Her natural milieu is off camera. But for four years her name and image have appeared regularly if furtively in a series of articles and photographs. We caught glimpses of her at some of Emmanuel Macron's campaign rallies in 2017, inside the future president's inner circle of supporters. She was seen a few weeks later walking alongside Brigitte Macron through the streets of the northern French resort of Le Touquet, accompanied by bodyguards.
In July 2018, when President Macron's personal security advisor Alexandre Benalla first spoke out about the videos that showed him beating up protestors in May that year – sparking the Benalla affair – she was there. Two years later, when a sex tape scandal broke that forced Macron's Paris mayoral candidate Benjamin Griveaux to stand down, it was against her that Alexandra de Taddeo – one half of the couple suspected of publishing the video tape – took legal action to find out the “circumstances of the arrest” of her partner Piotr Pavlenski. This arrest happened to occur under the watchful lens of a photographer from the Bestimage paparazzi agency. It was this, her agency, and her empire of networks and contacts that have been behind some of the biggest political-celebrity 'exclusives' in the last decade.
The woman in question is Michèle Marchand, often known as 'Mimi'. Indeed, that is the name that journalists Jean-Michel Décugis and Marc Leplongeon and novelist Pauline Guéna used as the title for their book about a woman who is also often dubbed the “queen of the paparazzi”. On paper the life of this woman in her seventies, who started off as a mechanic before mingling with the shady characters of Parisian nightlife, who married an armed robber and then a policeman, and who has been inside both prison and the Élysée, has all the ingredients for the outline of a good novel. But she hates that kind of attention.
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“It really worries me when people speak about me,” she told Vanity Fair magazine in 2017. Yet just at the moment 'Mimi' is being spoken about rather a lot.
On Friday June 18th she was placed in custody for breaching the terms of her bail in the case involving a false retraction by a key witness in the investigation into the alleged Libyan funding of Nicolas Sarkozy's 2007 presidential campaign. On June 5th 2021 Michèle Marchand had been placed under formal investigation for witness tampering and for “criminal conspiracy” to commit fraud with others, and then released under bail.
The investigators suspect her of having been involved in the talks which preceded the curious retraction of his witness statement by businessman and middleman Ziad Takieddine in Beirut at the end of 2020. Takieddine is one of the main witnesses against Nicolas Sarkozy in the Libyan funding case. Like her four alleged accomplices, who were also placed under investigation, her bail conditions included a ban on meeting several people who were themselves under suspicion or linked to the investigation. These included former president Nicolas Sarkozy, whom Marchand has known for a long time, having often met both him and his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy.
Billionaire introduced her to the Macrons
As Vanity Fair has described, the former 'first lady' Carla Bruni was not exactly overjoyed that her old friend had subsequently become close to the new first lady. “I am delighted that Brigitte Macron trusts you. Me, as a result, a little less. At the next revolution will you change again?” she messaged one day, though she did not end their friendship. Several people to whom Mediapart spoke underlined how trust was the cement with which the boss of Bestimage built her reputation. And it was how she then extended her influence into political circles by becoming involved in handling events in politicians' private lives.
Cyril Hanouna, the radio and television presenter favoured by government ministers in need of some publicity, looks on her as his “second mum”. As for Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron, they met her for the first time in the spring of 2016 through their friend and billionaire businessman Xavier Niel. The authors of 'Mimi' say that at the time Brigitte Macron was worried about rumours that her husband was supposedly homosexual. Niel, who owns the company Iliad which controls telecoms company Free, suggested that they meet a “specialist” who could keep a watchful eye over their image and press coverage.
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It was Michèle Marchand who persuaded the future first lady to pose in a swimming costume for the cover of Paris Match magazine. She also set up the images of the couple walking pass a naked man on the beach in August 2016, of them walking in the countryside at sunset and kissing tenderly in the streets of Lisbon. Operating alongside Sylvain Fort, Ismaël Emelien, Sibeth Ndiaye and other 'Mormons', as his original loyal aides were called, Michèle Marchand took part in her first political campaign, even though nothing was ever formalised in writing with Macron or his political movement En Marche! during the 2017 presidential election.
The number of front cover photographs of the couple multiplied, many of them provided by Marchand's own agency Bestimage. En Marche!'s spokesperson Sylvain Fort told L'Obs weekly news magazine at the time: “There is a moral contract for exclusivity with Bestimage. That allows for them [the Macrons] to control their image better, in the choice of photos of them that circulate,” he said. “When they are victims of the paparazzi they call on a photographic agency and that way they're sure of getting better pictures.” This relationship continued after the couple arrived at the Élysée, where 'Mimi' regularly took part in meetings to discuss communications issues. To use an expression much heard at the time, the presidential couple found her presence “reassuring”.
Michèle Marchand also annoyed other photographers who were worried about the virtual exclusivity that Bestimage seemed to enjoy over the private sections of the Macrons' official visits at the start of the presidency. However, the mood changed in May 2018 when the investigative weekly Le Canard Enchaîné and the weekly news magazine Le Point published a photograph of Michèle Marchand making the V for Victory sign in Emmanuel Macron's presidential office. The paparazzi boss sued for “breach of privacy” but the image left its mark, and after that the Élysée was much more cautious.
She did all she could to help Alexandre Benalla
This caution was soon reinforced by the Benalla affair that broke a few weeks later. It involved Alexandre Benalla, Macron's personal security advisor, to whom Marchand was also close. She had been informed that Benalla had been involved in violence at Place de la Contrescarpe in Paris on May 1st that year and kept this presidential secret quiet until July 18th when the news broke in Le Monde. As Mediapart later reported in June 2019, at the time the affair broke she was in daily contact with Alexandre Benalla, and throughout the summer of 2018 did all she could to help him.
“The guy no longer had a flat, a car, anything. I helped him in the first few days, there was his wife and his kid … I didn't get the impression there were many people around him. He was isolated at the time,” she said then. The former presidential security aide went regularly to Bestimage's offices at Levallois-Perret in the north-west suburbs of Paris to “get a complete overview of the press”, according to the agency's boss. She also lent him her Smart car “two or three times in July” and then helped put him up in a flat “for two days” that August.
Just after the Benalla affair broke, one of Michèle Marchand's favourite photographers, Sébastien Valiela – who had revealed the secret liaison between President François Hollande and actress Julie Gayet and who was also sent to Beirut to get photos of Ziad Takieddine in October 2020 – went to Benalla's home on July 19th 2018. That was the day of the mysterious disappearance of Benalla's gun safe from the property. “I'm not far from him and I'm checking. There are plain-clothed cops hanging around and two TV crews … he can either send me the address or I'll pick it up,” he messaged Marchcand from the scene, in an SMS message later found by investigators. Both deny having moved the gun safe.
Michèle Marchand has also denied any link between the help that she gave Alexandre Benalla - from whom she says she has since kept her distance - and her relationship with the Macrons, with whom she insisted “relations have become very distant”. In July 2018 she was still seen at the Élysée, once for a meeting with Brigitte Macron's private office, and on a second occasion for a reception for the French men's football team after winning the World Cup. That was just two days before the Benalla affair broke.
Since then 'Mimi' Marchand seems to have gone off camera again. Yet the position that the presidential couple afforded her at the heart of power continues to raise many questions. What precise role did she play with the head of state and his wife? Why was she so important to them? And above all, why did they take the risk of associating with someone who had such a scandalous background? “That's an eminently political issue,” former president François Hollande says in the book 'Mimi'. “You can't have someone at the Élysée whose job it is to make revelations about private lives.”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter