lavatories to explode when they were flushed. He blew up a bridge and watched as the first tanks dropped into a deep river. His actions helped prevent Das Reich reaching German ground troops at Normandy. But he was forbidden to speak of these exploits until papers were released in 2002.

After the Liberation of France, Prince Michel was sent to French Indochina to find out what the Japanese were doing. On August 28 1945, he was dropped into the rice paddies of Hue by parachute in broad daylight, and immediately captured by Viet Minh independence fighters, who detained him until June 16 1946.

In one macabre scene, he and his fellow captives were lined up before a firing squad in a village. Prince Michel refused to have his eyes bandaged or to smoke a last cigarette. When the order to fire was given, the Viet Minh had only blanks. All survived, as villagers howled with laughter. They were moved through dense jungle, bound together by strips of bamboo.

They subsisted on a bowl of rice with boiled leaves twice a day. At one time they escaped but were recaptured. Women and children took turns beating them with sticks and stoning them. Further captivity followed along with hunger, thirst, malnutrition and considerable weight loss, not to mention tropical diseases such as dysentery, amoebiasis and malaria.

A further escape took them into the jungle. Of the six, three were killed and another eaten by a tiger as he slept, only Michel and his friend, Paul Grall (alias Lebel), surviving to make it back to France after the French negotiated a ceasefire with the Viet Minh at the Geneva Conference of 1954. “That kind of experience changes you forever,” Prince Michel later explained.

He was appointed to the Légion d’honneur and awarded the Croix de Guerre (with three palms) and the Military Cross.

At the age of 20, he entered civilian life, serving as assistant manager in a hotel in New York for two years, then as a businessman, working variously for a company that created the Zodiac inflatable rubber boat and negotiating contracts between French enterprises and Iranian authorities for the Shah of Persia until the Shah was deposed in 1979.

He suffered from the allegation that he was selling arms to Iran, not helped by an impostor publishing a book under his name in 1978, titled Trafiquant sur Commande.

The prince went into motor racing, taking part in the Le Mans 24 Hours races of 1964 and 1966, his car failing to finish; but he came second in the 1964 Tour de France Automobile.

He was a spectator at the Monaco Grand Prix of 1967 and assisted the leader of the Italian team, Lorenzo Bandini, to escape from the burning wreckage of his 3 litre Ferrari when it crashed at 95 mph. (Bandini died later in hospital from his injuries.)

Perhaps understandably, after his earlier experiences, Prince Michel led a rather hedonistic later life. He lived partly in Paris, at a home in Versailles, later moving into the house of that great friend to European royalty, the industrialist Paul-Louis Weiller, in Neuilly, after Weiller’s death. He was also one of the select group who enjoyed holidays at Weiller’s villa in the South of France, La Reine Jeanne.

He first married, in Paris in 1951, Princess Yolande de Broglie-Revel, living with her in the Château de Montchevreuil in the Oise, and producing two sons and three daughters (two of the daughters predeceasing him).

He separated from his wife in 1966 and finally divorced her in 1999. He then lived with Princess Maria Pia, daughter of King Umberto II of Italy, who had been the wife of Prince Alexander of Yugoslavia.

They had a substantial house in Palm Beach, royalty being well feted in Palm Beach. Princess Maria Pia was the mother of two sets of twins, Dmitri and Michel, born in 1958, and Serge and Helen, born in 1967. He and Maria Pia were finally married in 2003. He also had a daughter, Amélie, by Laure Le Bourgeois, in 1977. He adopted her in 1997 and she later married Igor Bogdanoff, one of a pair of eccentric twins.

Prince Michel was a man of considerable courage, and as one of his relations put it: “He went through hell during the war, he was tortured very severely. Never once did he complain or tell us anything of his dreadful experiences. He was an angelic ‘father figure’ to so many in the family and we all adored him.”

He did relate his experiences, however, in two books, En Parachute (1949), and Un Prince dans la Tourmente (2010).

Prince Michel of Bourbon-Parma, born March 4 1926, died July 7 2018