Many of the wives of French leaders have found a place in the history books: Queen Marie-Antoinette’s lavish spending contributed to the fall of the French monarchy in the late 18th century and Empress Josephine was divorced because she couldn’t give Napoleon an heir. In 1914, Prime Minister Joseph Caillaux’s wife Henriette killed the editor of the newspaper Le Figaro because he was a political threat to her husband.
If the Macrons become the next residents of the Elysee palace, Brigitte will join a list of colourful first ladies.
In the 1980s and 1990s, while Socialist president Francois Mitterrand led a double life with the mother of his illegitimate daughter Mazarine, his wife Danielle had a love life of her own. Bernadette Chirac suggested to a biographer that she silently put up with the many infidelities of her husband Jacques, while Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife Cecilia left him for her lover just six months after he took office in 2007. In 2014, President Francois Hollande’spartner Valerie Trierweiler published a bitter tell-all book on him after his liaison with actress Julie Gayet became public.
For Macron and his wife, the challenge if he takes office in May will be to not let their unusual personal history — the couple’s age difference is the same as Donald and Melania Trump, only in reverse — become a distraction. The next French president enters a post-Brexit vote, post-Trump-election world facing a domestic economy that has made an anaemic recovery with an unemployment rate still at 10 percent.
An outspoken 5-foot-4 inch former high school French literature and Latin teacher, Brigitte comes from a bourgeois family, named Trogneux, renowned for its chocolate factory in the Northern French town of Amiens. She was a drama coach at the private Jesuit school in the town in 1992 when she met 15-year-old Macron. He acted in her theatre pieces, with their association slowly developing into a romance that pushed her to divorce her husband and the father of her three children.
“We don’t have a classic family, that’s an undeniable reality”
Even after more than a decade-long marriage, their extraordinary union raises eyebrows and is bound to draw attention if and when the Elysee palace spotlights are turned on them.
Source: Independent
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