Brigitte Macron

Brigitte Macron
Macron in 2023
Spouse of the President of France
Current
Assumed role 14 May 2017
President	Emmanuel Macron
Preceded by	Valérie Trierweiler (2014)
Personal details
Born	Brigitte Marie-Claude Trogneux (1953-04-13) 13 April 1953 (age 71) Amiens, France
Spouses	André-Louis Auzière ​ ​ (m. 1974; div. 2006)​ Emmanuel Macron ​ (m. 2007)​
Children	3, including Laurence Auzière-Jourdan
Occupation	Teacher (formerly)

Brigitte Macron, born Brigitte Trogneux onApril 13, 1953in Amiens , is the wife of Emmanuel Macron , President of the French Republic sinceMay 14, 2017. A retired literature professor, she has been president of the Hospital Foundation since 2019.

Biography

Family

Brigitte Marie-Claude Trogneux comes from a family of Amiens chocolatiers renowned for their macarons, since the creation of the Trogneux company in 1872.

She is the daughter of Jean Trogneux (1909-1994) and his wife Simone Pujol (1913-1998). The couple has six children, of whom Brigitte Trogneux is the youngest.

Raised in a Catholic environment, she attended the private Sacré-Cœur high school in Amiens, run by nuns.

As an adult, she defines herself as “Catholic, non-practicing believer”.

She was 8 years old when her sister Maryvonne Trogneux died in a car accident with her husband in 1961.

Her older brother, Jean-Claude Trogneux, manager of the Trogneux chocolate factory, died in 2018, at age 85.

Another of her sisters, Monique Trogneux, has been the wife of Jean-Claude Gueudet since 1963. The latter, a member of the Gueudet family, is one of the largest car dealerships in the country. Challenges magazine ranks him in the top 500 of the greatest fortunes in France.

Her two other brothers and sisters are Jean-Michel and Anne-Marie Trogneux.

Heritage

Brigitte Macron owns a house in Le Touquet, estimated at 1.4 million euros.

Near this house, Brigitte Macron has commercial premises which she rents to a real estate agency and a ready-to- wear boutique. She inherited these assets from her father.

First marriage

On June 22, 1974, Brigitte Trogneux married André-Louis Auzière  (1951-2019) at Touquet-Paris-Plage . Born in Éséka in Cameroon, André-Louis Auzière is a banker  and is the son of the high official Louis Auzière, colonial administrator of French Cameroon, and Renée Costes. The couple has three children: Sébastien Auzière (1975), statistical engineer, graduate of the National School of Statistics and Information Analysis, Laurence Auzière (1977), cardiologist, and Tiphaine Auzière (1984), lawyer. The couple separated when Brigitte Macron met Emmanuel Macron.

According to the biography He had just turned seventeen by the journalist Sylvie Bommel, relating the fact that André-Louis Auzière refused to attend his mother's funeral to avoid seeing his former wife, the separation was conflictual. The divorce was officially pronounced onJanuary 26, 2006. She also describes a particularly discreet man. After the media coverage of the couple Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron, André-Louis Auzière was contacted but refused any interview. He died on December 24, 2019 at the age of 68.

Brigitte Macron is a grandmother of seven grandchildren.

Professional career

Brigitte Trogneux obtained a baccalaureate with honors in 1972, at the age of 19, at the Sacré-Cœur high school in Amiens. She then obtained a master's degree in letters and devoted a final dissertation to “courtly love”.

In the early 1980s, for two years, she worked as a press officer at the Nord -Pas-de-Calais Chamber of Commerce. In 1984, following the transfer of André-Louis Auzière, the family moved to Truchtersheim ( Bas-Rhin ). After the birth of her third child, in 1986 she took the CAPES in classical letters. From 1986 to 1991, she taught French and Latin at the Lucie Berger college in Strasbourg, a private Protestant establishment. At the same time, she became involved in community and political life. She appeared on an unlabeled list, “Tuchtersheim tomorrow”, in the 1989 municipal elections in Truchtersheim, but was not elected. The family then left the region to settle in Amiens. She teaches French and Latin at the private Jesuit high school La Providence. In 2007, she left to teach in Paris at the private Jesuit high school Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague, commonly called Franklin.

