The Frog Prince

One week later, I am still gobsmacked by the Paris Match reveal of Jordan Bardella’s romance with Maria-Carolina of Bourbon and Two Sicilies, a 22-year-old luxury influencer and disputed heir to a nonexistent throne. I’m not alone, it’s been the story of the week among media and political commentators who understand the stakes.

As observers rightly note, a Paris Match cover en couple is a crucial entry on the “he’s running” checklist. It’s second only to writing vainglorious policy books like the two that have already made a millionaire out of the 30-years-young president of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally.

If your next thought is, “Wait, there are two Sicilies?” then you are not a reader of the European presse people, which covers minor royals like they do reality stars in America. Instead of spray tans and Uggs, the old countries’ OG nepo babies mooch around in sashes and tiaras, striving to maintain their soft power as the world slowly reaches for the pitchforks and torches. Their real-world weight is mostly diplomatic and back page. They go to each other’s weddings and charity balls, occasionally taking up with commoners to keep it spicy—though usually they go the Grimaldi route and pick athletes or actors, not desperately thirsty far right politicians with unrestrained presidential ambition.

If you are not among the very online French, you may just be learning about Maria Carolina now. Her proper debut came not at 2019 Bal des Debutantes, though of course she was there. It came one year prior, when her mother Camilla, with incredible dance mom energy for a milieu that nominally values discretion, trotted Maria Carolina and little sister out for an episode of the softball national chat show, Ça commence aujourd’hui. It was part of a special series on “extraordinary families” that aired three days before the first nationwide gilet jaunes protests, which saw anywhere from a quarter to a half a million people take to the streets in fury over declining standards of living. The stars aligned and Maria Carolina became a meme.

Her blonde tresses gleaming, her posture ramrod straight, she and her sister were asked if they ever got into mischief when their parents weren’t around. Maria Carolina’s wooden answer was beamed from another time. She recounted hiding behind trees on the mean streets of Monte Carlo, jumping out to surprise family friends by saying “Boo!” Of course she became internet famous.

Marina Carolina was only 15 then, but subsequent appearances on red carpets and royal confidential-style shows have not shown evidence of great insight or intellectual heft.

The angle of the coverage is always the same: to gawk at a strangely stilted creature who lives a rarified life. You don’t need to spend much time down the Two Sicilies rabbit hole to learn that Camilla is the real star. She ate the “Crazy Life of a Modern Princess” episode of Bling!, racing into a Saint Tropez Monoprix in blinding white doubleknit looking to buy pasta “for 250,” before putting Maria Chiara through the paces for an upcoming piano recital at a diplomatic function.

All the lifestyle obsession naturally led Maria Carolina and her sister to social media, where they launched YouTube and TikTok accounts during confinement. Now Maria Carolina has a combined half a million followers across platforms. French media has gotten a lot of mileage in the past week off this particular post:

There she continues to limit her observations to gorgeous views, how much she loves fashion, the cleverness of luxury handbags, and how her life is just like any other modern woman’s who was schooled at home by a governess. This is somewhat incongruous with Bardella’s personal mythos of a tough come-up in the rough Seine Saint-Denis suburb, even if he actually went to private school. But love conquers all!

Private tutoring got Maria Carolina as far as fashion school in Monaco and correspondence courses at Harvard. Surely it wasn’t impending royal duties that kept her from attending in person. Despite the family’s relentless brandishing of their HRH, the Two Sicilies, a defunct principality encompassing Naples and Sicily, hasn’t been a thing since 1861. Should the tiny kingdom defy spectacular odds and relaunch itself, the Spanish branch of the family’s claim is stronger anyway—or so say the highly engaged experts at r/monarchists.

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“Most of the nobility are dumb as bricks,” Cassandre said to me the other night, when I confessed how obsessed I was with this strangely composed new couple. She should know: both sides of her family have “de” in their surnames, and she went to all the white-gloved rallyes, or cotillions, among titled families when she was an eligible teen in Western Paris.

Those with serious fortunes usually marry into them, as was the case for the Bourbon and Two Sicilies, whose estimated €600 million nut comes from Camilla’s father’s aerospace and arms manufacturing company. We know this thanks to The Paradise Papers, which revealed in 2017 that much of the family wealth resides in trusts in Mauritius and Seychelles. They are already legal residents of Monaco, one of the original European tax havens, but we shouldn’t expect them to resist fiscal optimizationmaxxing. It’s legal, but not exactly on message for the potential future bride of a politician whose party has historically skewed heavily lumpen populist.

The Match story is a master class in normalization via unctuous fawning, portraying Bardella as a gallant young swain, nothing like the literal jackbooted thugs that make up the most notorious part of his base. “On their outing, their connection is undeniable. He puts an arm around her waist, she fixes her hair, ruffled by the April wind. They reach for the other’s hand but separate as soon as a passerby crosses their path. Their love is well mannered.”

