Brigitte Macron’s ‘adventure journey’ from school teacher to first lady of France to be told in TV drama series
Brigitte Macron’s ‘adventurous journey’ from school teacher to first lady – and how she met the French president while a teacher at his school – is to be chronicled in a French TV series, its makers have announced.
Production company Gaumont, which made detective show Lupin, said it is developing the series, titled ‘Brigitte, A Free Woman’.
Mrs Macron, 71, famously first met her now-husband Emmanuel while teaching at his high school in Amiens, northern France. The first episode will document this meeting, a writer has said.
“Brigitte Macron is a fascinating character and we want to tackle it in a romantic, almost melodramatic way because of the romantic dimension of her fate,” writer Bénédicte Charles told Le Figaro.
The Macrons – who are 24 years apart in age – married in 2007, with Emmanuel going on to become France’s youngest president.
Footage captures the moment a 15-year-old Emmanuel Macron (left) kissed his 40-year-old teacher Brigitte Trogneux (right) in 1993 – two years before he declared he would marry her
Brigitte entered the Elysee Palace in 2017 as the wife of the youngest president in French history – she was 64, Emmanuel was 39
A source close to the first lady, who did not want to be named, said it was the first they had heard of the biopic.
“We are not associated with this project, as we learned about today in the press,” the source said.
The cast has not yet been announced, but the show is set to be over six 45-minute episodes. It is set to be written by Mrs. Charles and Olivier Pouponneau.
The series follows a 2023 film titled ‘Bernadette’, starring French icon Catherine Deneuve as the wife of former president Jacques Chirac.
It tells how Bernadette Chirac earned a place in the limelight after being sidelined by her husband’s election in 1995.
The now French president was just 15 years old when he met Madame Auziere, a teacher 24 years his senior, at the Lycee La Providence in Amiens.
Brigitte, whose eldest daughter Laurence was in the same class as Macron, was captivated by his ‘exceptional intelligence’.
The first sign other students had that the relationship was more than academic came during the play’s closing party at a local restaurant, where a fellow student looked on as the pair shared what he cryptically described as a ‘tender moment’.
The little girl with a pudding bowl hairstyle sitting on her mother’s knee is Brigitte Trogneux and on the far left is her brother Jean-Michel
Their romance blossomed and caused a scandal in the province. Macron’s parents then sent him to Paris to attend another school, but his desire to be with his teacher and the pursuit of her remained.
Brigitte’s daughter Tiphaine Auzière, who is only six years younger than her stepfather, recently shed light on how she and her two older siblings really felt when Macron, 17 at the time, declared he wanted to marry their mother , then 42.
Speaking to Paris Match ahead of the release of her first novel, Auzière revealed how she and sister Laurence, 47, and brother Sebastian, 49, faced judgment and ‘slander’ when news of the scandalous romance broke in their local communities.
Brigitte Macron with her daughter Tiphaine Auziere, who has spoken out about her mother’s story in a recent Paris Match interview
She told the French magazine: ‘The attacks, the slander, the judgments. It was not yet the era of social networks, but we were in a small provincial town. Everything is known.’
Mrs Macron, whose maiden name was Trogneux, was a teacher until 2015 and quit her job when her husband entered the political world.
She has kept a low profile since her husband was first elected in 2017, but has made fighting school and cyberbullying one of her personal causes.