The Macron affair: How the French election winner's parents discovered he was dating his teacher
When Emmanuel Macron fell in love with Brigitte Trogneux, a married teacher at his school, it caused something of a stir. In this extract from her biography of the French presidential candidate, the author reveals the reaction of Macron's parents...
One thing is certain: the sudden burst of love into their son’s life knocked Emmanuel’s parents for six. And it certainly had tongues wagging in the quiet, middle-class neighbourhood of Amiens where the very respectable Jesuit school of ‘La Providence’ can be found - the establishment where Brigitte was a teacher, and Emmanuel a pupil.
However liberal they may have been, Emmanuel’s parents did not exactly jump for joy upon learning the news - despite having known for some time that their son was somewhat unique. Bright, pleasant, with good social skills and able to charm any audience, Emmanuel Macron was as perfect a young man as it is possible to be. He enjoyed reading, and existed slightly in his own world. Indeed, he lived “through texts and words”, as he himself admits in [his book] Révolution, with only two other high points in his life: piano and drama classes. It was through the latter that he met Brigitte Auzière.
The story has been told by Macron himself: “It was at secondary school, through drama, that I met Brigitte. It was surreptitiously that things happened and that I fell in love. Through an intellectual bond, which day after day became ever closer. Then emerged a lasting passion.”
Brigitte, meanwhile, recalls that when she arrived at La Providence, “all the teachers were buzzing about Emmanuel”. Her own daughter, Laurence, a classmate of Macron’s, also spoke of him as “that amazing guy” who “knows everything about everything”. Emmanuel was not in the French class Brigitte taught (though she did teach his brother, Laurent, and sister, Estelle) but only her drama classes, where she found herself in awe of his “exceptional intelligence, a way of thinking that I had never ever seen before”.
As often happens with romantic couples, it all started with words. “Every Friday, for several months, we spent several hours working on a play together,” Macron writes. “Once the play was written, we decided to produce it together. We chatted about everything. The writing became an excuse. I felt that we had always known each other.”
Years later, Brigitte confided to one of their friends: “You know, the day when we wrote that play together, I had the feeling I was working with Mozart!”
Then aged 39, the married mother of three with a comfortable middle-class life initially tried to resist. She hardly mentions André-Louis Auzière, her ex-banker husband, now. Out of decency or discretion? Or is it because there are things she does not wish to talk about?
In any case, he certainly didn’t seem to have made her happy. Why else would she have taken so many risks? Have let herself be taken in by the romantic promises of a boy barely 16-years-old? A teenager with dishevelled hair and an innocent, penetrating look, who promised her that after leaving for Paris to continue his studies, he would come back to find her?
“I will come back and marry you,” he told her, full of youthful confidence.
At the time, Emmanuel was succeeding at school with disconcerting ease, sailing through his classes at “La Pro”, [as the school is known]. Girls did not seem to be his main interest. His parents remember only one girlfriend, who visited the family home in Amiens only once.
“She was the same age, she was sweet, she was the daughter of a local doctor and a friend of ours. It lasted a few months,” Emmanuel’s father says.
Emmanuel’s mother talks about “an early relationship with a young girl in his class”. Whatever the circumstances, this fling was forgotten when he met Brigitte. His parents - who for a time thought their son was going out with Laurence, not her mother – heard about it by accident.
One of Emmanuel’s friends – at whose grandmother’s home near Chantilly, he was supposedly studying for his baccalaureate exams – rang to organise the coming weekend. His mother, Francoise Noguès-Macron, realised then that “Manu”, who called her every day to tell her about his day, was not actually in Chantilly. At the end of the week, his father went to the station to collect his son on his supposed return from a week’s revision with friends. There were raised voices when they returned home.
“What mattered to me was not the fact he was having a relationship with Brigitte but that he was alive and that there weren’t any problems,” says Francoise. But that is not exactly how Emmanuel’s father, who suggests it was mainly his ex-wife who was “wound-up”, recollects things.
“I figured, ‘he would get over it,’ he has said. “I wasn't worried, but Emmanuel still had to finish his schooling and not let it all go to waste.”
But Jean-Michel Macron speaks frankly: he was “surprised” all the same and “almost fell off his chair” when he learned about his son’s relationship. And Francoise admits: “When Emmanuel met Brigitte, we certainly did not say: “how wonderful!” Her mother Manette, Emmanuel’s grandmother, however, was “very conciliatory”.
“My mother, who would never have tolerated such a situation for her own children, showed herself to be much more open and tolerant with regard to her grandchildren's love affairs," she says.
Emmanuel’s parents, a bit shaken, decided to meet Brigitte and ask her not to see their son until he had reached adulthood. Jean-Michel Macron, however, was not convinced this was the right response. “I thought it could even have an adverse effect,” he says. But, he adds, his wife insisted, and so he told Brigitte: “I forbid you to see him until he’s 18.”
“I can’t promise you anything,” Brigitte answered tearfully, while Emmanuel’s mother - who says she realised from the start that this would not be a passing fling - replied: “You don’t understand, you already have your life. He won’t have children!”
Francoise remembers the astonished reaction to the relationship from a woman at the reception desk of the hospital where she worked: “Ah, but what’s going on! I’ve been thinking of you, it’s terrible!” It was as if she had lost a member of her family.
As it happened, Emmanuel was due to go to Paris to complete his final year at secondary school. Was the decision motivated or accelerated by his romance with Brigitte? Did his parents see this as a way of getting him away from his beloved? Both deny it, rejecting any version of the romance in which they would have "kicked their son out of the house."
“I had to fight in order to live both my private and my professional life as I wish,” Macron says. “I had to fight, and it wasn’t the easiest nor the most obvious, nor the most automatic thing to do, nor did it correspond to established norms.”
When asked whether he was kicked out of his parents’ home, he insists he wasn’t, but recalls that his parents initially “took it badly”.
“Strength of conviction was required,” he says. “They thought on several occasions that it was going to stop and naturally did everything to encourage that. In fact, I don't know how I myself would have reacted.” Clearly, it’s still a sensitive subject when he refers to this painful period. “It is very hard,” he says. “An experience like that makes you think... You have to learn to fight for things, to bear the burden and have a life which does not in any way correspond to other peoples’ lives.”
A pause, and he adds: “That was what we went through for 15 years. We managed to achieve the situation we’re in today, because we knew it was what we wanted. It didn't just happen all by itself.”
This is an edited, translated extract from Emmanuel Macron: Un Jeune Homme Si Parfait by Anne Fulda, published by Plon.
