Love is Blind! Meet 39-yr-old French President and his 64-yr-old Wife
Mangaluru: Here is the prospect of something far more intimate, if equally intriguing: that the man who became France’s president is married to his former high-school teacher, who is 25 years his senior. The love life of Emmanuel Macron, the former economy minister who won Sunday’s vote, adds to a long list of conventions the candidate has broken. He split from the Socialists to start his own centrist party, En Marche!, only a year ago. He managed to beat both mainstream parties in the first round of voting, despite never holding elected office before. His win made him the youngest president in French history. With equal defiance, he has upended the cultural norm of men marrying younger women.
Now the couple swans around elegantly, preparing to take their place at the helm of a deeply divided country. Macron’s wife, Brigitte Trogneux, represents a coagulation of everything French. The way she dresses, her sun-bleached hair, her preternaturally slender physique. She is a chocolate-company heiress from a rust-belt town, a trained school teacher who now sits front row at Louis Vuitton fashion shows. She embodies all that is intoxicating and enviable and ridiculous about French culture, impossibly elitist and socialist all at once.
For French voters, the tabloid glitz surrounding the couple can feel deeply painful and contradictory. The pair’s mix of privilege and idealism carries an unshakable arrogance reminiscent of another recent election across the pond, leaving open the possibility that this enthralling union might just be what brings Macron down. An “incredible closeness”- Macron met Trogneux in high school at age 15. She was a 40-year-old married literature teacher and mother of three, the daughter of a bourgeois family of chocolatiers, and ran the theater club at his Jesuit school in Amiens. As the couple tells it, he pursued her doggedly, and in the 11th grade convinced her to help him write a play. The work “brought us together every Friday” and “unleashed an incredible closeness,” she told media.
After breaking the shocking news of their bond to his parents—Trogneux says the moment when the relationship turned romantic will forever be their “secret”—Macron was shipped off to an elite lycée in Paris to finish his final year. “You won’t get rid of me. I will come back and I will marry you,” he famously told her. The distance did not break them, and eventually Trogneux left her husband and moved to Paris. “We’d call each other all the time and spend hours on the phone,” she said. “Bit by bit, he defeated all my resistance, in an amazing way, with patience.”
Their wedding in 2007 took place in the town hall of a northern beach resort, where she inherited a villa that became their second home. In a wedding speech, Macron thanked her children (one of whom was a classmate of his) for supporting them. We are “not at all a normal couple,” he said, but “a couple that exists.” They kept their marriage under wraps for eight years as he straddled investment banking and public service, before finally dipping into public together at a dinner with the king and queen of Spain. More than a mere gold digger or confidant, she is an inseparable part of his character. French people are rapt by the moment she entered his life because it reveals her role as teacher, mother, and lover—a status only achievable with the wisdom of age.
The French applaud this kind of bond in power couples who are close in age, or when the woman is the one who is younger. Priscilla Chan, who like her husband, Mark Zuckerberg, is 32, is credited with his “evolution and much of the couple’s philanthropic direction.” Actor George Clooney, 55, said his wife, 39-year-old Amal Clooney, a human rights lawyer, inspires him because “everything she does has actual consequence.” People obsess over the women in these relationships for good reason—they naturally wield influence over their husbands’ careers. By the same token, there are plenty of reasons to scrutinize Trogneux’s character, and what effect it might have on the future of France. Her age isn’t one of them.
Courtesy: Quartz-UK
