Some of Brigitte’s darkness appears to be self-inflicted
AS the succession race for the French presidency looms, Brigitte Macron has delivered her verdict on her decade as France’s premier WAG.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the sustained online attacks she has endured, the 73-year-old French first lady has little positive to say about her Élysée Palace era, telling a newspaper that it exposed her to ‘the darkness of the world, stupidity, cruelty’, adding: ‘I am sometimes sad in a way I have never been before…
‘Before I had a normal life, children, a job, ups and downs, like everyone else.
‘Here, these ten years have passed so quickly… They have been so intense.’
Her words are an indictment of the toll of modern political life, not just on leaders but their loved ones – something that must concern everyone who cares about democracy.
Like Michelle Obama, Brigitte
Crazy theories of far-right inf luencers
Macron has had to put up with painful conspiracy theories about being a transwoman and disgusting online abuse about her sexuality.
Neither her three grown-up children, her two marriages or verifiable accounts from her childhood could silence the crazy theories of far-right influencers such as Candace Owens who trade humiliation for profit.
The Macrons are pursuing a defamation case against Owens in the US, which is their right, although some might say that indifference, or taking a leaf out of the Obamas’ ‘when they go low, we go high’ playbook, might be a better tactic.
The couple’s 24-year age gap has also been cruelly exploited by rivals with Brigitte regularly lampooned as her dapper-looking spouse’s granny or mother.
Unfortunately for Brigitte, the Macrons’ Summer/Autumn relationship is a greyer area than the gender insults which, unless you have plunged head-first down a conspiracy rabbit hole, is, morally speaking, black and white. Her relationship with Macron can be sugar-coated all we like but the truth is it casts her as a more problematic figure than the average political wife. Brigitte was a 39-yearold married mother-of-three when she first laid eyes on the precocious schoolboy.
At 15, Macron’s reputation as an intellectually gifted teenager preceded him and, according to his besotted teacher Brigitte, all his teachers were ‘buzzing’ about him.
Brigitte was his drama teacher and, in her version, fell under the spell of ‘his exceptional intelligence’ and his way of thinking, unlike anything she had encountered ever before.
Macron’s parents told Anne Fulda, author of Emmanuel Macron: A Perfect Young Man, that they believed he was dating his classmate Laurence – Brigitte’s daughter – until the truth came out through a family friend.
Shocked at the illicit affair, they moved him to a prestigious boarding school in Paris and asked Brigitte not to see him again until he was an adult.
Brigitte responded that she couldn’t ‘promise anything’. A few years ago, she told Paris Match that a determined Macron vowed to marry her when he was just 17 years old, promising to come back and find her after he was sent to Paris.
Even in laissez-faire France, their unconventional relationship raised eyebrows lasting far beyond their marriage in 2007 when Emmanuel was 29 and Brigitte 54 years old.
True, had Brigitte been a male teacher and he a teenage girl, there would have been next to no scandal, so Brigitte was a victim of double standards.
But she also benefited from society’s ignorance about abusive relationships and the vulnerability of children.
It’s now accepted that irrespective of gender, romances where there is an imbalance of power, like between teachers and pupils or adults and children, are an abuse of trust, whereas back in the day, they were more likely to be shrugged off as weird or hilarious.
The Macrons’ long marriage proves that their relationship was no opportunistic ‘wham, bam, thank you mam, or very young man’ affair. Yet, unfortunately for them, cultural intolerance of grooming erases its redemptive effect.
The marriage’s success was also called into question when Brigitte was caught smacking her husband across the face as he alighted his flight in Hanoi at the start of their tour of Southeast Asia.
Brigitte says that the experience of public life has made her cynical, admitting that ‘sometimes I find it hard to see the blue sky, I have moments of pessimism that I didn’t have before’.
With the turmoil and political extremism in the world coupled with her husband’s lame-duck presidency, her dejection is understandable.
Yet even if Brigitte finds it hard to see them, there are blue skies amid the dark clouds of political unrest. And many of them spring from an enhanced awareness of gender-based violence in France thanks to the Gisèle Pelicot case, and of paedophilia courtesy of the international ‘Epstein class’.
But while Brigitte welcomed
Must wonder if she’d be punished today
these advances, for her personally, some of the reforms like the safeguarding measures for children must seem like a double-edged sword. It would hardly be a surprise if, for instance, in her darker moments, she has wondered if she would be punished today as a teacher if romance blossomed between her and a student. We will probably never know if she has a guilty conscience about the past or if she justifies it as an extraordinary coup de foudre that she was powerless to resist. Whatever is the case, it’s the tension between her past and her prominent life today campaigning on education and youth that casts a cloud on her character. It forces the conclusion that while by her own account, she has suffered intensely over the course of her husband’s presidency, she brought some of it upon herself.