Last July, when Emmanuel Macron was economy minister in François Hollande’s government and his barely hidden presidential ambitions were dismissed as a naive fantasy by the political class, he held his first rally at a smart venue on Paris’s Left Bank, reports The Guardian.
Before the crowds arrived, he took to the stage to rehearse his speech in front of a handful of volunteers from his new political movement En Marche! (On the Move), a “neither right nor left” grouping he said would revolutionise French politics. “We are the party of hope,” he told the almost empty auditorium, captured by the film-maker Pierre Hurel, who was discreetly documenting his rise.
A voice interjected: “Your voice is falling, you need to lift your voice.” Brigitte Macron, his wife, was giving him advice as a theatre director would to an actor on stage. “What’s wrong darling? Are there bits that are too long?” he gently asked her about another speech. “Brigitte tells me I always go on too long,” he once told a crowd.
Brigitte Macron’s advice on stagecraft, honed as a school drama coach, has been central to the French presidential frontrunner’s thunderous performances at campaign rallies. He met her when he was a 15-year-old pupil and she a 40-year-old drama teacher running his school theatre club.
Now that Macron, an independent centrist, is favourite to win the presidency against the far-right Front National’s Marine Le Pen next weekend, he wants to go further than any president before him in giving his wife an official role. If elected, he will hold a consultation to define the ambiguous status of first lady in France and draw up a job description for the first time. Brigitte Macron “won’t be paid by the taxpayer”, he promised this week, but he said that as president, “the person who lives with you must have a role”.
Brigitte Macron knows better than anyone else the pitfalls of being a partner at the Elysée Palace, where spouses have never had an official role. Macron was deputy chief of staff at the presidential palace in 2014 when Hollande was photographed sneaking out on a motorbike to meet a lover. The president’s jilted partner, the journalist Valérie Trierweiler, published a damning tell-all account of their relationship’s implosion, with catastrophic consequences for his image.
In private, Brigitte Macron, 64, a French literature and Latin teacher who has always worked at exclusive Jesuit schools, would rather the media stopped obsessing about the 25-year age gap between her and her husband, roughly the same as that between Donald Trump and his wife, Melania, with the genders reversed.