Macron drama tells love story of pupil and his premiere dame

French film-makers are being braver about exploring the private lives of politicians.

The age gap between President Macron and his wife, Brigitte, has raised eyebrows. Picture: AFP

Brigitte Macron’s romance with the teenage pupil who became the youngest president of France will be turned into a television series.

The affair that began in 1992 when the 15-year-old Emmanuel Macron fell for Brigitte Auziere, the married drama teacher 24 years his senior, is to be the focus of Brigitte, une femme libre (Brigitte, a free woman, although its international title is yet to be confirmed), which is under development by Gaumont, the oldest film company in the country.

The six-part “bio-series”, which has yet to be cast, breaks a French taboo with the fictional depiction of the private lives of a sitting head of state and his premiere dame.

It follows last year’s groundbreaking Bernadette – The President’s Wife in its foreign release – a successful satirical biopic that starred Catherine Deneuve as the wife of the late president Jacques Chirac struggling to cope with her life in the Elysee Palace.

Gaumont, one of the world’s biggest production companies, said the new series would trace the “storybook journey” of Macron’s wife, starting with her first meeting with the boy who was a classmate of her daughter at the Providence school in Amiens.

The unusual relationship at the Catholic private school, which at the time scandalised the professional classes of the northern town, led to marriage in 2007, when Macron was 29 and his wife 54.

Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron in April 2017, after the first round of the presidential election. Picture: AFP

Benedicte Charles, co-writer of the series with Olivier Pouponneau, told Le Figaro newspaper: “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.

“It’s a huge gamble. It’s a touchy subject. We were a bit stuck at first. We had to get hold of the subject and free ourselves from it to turn it into fiction.”

The series will use flashbacks to set the stage of French life from the 1970s to the 1990s, Charles added.

The Elysee Palace said it had nothing to do with the series, which will consist of 45-minute episodes. “We are not associated with this project, which we learnt about in the press,” a presidential aide said.

The Macrons’ relationship – the President is now 46 and his wife 71 – has been given widespread exposure since he declared his candidacy for the French presidency in 2016.

In 2018, a year after Macron’s election, his wife was the subject of Brigitte Macron, a French Saga, a television documentary. The age difference has also fed false claims on social media, amplified by Russian cyber operations and picked up by right-wing American commentators, that she was born a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux. Macron has denounced this and the family took successful legal action against those who spread the falsehood.

Respectful feature films have been made about most modern presidents but the entertainment world has been reluctant to depict the private lives of France’s rulers. However, French filmmakers have now been influenced by the approach of American and British producers – including Stephen Frears, who directed The Queen, starring Helen Mirren, in 2006 – and the success of Netflix series The Crown.

‘Storybook journey’: Brigitte Macron in 2017. Picture: AFP

In 2011 La Conquete (The Conquest), directed by Xavier Durringer, told the story of the rise to power of Nicolas Sarkozy. Florence Pernel played Cecilia Sarkozy, the former first lady who left him for her lover four months after his election in 2007. Sarkozy met Carla Bruni, the Italian model and singer, a month after his wife left him and married her three months later.

The Chirac family said it had been hurt by Bernadette, which focused on her supposed rebellious efforts to win public favour and handle her philandering husband. In one sequence, the film shows the hours after the fatal car crash of Diana, Princess of Wales in August 1997, when the president could not be found because he was allegedly spending the night with a female Italian actor. In the film, an Italian woman’s voice answers the telephone call from the Elysee Palace. Claude Chirac, 61, her father’s confidante and adviser, said the film treated her mother, now 90, as though she were already dead.

However, filmmakers have steered clear of the so-called Markovic affair in 1968. Photographs of Georges Pompidou’s wife, Claude, at a sex party in Paris were reportedly found in the car of Stevan Markovic, the murdered bodyguard of film idol Alain Delon.

The scandal turned out to be a smear plot by enemies of Pompidou, then Charles de Gaulle’s prime minister, who became president the year after.

The Times