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Always there, at his side, in every photo, at every occasion. She's called "the indispensable other half," deeply involved in his career and credited with inspiring his run for the presidency.
Brigitte Trogneux was the first person that her husband, Emmanuel Macron, the front runner in France’s presidential election, thanked after he won the first round. He called her to the stage, they embrased and kissed and he declared: ”To Brigitte, always present and even more, without whom I wouldn’t be me,” he said as his supporters shouted her name: “Brigitte! Brigitte!”
“Emmanuel Macron wouldn’t have been able to embark on this adventure without her,” Marc Ferracci, a campaign adviser and a witness at the couple’s 2007 wedding, told The Independent. “Her presence is essential for him.”
He's already announced that if elected, he will create for her both a formal governmental role and the official status of First Lady, which doesn’t exist in the country’s constitution. “She is not going to be behind or hidden or become a tweet," he said. "She will be next to me because she has always been next to me.”
Twenty four years his senior, outspoken, slender, blonde and tanned, she's chic and glamorous, frequently present in the front row of fashion shows and pictured in stylish French magazines. “Not for a second does she say, 'I cannot wear short skirts, ultra-high heels, sleeveless dresses, leather trousers,'" the newspaper L'Express wrote. "She dares everything.”
“A menopausal Barbie,” sniff her detractors - mainly because she's 64 to his 39, the same age difference as that of President Donald Trump and his wife, Melania. The difference, of course, is that when a man has a younger wife, it appears to be an advantage while the reverse, with such large age difference, lays them open to insults, jokes, mistrust, and criticism.
”Oh, he came with his mom?”
“But, she's too old for him, right?”
“It's a little weird, this relationship, don’t you think?”
“What does he see in her?”
“He must be gay”
“No man can desire an older woman; that doesn’t happen”
“That's it, he must be homo. There can be no other explanation.”
These are comments frequently heard among the public, the media and especially in social media, recently published by Elle magazine in an article denouncing French misogyny emerging from dark corners about the atypical potential presidential couple.
They also call her "cougar" and him "chouchou" which means teacher's pet.
“This visibly frightening societal abnormality of a younger man with an older woman happens while for millennia the opposite seems to thrill the whole Earth," Elle ponders. "Are we going to have to endure this macho, nerdy and rancid humor for a long time?”
Very probably. The result of the election “will propel this 64-year-old teacher of French and Latin, three-time mother and seven-time grandmother, to the post of First Lady of France,” reported by MidiLibre.
The unconventional beginning of their love story, the age difference, but mostly the closeness of their relationship fascinates the French and the world.
Described as omnipresent in his life and his campaign, albeit discreetly, Brigitte Macron, the youngest of six children, was born on April 13, 1953, in the northern French town of Amiens in a bourgeois family of well-known chocolate makers.
They met in 1992 when Macron was 15 and a student at a private Jesuit school. Brigitte Auziere was his 40-year-old, married literature teacher and the person who ran the theater club in which he was an avid participant.
The romance blossomed as they worked together in school plays and she coached him. “Writing brought us together,” she has explained. “It unleashed an incredible closeness and I was totally charmed by his intelligence. He wasn’t like the others. Nobody will ever know at what moment our story became a love story. That belongs to us. That is our secret.”
When he told his parents about his feelings for Brigitte, they weren't thrilled. They asked them to wait until he was 18 and sent him to finish his studies in Paris. What he told her before leaving is now part of the legend: “You won’t get rid of me. Whatever you do, I will marry you.”
Macron has said that their relationship became official when he turned 18, although they kept in touch through those years. “We’d call each other all the time and spend hours on the phone,” she told Paris Match. “Bit by bit, he defeated all my resistance, in an amazing way, with patience.”
In 2006 she got her divorce and they married the year after. By then she had moved to Paris, where she took a job teaching. They have been together since then.
At their wedding, Macron thanked her children for accepting their relationship, adding that they were “not a normal couple – but a couple that exists.”
Their love story and age difference fascinate many people in social networks all around the world. The Chinese - in “a country more used to seeing older men courting young women,” writes Le Figaro - are particularly taken with the romantic side. “The comment 'This man married a teacher who is 25-year his senior, became a grandfather at 30 and now makes Europe crazy’ was read more than nine million times over Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter.”
"This man is so beautiful and extraordinary," another viral entry read. "In China, a man would not want a woman older than him, but when men get rich, they like to find women very young.”
Anna Fulda, a biographer of incoming president Macron told the Financial Times: "He wants to give the idea that if he was able to seduce a woman 24 years his senior and a mother of three children, in a small provincial town, without shame, he can conquer France in the same way."
And he did.
