Brigitte Macron’s ‘fairytale journey’ from school teacher to first lady – and how she met the French president while she was a teacher at his school – is to be recounted in a French TV series, its creators have announced.
Production company Gaumont, which made hit 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 in Amiens, northern France. The first episode is set to 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 destiny,’ writer Bénédicte Charles told Le Figaro.
The Macrons – who have a 24-year age gap – 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 wanted to 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 wish to be named, said it was the first they had heard of the biopic.
‘We are not associated with this project which we learnt about today in the press,’ the source said.
The cast has not yet been announced, but the show is set to be over six episodes of 45 minutes. It is set to be penned by Ms Charles and Olivier Pouponneau.
The series comes after a 2023 film titled ‘Bernadette’, starring French icon Catherine Deneuve as the wife of former president Jacques Chirac.
It tells how Bernadette Chirac carved herself a place in the limelight after being cast aside following her husband’s 1995 election.
The now French President was just 15-years-old when he met Madame Auziere, a teacher who was 24 years his senior, at Lycee La Providence in Amiens.
Brigitte, whose eldest daughter Laurence was in the same class as Macron, she was captivated by his ‘exceptional intelligence’.
The first sign other pupils had that the relationship was more than academic came during the play’s closing party at a local restaurant, with one contemporary watching as the pair shared what he described, cryptically, as a ‘tender moment’.
The little girl with a pudding bowl haircut sitting on her mother’s knee is Brigitte Trogneux, and 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 pursuit of her remained.
Brigitte’s daughter Tiphaine Auzière, who is just six years younger than her step-father, recently shone a 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 judgement and ‘backbiting’ as news of the scandalous romance broke in their local community.
Brigitte Macron with her daughter Tiphaine Auziere, who has spoken out about her mother’s history in a recent Paris Match interview
She told the French magazine: ‘The attacks, the backbiting, 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, quitting her job when her husband entered the world of politics.
She has kept a low profile since her husband was first elected in 2017, but has made fighting school- and cyber-bullying one of her personal causes.
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