She was a French teacher for the children of Bernard Arnault.

In September 2015, Brigitte Auzière-Macron stopped teaching to devote herself to the career of Emmanuel Macron, and was placed on leave from National Education.

Meeting with Emmanuel Macron

During the 1992-1993 school year, she led a theater workshop at the Providence high school. Among her students, she noticed Emmanuel Macron , then aged 15 and a second year student in the same class as her daughter Laurence Auzière. An end-of-year theater performance is organized where Emmanuel Macron plays a scarecrow in the adaptation of the collection of plays La Comédie du langue, by Jean Tardieu. About their first meeting, she declared having been “totally captivated by the intelligence of this boy”. The following school year, she worked again together with Emmanuel Macron, who was in first grade, to rewrite the play The Art of Comedy by Eduardo De Filippo , in which her eldest daughter Laurence Auzière also participated. At Paris Match, Brigitte Macron declared a posteriori that “writing brought us together every Friday and triggered an incredible closeness”. From then on, they begin a romantic relationship.

The age difference (of more than twenty-four years) between the two lovers caused a scandal in the Trogneux family, especially since their relationship could fall under article 227-27 of the Penal Code , which enshrines the offense of sexual assault of a minor, and which now provides that a teacher who has sexual relations with a minor student aged over 15 years faces up to three years in prison. Their relationship continued discreetly in Paris, where Emmanuel Macron entered final year, then literary preparatory classes at the Henri-IV high school.

THEOctober 20, 2007, Brigitte marries Emmanuel Macron at Touquet-Paris-Plage, where she owns a house. Her new husband, then a financial inspector, left the civil service to join the Rothschild bank.

Public life of the Macron couple

In 2012, Emmanuel Macron entered politics. The couple then attracted the attention of the media, who saw in the interest aroused by their age difference proof of the evolution of opinion on the matter.

On June 2, 2015, on the occasion of the visit of King Felipe VI of Spain and his wife Letizia Ortiz, Brigitte Macron posed for the first time on the steps of the Élysée Palace at his side.

^{With her younger daughter Tiphaine Auzière} — substitute for Thibault Guilluy, candidate of La République en Marche in the 4th constituency of Pas-de-Calais in the 2017 legislative elections — Brigitte Macron is involved in her husband's 2017 presidential campaign. At first omnipresent, it then takes a back seat while continuing to play an important role with the candidate.

Staging in Paris Match

During the spring of 2016, businessman Xavier Niel recommended Mimi Marchand , director of the Bestimage photo agency working in partnership with Paris Match, to Brigitte Macron; she subsequently became an informal advisor to the Macron couple.

In April 2016, the Macron couple made the front page of the weekly, to which they granted private photos and an exclusive interview. Afterwards, they consider this overexposure as a mistake and deny that there was a deliberate mediatization strategy on their part. In comparison with other candidates, the couple's photos regularly appeared on the cover of Paris Match during the 2017 electoral campaign, i.e. six covers in one year, making it possible to promote consensual marital and family values. Likewise, according to journalist Nathalie Funès, this communication strategy is intended to anchor the candidate in marital normality in the mind of the general public, while rumors about the alleged homosexuality of Emmanuel Macron could have constituted an obstacle to his election.

After Emmanuel Macron's victory, Mimi Marchand continues to advise Brigitte Macron at the Élysée and only Best Image photographers are authorized to take photos of the couple. According to Le Figaro, the contours of Michèle Marchand's action around the presidential couple remain vague, between communication and photojournalism.

According to Mediapart, telephone tapping reveals a discussion between the two women in which Brigitte Macron criticizes the justice system concerning the legal cases targeting Nicolas Sarkozy and offers him the services of a bodyguard  . Following this revelation, Brigitte Macron's entourage evoked a “political overinterpretation” of a “banal conversation”. At the end of Emmanuel Macron's first presidential term, Michèle Marchand lost exclusivity on the couple's reports to the benefit of the Abaca Press agency.

