Just a couple of days ago, she was known as Emmanuel Macron’s older wife, a thin, stylish blonde woman always seen in the finest French couture. However, everything changed when a video surfaced showing her seemingly hitting the French president. The narrative surrounding Brigitte Macron has now shifted dramatically.
Brigitte met Emmanuel when he was just a schoolboy, and she was his teacher and a mother of three. Following the video’s release, she is now being talked about in a much less respectful manner.
As the footage spread like wildfire online right after the couple arrived in Vietnam for a tour of South-East Asia, terms like ‘husband-beater’ started circulating on social media.
The film, shot at Hanoi’s international airport on Sunday night after the presidential jet had landed, showed Mrs Macron slap or shove her husband in the face, causing him to recoil with a look of considerable shock, before he quickly recovered to wave at the cameras at the foot of the aircraft’s steps.
The clip is barely two seconds in length, but long enough to trigger a howl of global controversy and intrigue about a marriage that has long been fuelled by rumour and gossip. And it has reopened an avalanche of speculation about the nature of the relationship between President Macron and his wife, 25 years his senior.
More specifically, the incident is posing questions about whether there is a dark side to an unconventional marriage that has always fascinated onlookers, from the moment Mr Macron became France’s youngest president at 39 in 2017. Questions, in fact, that have rarely been dormant even in France, with its laissez-faire attitude to matrimony.
So was it simply a fractious moment that any air traveller would recognise after a long flight over multiple time zones? Or does it hint at something deeper and darker?
Footage of the incident, along with photographs of Mr Macron, 47, appearing to look angry in the aftermath, spread rapidly on social media. And matters were surely not helped when his 72-year-old wife declined to take her husband’s arm as they walked down the plane’s staircase.
The French president – with fist clenched – and his wife on arrival in Hanoi moments after the incident on the plane
The film, shot at Hanoi’s international airport on Sunday night, showed Mrs Macron slap or shove her husband President Emmanuel Macron in the face
Officials finally had to concede the ‘slapping’ video was genuine
The clip is barely two seconds in length, but long enough to trigger a howl of global controversy and intrigue about a marriage that has long been fuelled by rumour and gossip
The Elysee Palace initially denied the authenticity of the images, claiming they were AI-generated by accounts hostile to France’s head of state, just as they denied outlandish claims about pictures earlier this month that purportedly showed Mr Macron handling a bag of cocaine (in fact it was just a paper napkin) on a train en route to peace talks in Ukraine, along with Prime Minister Keir Starmer and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
Officials on this occasion, however, had finally to concede the ‘slapping’ video was genuine. Still, a member of the president’s entourage downplayed its significance, insisting it was a ‘moment of togetherness’, while another source referred to a harmless ‘squabble’.
Not everyone agreed. The leading French commentator Alexis Poulin posted a message about Mr Macron, who is due to stand down in 2027, saying simply: ‘He is lost.’
Even AFP, France’s venerable and respected national news agency, which is indirectly funded by the French state and rarely comments on presidential tittle tattle, felt moved to intervene.
‘Bickering, a moment of complicity or a blow to the face?’ was the stark question it asked of the episode. Meanwhile, viewers of the clip were coming up with their own conclusions. Memes showing a beaten-up president with black eyes erupted online. A post on X declared that Mrs Macron ‘had done what all France wants to do’.
Another wrote sarcastically: ‘Of course it was horseplay. I regularly shove my husband in the face with both hands to show how much I care for him.’ And yet another said: ‘Perhaps she is wiping the powder off his nose.’
Jokes about cocaine aside, the overwhelming reaction was that the incident was a glimpse into the reality of this odd couple’s lives. As the door of the presidential Airbus 330 opens, Mr Macron appears in the doorway. His wife’s arms then emerge from the left of the door and both her hands appear to strike or push at her husband’s face.
It seems to be sudden and aggressive. A startled Mr Macron takes a step backwards, his face registering shock at the blow
And matters were surely not helped when Macron’s 72-year-old wife declined to take her husband’s arm as they walked down the plane’s staircase
Ground staff and other employees at the top of the ladder don’t quite know where to look as the domestic drama unfurls.
Mr Macron then instinctively brushes his face before regaining his composure and waving to media and the official receiving party waiting on the tarmac.
Mrs Macron, though, remains out of camera shot, concealed by the aircraft body, making it impossible to see her facial expression or gauge her body language.
But the drama is not over. As the couple step on to the red carpet-covered steps from the plane, Mrs Macron, in a red jacket, ignores her husband’s proffered arm and navigates her way down without looking at him.
Once on the ground and standing for the welcome ceremony, Mr Macron looks tense, his left hand balled into a fist.
As every air passenger knows, long-haul travel can be a stressful business at the best of times. But the Macrons do not fly ‘economy’, their cabins are roomy and boast every conceivable luxury. There’s a king-size bed, a bathroom, dressing room and vast kitchen with cordon-bleu trained chefs.
