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Charlotte Casiraghi, the 35-year-old granddaughter of Princess Grace of Monaco, is hard to describe. Pauline Delassus of Paris Match magazine calls her “serious, studious, persevering, a competitor, discreet, smart and cultured”—terms not often associated with young royals.
But maybe that’s because Casiraghi has managed to parlay these traits into a multitude of part-time careers and identities that’s led to the creation of a fascinating life. A published author, magazine editor, film producer, model, equestrian, cofounder of a philosophical think tank, and front-row Fashion Week staple, Casiraghi also served as a muse to the late Karl Lagerfeld and is currently a spokesperson and ambassador for the House of Chanel.
Despite all those roles, one title that Casiraghi does not hold is princess. “I’m not a princess,” Casiraghi, who is 11th in line to the Monégasque throne, once told Vogue Paris. “My mother is, not me. I am the niece of a head of state. And with this status, I have some representational duties, nothing very constraining or very exceptional.”
This technicality has not stopped the press from dubbing Casiraghi the “Princess Philosopher” or covering her every public move. Paparazzi often catch her looking chic as she walks the streets of Paris with her children, Raphaël and Balthazar. Her marriage to producer Dimitri Rassam, son of actor and model Carole Bouquet, was the talk of summer 2019, with the bride wearing a couture Chanel gown and a Cartier necklace once owned by her famous grandmother.
While Monaco’s House of Grimaldi has often found itself in rather scandalous situations (including the current strange saga of Prince Albert and his wife, Princess Charlene), Casiraghi has managed to keep her poised head above the fray. This in large part may be due to the actions of her mother, Princess Caroline, who would raise her children far from the fast flash of Monaco.
Charlotte Marie Pomeline Casiraghi was born on August 3, 1986, to Princess Caroline of Monaco and the Italian financier Stefano Casiraghi at Princess Grace Hospital in Monaco. She was named after Princess Caroline’s beloved grandmother Princess Charlotte, Duchess of Valentinois. “She was a very free woman and an original. She was a nurse during the war, then ran [a rehabilitation centre for ex-convicts]. Totally unclassifiable,” Princess Caroline told Madame Figaro in 2020.
Although Princess Caroline had taken over the role of Monaco’s first lady after the tragic death of her mother, Princess Grace, in 1982, Charlotte and her brothers, Andrea and Pierre, were able to grow up in relative anonymity.
“Most of media view [Monaco’s ruling family] as a frivolous entertainment. They are not royals, they are not part of the Gotha—they have an old history but it’s such a small territory that there are not a lot of political and economic stakes,” Delassus says. “Most of the media finds more interest in the British royal family.”
Sadly, another tragedy would thrust the young family back into the spotlight. On October 3, 1990, Stefano Casiraghi died when his speedboat flipped off the coast of Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat. According to Anne Edwards, author of The Grimaldis of Monaco, Princess Caroline was too devastated to tell her children. It was left to Prince Rainier to deliver the news to four-year-old Charlotte and her brothers.
“When I think about him, I remember his courage,” Casiraghi has said of her father. “Everything he did reminds me how brave he was. Losing someone, somehow, makes you take on that courage, to get over the anguish and fear that it provokes. I could say my dad gave me courage.”
A distraught Princess Caroline retreated for a time from her official duties.
“It was a privileged childhood in terms of wealth obviously. But Charlotte grew up in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, a village in Provence. She went to public school and had a low-key everyday life,” Delassus notes. “The death of her father was very traumatic for her and her brothers. Their mother wanted to protect them and raised them away from the Monaco uproar. That is partly how she became a very good student and got interested in horse riding. She was a serious teenager, never a party girl, even if most of her friends are part of jet set families.”
Casiraghi has always been close to her highly cultured, multilingual mother and claims to see much of her late grandmother Grace in her. “The relationship between a mother and a daughter is a complex thing, the mother occupies an all-powerful place, even when she is loving and tender,” Casiraghi told Princess Caroline during a joint interview in 2020. “When I watch films of my grandmother, I see in her your grace…your discipline, and your mystery too.”
Casiraghi appears to have inherited this sense of discipline, especially when it comes to her life as an equestrian. According to Hello Monaco, while celebrating her 12th birthday, she stood on the family balcony. Suddenly her aunt Princess Stéphanie (a tabloid staple for decades) rode under the balcony with her birthday present, a horse named Emilie. “Emilie,” Stephanie called up, “is ready to take you to the edge of the world!”
Her love of competitive show jumping has continued into adulthood. “They’ve had an important role in my life since childhood,” Casiraghi told Harper’s Bazaar in 2013. “They gave me the energy to move forward, the ability to fight, giving me a rare confidence and invaluable strength. They taught me great humility too.” She continued: “Competing in show jumping is a school of life…. And it’s one of the few Olympic sports where men and women are equal. Being a great horseman does not rely on physical strength but more on the mind and sensibility.”
