CANNES, France — They say that behind every great man is … an older woman?
In French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s case, this is true — he married his former high-school teacher.
Macron’s wife, Brigitte Trogneux, is a glamorous granny with a total of seven grandchildren and three children. At 64, she is almost 25 years older than her dashing 39-year-old husband, whom she met when he was just 15.
Although there is no suggestion that anything illegal took place while he was underage, the pair’s love story started when she was a married teacher. Her middle daughter was in Macron’s class. Trogneux’s son is two years older than Macron. And her youngest daughter, 30, is a lawyer who works for Macron’s campaign.
The pair eventually wed in Brigitte’s home town of Le Touquet in October 2007. She was 54 and had been divorced for 21 months. Her groom was 29.
In the US, a presidential hopeful with such a seemingly sordid background would face relentless scrutiny, with every detail of his or her past put under the microscope. Across the pond in France, almost anything goes.
It’s a land where sex is seen to be as much a part of life as wine and cheese, and nobody bats an eyelid at what others get up to, preferring instead to mind their own business.
And, as scandalous as it might seem to Americans, by French standards the tale is actually quite tame. The fact that the pair has lived monogamously — and happily — since their nuptials is seen by the majority in the laissez-faire country as rather conservative.
Almost every French president in recent memory has enjoyed a history of sex scandals. After all, France is a nation where having a mistress — or several — is perceived as so normal that strict divorce laws make it extremely financially unfavorable for wives to leave their husbands.
Sex and love are seen as two separate things, and an illicit affair is generally accepted by many as a valid way to spice up an otherwise dreary love life.
Sex and love are seen as two separate things, and an illicit affair is generally accepted by many as a valid way to spice up an otherwise dreary love life.
France’s current leader, François Hollande, was caught visiting the apartment of an actress who is 18 years younger than he is while he had an official partner. François Mitterrand spent the 14 years that he was in power covertly shacked up with his mistress and their secret love child.
Even Charles de Gaulle was generally accepted to have cheated on his wife during World War II. All this was dealt with by the French public with a Gallic shrug.
As for Macron, when he took the podium after winning the first round of the elections last weekend, he turned to thank his wife, saying to her, “Always there, and what’s more, without whom I wouldn’t be me.”
The crowd yelled and whooped shouts of approval.
It was her name — not his — that echoed around the hall: “Brigitte! Brigitte! Brigitte!”
Jenny Paul is a British journalist who has lived in France for 17 years.