Even so, they’d had a late night the previous evening attending the French football cup final between Paris Saint-Germain and Stade de Reims. Might fatigue, then, account for a tiff?
Certainly this seemed to be what officials had in mind when they briefed reporters. ‘It was a moment when the president and his wife were decompressing
one last time after a 16-hour journey before the start of the trip by joking around,’ one said. ‘It’s a moment of togetherness. No more was needed to feed the mills of the conspiracy theorists.’
These so-called conspiracy theorists are presumably the same ones who suggested Mr Macron was removing a supposed ‘wrap’ of cocaine out of shot of the cameras on that train trip to Kyiv.
The source blamed pro-Russian accounts for negative comments about the incident and said: ‘There was obviously no violent gesture between Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron. To say the opposite – based on a very partial, fleeting image, without sound and without context – is dishonest and shows a serious lack of understanding of them.’
Maybe so, but the episode showed that even after eight years on the world stage, the couple are still not completely comfortable. Denying there was any kind of domestic dispute, Mr Macron said he was ‘simply joking with my wife, as we do quite often’.
However, imagine for one minute, if the incident had played out the other way round: if he had been the one striking his wife.
But then the story of the Macrons has always been an unusual one – and for years the subject of gossip.
In 2018, he used a crisis meeting with aides to vigorously deny a relationship with his former bodyguard Alexandre Benalla, a son of Moroccan immigrants. ‘Alexandre Benalla has never had the nuclear codes!’ he declared in an attempt at humour. ‘Benalla has never been my lover!’
There were also much-repeated claims that paparazzi had compromising pictures of the president with Mathieu Gallet, the former chairman of Radio France, taken in a forest.
No pictures ever surfaced, but this did not stop Mr Macron giving an intriguing interview in which he said: ‘Saying that it is not possible for a man to live with an older woman without being anything other than a homosexual or a hidden gigolo is misogynous. And it’s also homophobic. If I had been homosexual, I would say so and I would live [openly].’
Mr Macron appears to wave after the ordeal with his wife in the two-second clip all over social media
The couple pose with Vietnam’s General Secretary of the Communist Party, To Lam, and his wife Ngo Phuong Ly on Monday
It is the Macrons’ marriage, their age gap and how and when they met that have led to most of the questions, something Brigitte still finds hard to deal with.
She met her future husband when he was a 15-year-old pupil and she was his 40-year-old drama teacher – and a mother of three – in the northern French city of Amiens. From day one, being in a
relationship ‘with such a young boy,’ was ‘crippling,’ she admitted in a 2023 interview with Paris Match magazine. She spoke of the rumours her own young children (one was a classmate of the teenage Emmanuel) had to deal with, saying: ‘You can imagine what they were hearing. But I didn’t want to miss out on my life.’
Mr Macron’s parents sent him away to Paris to finish his schooling in the hope that the relationship would end. It did not and they married in 2007, when he was 29 and she 54.
Turning 70 was particularly hard for Mrs Macron. ‘I’ve never promoted our couple – it exists but you can’t explain it,’ she said. ‘Obviously, it’s easier to be in the same age range.’
Friends and political allies say that one of the reasons the rumours get so much traction is because the Macrons always respond to them.
The latest scandal comes as four men are due to go on trial in Paris accused of likening Mrs Macron ‘to a paedophile’.
She filed a criminal complaint in August last year, and prosecutors confirmed a cyber-harassment trial will take place this summer.
Among the accused is Aurelien Poirson-Atlan, a 41-year-old known as ‘Zoe Sagan’ on social media, where he spreads multiple conspiracy theories.
His posts include one saying Mrs Macron was born as a boy called Jean-Michel Trogneux in 1953.
This is, in fact, the name of Mrs Macron’s brother, and she was called Brigitte Trogneux before her first marriage.
The defendant also claimed that Brigitte’s first husband, Andre-Louis Auziere, had never actually existed before his reported death in 2019, aged 68.
Last year, two women were also ordered to pay the equivalent of £7,000 in damages to Mrs Macron after they scurrilously claimed in a YouTube video that she was transgender.
These unpleasant, transphobic rumours about Mrs Macron were picked up by the hard-Right in 2022, while Mr Macron was campaigning for re-election.
Groups including the Yellow Vests (Gilets Jaunes) and those protesting against Covid vaccines all used the claims to attack the Macrons.
In March 2024, Mrs Macron’s own daughter talked publicly about the accusations against France’s First Lady.
Tiphaine Auziere, 41, said: ‘I have concerns about the level of society when I hear what is circulating on social networks about my mother being a man.’
Beyond the wilder rumours about the Macrons, there is no doubt that their relationship often appears to be a mother-and-son style one.
A Paris source says: ‘Madame Macron organises everything for the president – from his diary to his clothes.
‘She is a very hands-on wife, and it’s not unusual for her to scold him if he is doing something wrong, like forgetting something.’
Is this really what the latest video is all about – a maternal clip round the ear?
Additional reporting by Peter Allen in Paris.