Election campaigns

During the 2017 presidential campaign, Brigitte Macron played a particularly active and versatile role within the En Marche! , without an assigned function within the political party's organizational chart. According to the book Emmanuel Macron, en marche vers l'Élysée, published in 2016 by the journalist Nicolas Prissette, she would have encouraged Emmanuel Macron to launch into this presidential election by declaring: “He must go in 2017. Because 'in 2022, his problem will be my face'. For Le Vif/L'Express, Brigitte Macron denies having made these comments. On the eve of the presidential elections in May 2017, the parody information site SecretNews relays that Brigitte Macron is lying about her age and that she was born on April 13, 1943 and not April 13, 1953, based on a supposedly revealed document by WikiLeaks. In October 2018, the “entertainment” site Ici L’Info knowingly relayed this parody by presenting it as information. Judging this information to be absurd, Brigitte Macron did not file a complaint.^[relevant?]

During the 2022 presidential campaign, Brigitte Macron is less omnipresent but enjoys growing popularity if we judge by the regular increase in letters addressed to her.

Wife of the President of the Republic

On May 7, 2017, Emmanuel Macron was elected President of the Republic. Brigitte Macron then became the “First Lady of France” on the day of her husband’s inauguration, onMay 14, 2017 and set up his office in the Salon des Fougères, located in the Madame wing, on the ground floor of the Élysée Palace , a salon having already served as a workplace for Cécilia Sarkozy, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy and Valérie Trierweiler.

Brigitte Macron claims to want to be “one and indivisible” alongside the President of the Republic, who initially wants an official framework to be defined for the function of “First Lady”, describing the current situation as “hypocrisy”. During the summer of 2017 , a petition against the creation of this status, launched by the future Yellow Vest Thierry-Paul Valette , gathered 300,000 signatures.

Status of First Lady

Finally, a “transparency charter” is presented. This recognizes Brigitte Macron as having a “representative role” for France alongside the president, particularly during international meetings. She will be able to “take part in national and international actions, implemented with other spouses of heads of state, in particular to fight against climate change or violence against women and children”. She will also have to respond to “requests” from people wishing to meet her. Through its sponsorship or presence, it will support “events of a charitable, cultural or social nature or which contribute to the international influence of France”. She will also be responsible for “maintaining a continuous link of listening and relations with civil society actors in the fields of disability, education, health, culture, child protection or still equality between men and women.” The President of the Republic may also charge it with “missions of reflection and proposals” which will be made public at the end of each month, just like his agenda. The charter indicates that the means for its function will be taken from the budget of the presidency and that it will be able to count on two presidential advisors placed at its disposal and on a secretariat. A budget of 440,000 euros is made available.

In his book Emmanuel Macron, Truths and Legends released in May 2021, Le Figaro journalist Arthur Berdah relates the “relationship of trust” that Emmanuel Macron maintains with his wife Brigitte Macron. Despite its lack of legal status, it intervenes within the framework of its work, in particular on speeches and television addresses. According to the journalist, “he admits that she has a role and an influence on him. What was a legend that is told a lot and which in fact turns out to be a truth, is that Brigitte Macron did indeed have a role and an influence on him”.

During Emmanuel Macron's second term, his political influence was also highlighted by Le Monde.

Operating budget

Brigitte Macron's office employs two employees and two full-time and part-time assistant positions. According to the Court of Auditors, the increasing volume of addressed letters involves seven full-time jobs for managing correspondence, while security and representation costs (hairdressing, makeup excluding clothing) are shared with the budget for costs of the Presidency. Compared to its predecessors, the AFP emphasizes that it has less financial resources, i.e. €440,000 annually in 2018.

