Meet France's new Premiere Dame
Monday 8 May 2017 09:24, UK
Alessandra Rizzo, News Reporter
She was his drama teacher at school, then his wife and confidante - and now will become France's Premiere Dame.
Already one of the most talked about women in France, Brigitte Trogneux, wife of the , is preparing herself for a public role for the next five years.
Ms Trogneux has been a constant presence next to her husband during the campaign that brought him to the Elysee Palace. She has managed his agenda, edited his speeches and advised him on his stage presence.
She has been his closest aide.
"Without her, I wouldn't be me," Mr Macron said of his wife after he won the first round of voting last month, bringing her onto the podium and publicly thanking her before his supporters.
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When the two first met, he was a teenager, she was a married 40-year-old coaching him for a school play.
The age difference of the presidential couple - she is 64, he 39 - is regularly mocked by French cartoonists and satirical shows, often describing Mr Macron as a schoolboy taking instructions from his teacher.
But feminists and others denounce the comments as sexist and misogynistic, noting that the age difference is identical to that between Donald Trump and his wife Melania.
Mr Macron addressed this issue during the campaign, saying his family is a "little different".
"So yes, there are in France lots of families," he said.
"There are same-sex couples and different-sex couples. There are different filiations. And there is plenty of love."
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Born Brigitte Trogneux on 13 April 1953, she was the youngest of six children in a family of wealthy chocolate makers in the northern town of Amiens.
She married a banker with whom she had three children.
In 1993, in the Providence Jesuit college where she taught French and drama, the young Macron acted in a play under her supervision.
The next year, the two rewrote a play together, adapting it to include more roles.
"Little by little, I came totally under the spell of the intelligence of this young boy," Ms Trogneux told France 3 TV.
Mr Macron's parents, worried about the budding love affair, sent him away for his last year of high school. Brigitte eventually divorced, returned to her maiden name, Ms Trogneux, and joined him in Paris.
The couple married in 2007. They have no children together but Mr Macron says his wife's three children and seven grand-children are his family.
They were both complete unknowns when Mr Macron was appointed economy minister in socialist president Francois Hollande's government in August 2014.
But the public got to discover her in a series of cover stories in the popular society magazine Paris Match.
A fashion lover, she can be seen in the front row of shows at Paris Fashion Week - recently she was at Dior and Louis Vuitton shows.
In 2015, in order to help her husband in his political ambitions, she quit her job at a posh Parisian high school, where students remember her as an enthusiastic and joyful person keen to share her passion for French authors.
Mr Macron has said he wants to make the French First Lady a formal, unpaid role within the first few weeks of his presidency.
As a First Lady, Ms Trogneux told Paris Match magazine last year that she would continue to focus on young people.
"My combat will be education," she said.