Whoever is running PR for Bardella is making a risky bet; so far, the fairytale romance angle hasn’t entirely won the day. The lovebirds’ outing in Corsica was so obviously staged it only took a few days before Bardella admitted to it, protesting to the presenter Léa Salamé on France 2 the other night that, “It’s very hard to maintain your private life while doing politics at the level I’m operating at.” So, the couple decided “to stop hiding.” There is no proof they themselves hired the photographer whose pictures ended up on the cover, but the photo credit was a pseudonym whose work had never appeared in the tabloid weekly, and the pictures were as naturalistic as Angelina Jolie’s early aughts baby stroller sorties in full hair and makeup. I worked at Us Weekly back then, and in 2003, everyone on staff respected her game. It doesn’t fool anyone anymore.

The follow-on coverage across media outlets owned by the far-right billionaire Vincent Bolloré was treacly and uniform enough for proper skewerings like the one Yann Barthès put together on his nighttime chat show Quotidien. “They’re happy!” he said of the far right talking heads. “They’re not talking about Blacks and Arabs anymore! They’re talking about love!”

Bardella has been dogged for years by rumors that he plays for the other team—you already know this if you read our helpful primer. A party whose militant trenches are populated by convicted gay bashers is not going to follow un sale pédé into the breach, even if only an alleged one. Just ask Florian Philippot, Marine Le Pen’s previous pet poodle, who is openly gay. (That is, if you can find him. He hasn’t held elective office for years and has all but disappeared.)

Bardella has made good use in the past of strategic love matches, having been coupled previously with a Le Pen family member, and the daughter of a former leader of the now-disbanded paramilitary fascist group GUD. This latest turn towards the gilding and carriages set has people asking what constituency he’s trying to mop up now.

French aristos are not a monolith, but they tend to sit on the tradcath section of the spectrum, with a sprinkling of restorationists and old-world kooks. In the first round of an election, this constituency might go to someone more refined, like Eric Zemmour or Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, even if in the end, they’d probably show up for the RN anyway.

Though what the RN is now, exactly, is in flux. Marine Le Pen’s decades-long effort to normalize the party is working so well, she finally got a sit-down the other night with Bernard Arnault, owner of Paris Match. He used to have a public red line on platforming the RN; clearly not anymore! The meeting was part of a plutocrat chit chat with CEOs from other leading national companies like Total Energies, Renault and Accor. It is not only American billionaires who bend the knee.

Le Pen and the party are dancing as fast as they can as she awaits her likely ineligibility to run in 2027 from criminal fraud and corruption convictions. She and Bardella, who uses the first person more and more when discussing the RN, are ditching the party’s historic protectionism for a right-wing liberalism. That’s already starting to bother the RN faithful, who have long held that elites were “tous pourris,” or all rotten. (Léa Salame dinged Bardella with the same logic the other night, asking him if, with his Paris Match debut, “the RN is just like the others.”)

They smell their chance now, with Bardella still at the top of the polls—even early frontrunners often crater, even if ratings for his spot with Salamé were in the tank.

Right on cue, Mediapart reports he’s hired as a “special counsellor” François Durvye, who just gave up stewardship of Otium Capital, an investment fund owned by another far-right billionaire, Pierre-Edouard Stérin. Durvye’s unstudied, move fast and break things approach to business has left Otium in bad shape. But at least he speaks the language of high finance. Before France’s plutocrats jump on board, a coherent economic plan will presumably be required from the party for the first time in its history. Bardella’s policy skills are as paper-thin as his resumé. Durvye has his job cut out for him.

If the various diverging interests making up Bardella’s expanding support base seem as impossible to reconcile as the idea of his new girlfriend setting a foot in the Seine-Saint-Denis of his youth, here’s Paris Match doing its best to weave it all together:

“In reality, beyond their individual selves, there is what they incarnate: he, emergence; she, long memory. He, rupture; she, continuity. In French tradition, these oppositions are never absolute. They dialogue, exchange, respond. After all, aren’t monarchy, Empire and Republic all parts of the same national narrative, forever in tension between heritage and conquest?”

Democracy and monarchy, I mean, really, what’s the difference?

Nathalie NAFO 🌹🐭 🇫🇷🇪🇺🇺🇦@SouriceauParis

🛑Certains diront que c’est de l’IA 🤫🤣😇 Vidéo +son 😂🤣👇 #Bardella #RN #MLP 🤡🤡🤡

9:19 PM · Apr 17, 2026 · 163K Views

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(Wait til the end for the surprise cameo.)