Hospital Foundation

On June 12, 2019, Brigitte Macron was elected president of the Fondation des Hôpitaux. In January 2020, she paid tribute to Bernadette Chirac, who took care of the Yellow Pieces operation for 25 years. During the Covid-19 pandemic in France , she launched a call for donations from 350 personalities; she claims to have collected 30 million euros in this way.

Foreign policy

In August 2019, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro published an offensive comment on Brigitte Macron's physique on Facebook. Subsequently, the Brazilian Minister of Economy Paulo Guedes repeated insulting remarks against her, declaring that she was “really ugly”. These unprecedented attacks mark additional diplomatic tension between Brasilia and Paris following previous speeches by Emmanuel Macron questioning Jair Bolsonaro's ecological commitment. Faced with the controversy, Brigitte Macron received the support of Brazilian artists like Paulo Coelho, as well as the Brazilian daily Extra, which published the photo of Brigitte Macron with the title written in French: “Pardon Brigitte”. Her daughter Tiphaine Auzière declared herself “very angry” and affirmed that defending her mother “was defending all women victims of violence”. Brigitte Macron declares having been “very touched” by the messages of support from Brazil. During a trip to Agincourt in Pas-de-Calais , Brigitte Macron launched “Muito obrigada!” (“Thank you very much” in Portuguese) and declares: “Things are changing, everyone needs to be aware of it. There are things we can no longer say and things we can no longer. In order to calm diplomatic tensions, during an interview, the Brazilian ambassador to France, Luis Fernando Serra, declared that she was “beautiful, elegant and charming”. Subsequently, the spokesperson for the Brazilian presidency declared: “In order to avoid misinterpretation, the comment was removed from the social network”.

Dress style

Brigitte Macron is the subject of laudatory articles in the Daily Mail, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and The Observer. His style of dress in international meetings is the subject of comments. For its part, the Financial Times evokes a style close to that of “Essex girl" to portray it.

Close to Bernard Arnault 's family, she was dressed for free by Louis Vuitton during her official outings, which created controversy.

Decoration at the Élysée

Furthermore, she participated in the decoration of the Élysée, by introducing contemporary artists, including a carpet made by Christian Jaccard and armchairs signed Éric Jourdan in the Murat  lounge. After the palace's banquet hall, it launched the renovation of one lounge per year, work that the Court of Auditors deemed essential.

Complaints

In March 2018, the cabinet of the Élysée Palace filed a complaint for identity theft after discovering that the name of Brigitte Macron was used to obtain preferential treatment in luxury establishments through a false email address. The subject of the complaint is, according to the firm, “a very clear attempt to harm [the] reputation [of Brigitte Macron]”. In October 2021, the 35-year-old man who claimed to be Brigitte Macron's nephew was sentenced to 30 months' imprisonment, 18 of which were suspended, reinforced for identity theft, attempted fraud, fraud, as a repeat offender.

Beginning in August 2020, during the presidential couple's vacation at Fort Brégançon, "Yellow Vest" demonstrators gathered on the nearby beach and put several inflatable lobsters into the water on which one of them wrote insults against of the “First Lady”. On September 30, before the Toulon criminal court, the person is tried for “public insult towards the President of the Republic” and “public insult and defamation towards private individual(s)”. According to Var-Matin, the procedure is canceled for a formal defect. According to Mr. Juan Branco, it was an employee of the Élysée who filed a complaint without a representation mandate and in the absence of Brigitte Macron's signature. Consequently, the court gives a favorable response to the conclusions of nullity raised by Mr. Juan Branco according to the provisions of the law of July 29, 1881 on freedom of the press.

On August 22, 2018, the Yellow Vest Thierry-Paul Valette filed a complaint against Brigitte Macron  at the Lisieux police station as part of the transparency charter. The reasons for the complaint are: offense of passive influence peddling, offense of passive corruption and complicity in passive conflict of interest by person entrusted with a public service mission. It will be closed without further action in August 2019.^{[needs update]}

The image of Brigitte Macron is also illegally exploited by several scammers on the internet, in order to sell and promote brands of anti-wrinkle cream of which she is the muse or creator.

