President’s wife stars in a real life drama
Print Edition
ONCE his high school drama teacher, now wife of incoming French president Emmanuel Macron, 64-year-old Brigitte Macron stepped into the spotlight long before her husband was elected.
The 25-year age difference and the extraordinary way they met — he pursued her when he was her pupil — makes her the most talked-about French president’s partner since Nicolas Sarkozy married singer-model Carla Bruni nine years ago.
Even Madonna is a fan, writing on Instagram she said “no-one seems to care about their age difference nor insisted that Brigitte should ‘act her age’.”
Brigitte is her husband’s closest collaborator and has pledged to give her an official role.
She was once another man’s wife and a mother-of-three who taught French, Latin and drama.
Brigitte Trogneux was born on April 13, 1953, in Amiens in northern France, which is also Emmanuel Macron’s home town, into a prosperous family that owns a chocolate business.
In the early 1990s a confident 15-year-old acting, in a production of Milan Kundera’s “Jacques and his Master,” caught her eye. It was Emmanuel.
She quickly agreed when he asked her to help him work on a script and a remarkable relationship began.
Brigitte, who was then 39, recalls she was “totally captivated” by Emmanuel’s intelligence.
Two years later he made an audacious prediction.
“At the age of 17, Emmanuel said to me ‘whatever you do, I will marry you’,” Brigitte said.
Emmanuel was sent off to finish high school at an elite establishment in Paris, but he kept pursuing her and gradually won her over.
Brigitte left her husband Andre Louis Auziere, a banker, in 2006 and married Macron a year later. She moved to Paris where he continued his studies and she worked as a teacher.
“When I make up my mind about something, I do it,” she said.
“She didn’t love me for what I had, for the standing, the comfort or the security that I could give her. She gave up all of that for me,” Macron wrote in his campaign-launching book “Revolution.”
Known as “Bibi” to friends, Brigitte is described as warm, down-to-earth and positive by those who know her.
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