While Casiraghi’s equestrian career has not potentially been as fruitful as say, Princess Anne or Zara Tindall, academically she has outshone many of her noble counterparts. She excelled in school, and in 2007 she completed a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the Sorbonne before cofounding Ever Manifesto, a magazine critical of the environmental impact of the fashion industry.
It was Casiraghi’s elegant beauty, so reminiscent of her mother and grandmother, which would thrust her onto Europe’s A-list. Long courted by luxury brands and high-fashion magazines, in 2010 she modeled of the Gucci Equestrian line. Campaigns for Saint Laurent and Montblanc followed, as did fashion spreads for Vogue Paris and Vanity Fair France.
But Casiraghi’s love life would make her the cover girl of every tabloid in Paris. In 2011, she began dating the Moroccan Canadian comedian Gad Elmaleh.
“When she started a romance with the very famous French comedian Gad Elmaleh and had her first son with him, the interest went mad,” Delassus says. “Paris Match did a lot of covers on them. Elmaleh is very popular and from a very different background. It was a good story of two worlds meeting, with all the social, cultural, lifestyle differences you can imagine. To summarize, a very good story for newspapers.”
The couple welcomed their son, Raphaël, in 2013 (who Elmaleh recently claimed “rides a horse like his mother and puts on a show like his father”). While they were together, Elmaleh was effusive in his praise of his partner:
“She’s a smart and very intelligent girl who has a lot of humor,” he said. “We share the same observations about life. When we are somewhere, she says, ‘Did you look at that? Did you observe that? What did you think about that?’ And then we have a good exchange…. She’s one of those people who always tells the truth. You can talk about philosophy and make stupid jokes with her. We go see art or she will go crazy over a TV show and laugh out loud with me about a stupid gag.”
However, according to People, the focus on their careers—which included an attempt to break into the American entertainment industry for Elmaleh—meant the two were often apart.
They split in 2015. That same year, Casiraghi moved to establish herself as a serious player in the world of philosophy when she started the think tank Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco with her philosophy professor Robert Maggiori. The organization hosts talks and events with noted thinkers. It also works with schools in Monaco to promote the study of philosophy.
She and Maggiori published Archipel Des Passions in 2018, a book of conversations between teacher and pupil about the meaning of life.
“I noted that it made smile a lot of people,” Delassus says of Casiraghi’s forays into the philosophical space. “Partly because some think, in a sexist way of thinking, that a young, beautiful, and rich woman from Monaco simply cannot also be intelligent. Also, because philosophy in a place like Monaco, a casinos and tax system paradise, is strange and contradictory, to say the least, even absurd for some.”
In 2018, Casiraghi announced her engagement to Dimitri Rassam, who proposed while they were on a ski trip with Princess Caroline. When Prince Albert was asked if his family members asked him for permission to marry, he revealed the family’s dynamics in Albert de Monaco: L’homme et le prince. “It’s a little more relaxed. I mean they did, the boys. They talked to me about it before. Charlotte’s a little more independent. I’m used to independent women in our family, so it’s okay.”
Casiraghi’s independence has stretched into her role as ambassador for Chanel, which was announced in December 2020. “It’s almost as if I was born with Chanel, I think of photos of my mom when she was pregnant with me…wearing Chanel,” she said in a video announcement.
Determined to make more of the role, Casiraghi has organized literary salons at Chanel’s Rue Cambon headquarters, where female actors and writers will discuss their works and philosophies. She also starred in Chanel’s short film In the Library With Charlotte Casiraghi, where she discusses her love of Anne Dufourmantelle, Michel de Montaigne, Emily Dickinson, and others.
“I want to buy everything, to take as many books as I can carry. And I can never decide which book I’m going to read, so I take more and more,” Charlotte explains in the film. “I never feel guilty about it because I tell myself it’s not so bad to be addicted to books.”
Despite these sincere intellectual pursuits, there is an inherent contradiction in a feminist environmentalist thinker continuing to work with massive global corporate brands. “A big contradiction remains in my view: being a luxury brands’ Egeria and wanting to be a philosophical figure. In other words: taking money from capitalist companies and writing and talking about ascetic and metaphysical ideas,” Delassus says.
Perhaps in an effort to not have to answer these questions, Casiraghi doesn’t often speak to the press. “Sometimes she goes on TV, mostly in a serious and successful talk show on the public channel France 5, to promote Les Rencontres Philosophiques de Monaco,” Delassus says. “She despises tabloids…and she is never on social media.”
“We all have suffered the effects of malicious words or judgements,” she told writer Massimo Gramellini in 2019. “Sometimes people may criticize the way you look, or even your family, things that have nothing to do with our intrinsic values. I have been there. I have listened to hard words about me. But you have to put some distance.”
Casiraghi holds no official position in Monaco, although she is frequently seen at events like National Day and the Rose Ball. “I believe that we are all imprisoned in prejudices, projections, determinations, stories which precede us,” she told Madame Figaro in 2020. “What is interesting is to seek to escape the law, the rule, the lineage, what is planned and assigned. I have a memory to honor, a transmission to respect, but it is essential to knit things differently, to be surprised, to choose your life.”
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