Rumor Jean-Michel Trogneux

In March 2021, Natacha Rey, an Internet user close to far-right circles and conspiratorial circles , and who presents herself as an independent journalist, published several messages on Facebook insinuating that Brigitte Macron would have been born male under the first name of her brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux. The theory, relayed by a YouTuber and six issues of Facts and Documents, is growing and is being spread on conspiracy and far-right sites as well as on Twitter. Natacha Rey calls for a campaign of harassment by sending messages on the Élysée website. Despite a defamation trial condemning the two women at the origin of this rumor in February 2023, and another whose outcome is scheduled for March 2025, the rumor is resurfacing in American conspiracy and far-right circles. For observers, this large-scale diffusion would result from a distrust of power and the media and a rejection of elites, who could use the figure of Emmanuel Macron as a vent, and raises fears of “Trumpization” debates.

Positions

In August 2017, during her first press interview, published in Elle magazine, Brigitte Macron declared that she wanted to “fight against exclusions, particularly those relating to disability, education and illness”.

In October 2017, while, in the wake of the Harvey Weinstein affair, thousands of harassed women begin to publish on Twitter, with the hashtag #balancetonporc, the story of sexual assault of which they declare having been victims, Brigitte Macron supports these alleged victims. She encourages people who have not yet denounced the abuse they have suffered to “break the silence”.

In 2018, she supported the action of Stéphane Bern, close to the presidential couple responsible for a mission on heritage.

In April 2019, she launched and took over the presidency of the Institute of Vocations for Employment (Live): financed by LVMH, this aims to create training centers for unemployed young adults. She plans to act as a teacher in the Institute's first school, inaugurated in September 2019.

In November 2019, on the occasion of the accusations of sexual assault by Adèle Haenel, she expressed her solidarity with the actress and saluted the “courage” of “those who speak”. In January 2021, on the occasion of the Olivier Duhamel affair, accused of incest, she spoke in favor of judicial reform during an interview given to TF1.

In August 2021, she participated in a debate on children in danger animated as part of the screening of Jacques Doillon 's film CE2, which deals with school bullying in a primary school. On several occasions during the presidential term, she accompanied the Minister of National Education, Jean-Michel Blanquer, to raise awareness of the problem of school bullying and take action against this phenomenon.

She is in favor of medically assisted procreation (MAP) but opposed to surrogacy (GPA).

She declared herself in favor of reinstating the uniform at school.

Decorations

• Grand Cross of the National Order of Merit in 2018 (Tunisia)
• Grand Cross of the Order of Dannebrog in 2018 (Denmark)
• Grand Cross of the Order of the White Rose in 2018 (Finland)
• Commander of the National Order of Côte d'Ivoire in 2019.
• Knight Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic in 2021.
• Commander Grand Cross of the Royal Order of the Polar Star in 2024 (Sweden)

In culture

In 2018, Le Parisien announced that author Gaël Tchakaloff was preparing a comic strip illustrating a day in the life of Brigitte Macron.

In the third episode of the first season of the American television series Emily in Paris, Carla Bruni sends Brigitte Macron a photo posted on social networks by Emily Cooper, which the “First Lady” then shares, which allows Emily to stand out within your marketing company. During this episode, a scene shows Brigitte Macron at the Élysée Palace, from behind and played by a body double, at the moment when she receives the photo.

Filmography

• 2018: Brigitte Macron, a French novel by Virginie Linhart.
• 2018: Vestiaires by Adda Abdelli and Fabrice Chanut: Brigitte Macron appears in her own role, in an episode of season 8; she ends this cameo with the phrase “Thank you for this moment” , borrowed from the book by Valérie Trierweiler.

Notes and references

External links

• (in French) Charte de transparence relative au statut du conjoint du Chef de l’État, Presidency of the French Republic, 2017

Unofficial roles
Vacant Title last held by Valérie Trierweiler	Spouse of the President of France 2017–present	Incumbent