For six years, Brigitte Macron has continued to support her husband - elected President of the Republic in 2017, then in 2022 -, remaining faithful to his role as second, sometimes discreet, sometimes assertive.
Since her media debut on the arm of Emmanuel Macron, then Minister of the Economy in 2015, the world wants to know everything about this former French teacher who fell in love with her student, 25 years her junior.
Of this woman who "left everything to follow her dreams", as she likes to remember.
Read alsoBrigitte Macron: "There are times in life when you have to make choices that impact the rest of your life"
Brigitte Macron through the years
In images, in pictures
See the slideshow42 photos
See the slideshow42 photos
Read also30 minutes of sport a day: Brigitte Macron shares her sports routine
love of writing
"There are times in life when you have to make choices that impact the rest of your life," she said in the columns of
Madame Figaro
, less than a year ago.
Her destiny was sealed in 1993, within the walls of the Jesuit high school of La Providence, in Amiens.
Brigitte Trogneux, 39 and a French teacher, leads a theater workshop of which the young Emmanuel Macron, 15, is a part.
At the time, she was married to banker André Lauzière and was already the mother of three children: Sébastien, Laurence and Tiphaine (today, 48, 46 and 39 years old).
The literature teacher is "captivated by the boy's intelligence", and takes him back to her classes the following year to rewrite with her the play by Eduardo Filippo,
The Art of Comedy
.
Every Friday, the two meet to work.
Then, to discuss.
These same Fridays becoming a pretext to see each other and exchange.
Coming from a family of chocolate makers from Amiens, bourgeois and Catholic, Brigitte cut the relationship short, while Emmanuel Macron fled to Paris to follow a course in preparatory classes.
It will be necessary to wait ten years for the youngest of the Trogneux (they are six brothers and sisters) to decide to join the capital and its former pupil.
The latter was then 29 years old and was - already - a finance inspector.
Brigitte divorced in January 2006 before marrying the future city councilor in 2007. She is 53 years old.
In video, Brigitte Macron back to school for the ELA dictation
Read also"Aging well means accepting that some days it's not great": Brigitte Macron talks about her relationship to age, at the dawn of her 70th birthday
A couple that attracts all eyes
The couple has since been the target of much gossip.
When some set up their age difference as a model to change mentalities, others criticize or mock it.
From the start of his first campaign, Emmanuel Macron will not stop staging with his wife at every opportunity, as if to silence the most virulent.
Read alsoBrigitte Macron, far from the emulation of 2017 during her husband's victory in the first round of the presidential election
At the Élysée, Brigitte is far from being a stooge and, like all first ladies, uses her status to support causes that are dear to her.
In 2019, she succeeded Bernadette Chirac by becoming president of the Fondation des Hôpitaux.
The following year, she will pay tribute to the wife of the "father of Corrèze" by taking up the torch of Operation Yellow Pieces, for the benefit of hospitalized children.
In video, Brigitte Macron launched the 31st collection of "Yellow Pieces"
seven times grandma
Remained very close to her children, Brigitte Macron, seven times a grandmother, does not neglect her family.
Moreover, she confided a few years back to RTL: “If my children had not allowed me to live with Emmanuel, I would not have done it (…).
I could not bear to ruin their lives, it was not possible.
When everyone got mad at me, I always had Sébastien, Laurence and Tiphaine”.
At the dawn of her 70th birthday, the one who has received many criticisms has become a model of self-sacrifice.