November 16, 2023

The Crown season six, episode three, “Dis-Moi Oui,” deals with a famously tragic night in history: the death of Princess Diana. Over the course of an hour, Peter Morgan reimagines the final hours of the princess and Dodi Fayed in Paris as they are sieged by paparazzi and buckle under the weight of Diana’s superstardom. Everywhere they go, they are followed. At one point, they even need to leave the restaurant of the Ritz Paris because of all the attention they receive. Eventually, they choose to head back to Fayed’s apartment through the back door of the hotel in a spur-of-the-moment decision after Diana (kindly) rejects his proposal. The viewer knows what happens next: Their car, with an intoxicated driver at the wheel and tailed by paparazzi, crashes into a tunnel.

While the private conversations between Fayed and Diana are figments of imagination—and the possibility of an engagement proposal very much speculative—much of the episode closely mirrors the real, tragic evening.

In 2004, London’s Metropolitan Police launched Operation Paget, an official investigation into the death of Princess Diana and the many conspiracy theories that surrounded it. Dodi Fayed’s father, Mohamed, alleged a conspiracy to murder the couple, suggesting that the royal family “could not accept that an Egyptian Muslim could eventually be the stepfather of the future King of England,” according to the operation’s 871-page report in 2006. The police issued their findings as part of a British court inquest between 2007 and 2008. That jury concluded that Diana died unlawfully due to the “grossly negligent driving of the following vehicles [the paparazzi] and of the Mercedes driver, Henri Paul.” The elder Fayed accepted the verdict.

In the investigative process, they pieced a stark, sad timeline of the princess’s final night in Paris.

On August 30, 1997, the Princess of Wales and Dodi Fayed flew from Sardinia to Le Bourget airport outside Paris. They landed around 3:30 p.m., and paparazzi were waiting for them on the tarmac.

Philippe Dourneau, a driver for Dodi, picked up the couple as well as their bodyguard and drove them to the Fayed home of Villa Windsor in the 16th arrondissement. Their luggage, however, was dropped off at another Fayed apartment in rue Arsène Houssaye. After a short visit, Diana and Dodi left for the Ritz Paris, which Mohamed owned, and arrived at 4:30 p.m. They stayed in the hotel’s Imperial Suite.

At 7 p.m., they returned to the apartment on rue Arsène Houssaye. They stayed there until around 9:30 p.m., when they left to go to the restaurant Chef Benoît for dinner. Yet, they quickly changed their minds: “There are differing accounts of how difficult the paparazzi were on this journey,” the report found. “En route to the restaurant Dodi Al Fayed told Philippe Dourneau to abandon the plan to go to the Chez Benoît and to drive to the Ritz Hotel instead.”

The Ritz had not been expecting their arrival. “The arrival of the Princess of Wales and Dodi Al Fayed at the hotel did not go smoothly. Some paparazzi upset the couple with their intrusive behavior.” After initially going to one of the restaurants, they decided to have dinner instead in their suite “because of the attention in the restaurant,” Paul Handley-Greaves, the head of Mohamed’s security team, later recalled.

At 12:20 a.m., the two left the Ritz Paris with the intention of returning to the rue Arsène Houssaye apartment. They left via the rear exit in the rue Cambon, while Philippe Dourneau waited in a car in front of the main entrance, which had attracted a sizeable crowd. Instead, another driver, Henri Paul, escorted the couple into a Mercedes. Neither wore seatbelts. “Once the paparazzi realized that the couple had left by the rear exit they were quickly in pursuit,” says the report. “Indeed a small number of the paparazzi had been covering the rear exit in any event.” Paul crashed this car into a pillar while driving above the speed limit in the Pont d’Alma underpass, killing himself and Dodi Fayed at the scene. Diana and a bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, were taken to the hospital. The princess was pronounced dead at 4 a.m. local time. A toxicology report showed Paul had been drunk at the time of the accident.

While The Crown is a piece of historical fiction, its creators didn’t stray far from the actual timeline of Princess Diana’s death. In this case, it seems, no additional dramatization was needed.