Brigitte Macron and her family were denounced when she began dating her teenage pupil Emmanuel, a new biography has claimed. Now the first lady of France, Mrs Macron shocked locals in Amiens when details emerged of her relationship with the future president.
Her parents – both doctors – were treated ‘like they had the plague’, had their door spat on and were sent letters denouncing their daughter. Maëlle Brun’s unauthorised biography, titled ‘Brigitte Macron: L’Affranchie (The Unfettered Woman)’, has hit the shelves as President Macron lands in Britain today for his first visit since moving into the Élysée Palace. The book reveals the depth of the hostility Mrs Macron encountered after she began the relationship with her teenage pupil at the private La Providence Lycée Catholic school. She was from a wealthy family known for its cake business, had a successful banker husband and was a mother to three children.
But when she met Emmanuel for the first time – he was 14, she was 38 – her respectable life was about to be ended.
Mrs Macron has previously said the couple fell in love when Emmanuel was 15 – the age of consent in France – but their affair still scandalised Amiens. Brun quotes a friend of Mrs Macron who explains that the period is a ‘wound’ in her life which she does not enjoy speaking about. ‘But she has sometimes told me she lost all her friends,’ the acquaintance went on. ‘Friends with whom she went on holiday changed overnight and no longer wanted to speak to her.’ Brun adds that tensions ran ‘extremely high’ at the time of the relationship.
Their affair ended Mrs Macron’s marriage to Andrew-Louis Auziere, now 66 – though she did not get divorced until 2006 – and led to Mr Macron being removed from the school and sent to Paris. Auziere ha d a ‘violent reaction’ when he heard she was having an affair, the biography claims. He is said to have stormed out of the family home and was incandescent with rage over the relationship. Emmanuel Macron also happened to be a school friend of the Auziere’s daughter, Laurence, at the time. ‘When [Brigitte’s] husband learns the truth, his reaction is violent,’ writes Brun. ‘To be replaced by a schoolmate of his daughter, by an adolescent whom he had often received at his home? That’s a difficult wound to heal.’ Mr Auziere was working in finance at the time, and had been enjoying a happy life with his wife and three children in Amiens. ‘And the banker did not procrastinate – he leaves,’ the book explains, quoting an old neighbour as saying: ‘He was not seen again. It was as if he had disappeared.’
The book continues: ‘He took it like such a slap. It’s necessary to understand it. I think it wasn’t easy to see the children appreciating Emmanuel afterwards.’ There have been next to no public sightings of Mr Auziere since that fateful day in September 1996, and it was a full ten years before their divorce was finalised. This allowed Emmanuel and Brigitte to finally marry, following what is described in the book as a ‘taboo relationship’. The book says they first met in September 1992, when Emmanuel was just 15 and joined the then Mrs Auziere’s Providence theatre workshop in Amiens. They chose to marry in the seaside resort of Le Touquet, where Mr Auziere had himself married the then Brigitte Trogneux in June 1974. Mr Auziere was born and grew up in the former French African colony of Cameroon, but it is not known where he is today.His children with Brigitte – Laurence, Sebastian and Tiphanie – are said to maintain contact, despite also being extremely close to Mr Macron. Mrs Macron, who is now a grandmother, has never spoken about Mr Auziere, but frequently explains why she pursued her relationship with Mr Macron. ‘There are times in your life where you need to make vital choices,’ she said in an interview with Elle magazine last year. And for me, that was it. So, what has been said over the 20 years, it’s insignificant. Of course, we have breakfast together, me and my wrinkles, him with his youth, but it’s like that.’
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