This is Brigitte Macron: The French President’s wife and First Lady of France

The President of France and his wife are back in the news after a confrontation on a plane goes viral.

Emmanuel Macron has downplayed the incident. “There’s a video showing me joking and teasing my wife and somehow that becomes a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe, with people even coming up with theories to explain it,” Macron said.

Macrons: a 24-year age difference

Her maiden name is Brigitte Marie-Claude Trogneux and she is a native of Amiens, where she was born on April 13, 1953, having just turned 69 during the campaign for the presidential election. She is nicknamed ‘Bibi’ and has been married to Emmanuel Macron since 2007. She was previously married to banker André-Louis Auzière (1974-2006), whom she divorced just a year before.

Brigitte is 24 years older than her husband, Emmanuel having been born on 21 December 1977, also in Amiens. The French First Lady has three children, all from her previous marriage, although their relationship with their step-father is exceptional. Indeed, the first lady’s seven grandchildren consider Macron to be their grandfather.

She was Emmanuel’s teacher in the 1990s

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Brigitte Macron was a secondary school professor and until 2015 taught literature at the Lycée Saint-Louis-de-Gonzague in Paris, a leading elite school. But before ending her working life there, Brigitte worked at Collège Lucie-Berger in Strasbourg (1980s) and at Lycée la Providence in Amiens (1990s). It was here that she met Emmanuel Macron, with whom she had an intimate relationship when he was her underage pupil.

For years there was some controversy about her sexuality, as it was said that she was a transsexual woman. In 2021, however, this rumour was disproved. It was Natacha Rey, a French ultra-right-wing internet user and QAnon sympathiser, who perpetrated this theory, which had never been very credible.