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Emmanuel & Brigitte Macrons love story is creepy as hell, actually

The French presidential runoff election is this weekend. French voters must choose between Marine le Pen, a Holocaust-denying fascist, or a centrist banker named Emmanuel Macron. Macron is getting a lot of coverage in the French and international media because A) he’s leading in the polls in many believe he will be France’s next president and B) he’s married to a woman 24 years older than him. What would have been an interesting – and perhaps “very French” – story about a marriage that is somewhat unconventional has taken a weird turn. Macron’s wife Brigitte was literally his high school teacher. They fell in love when he was 15 years old. He had to be sent away because his parents lost their sh-t. And it sounds like Brigitte was pretty much grooming him from the start, because she – the adult! – was convinced that he was a one-of-a-kind genius like Mozart.

At 15, Macron fell in love with his high school drama teacher, Brigitte Auzière. She was married with three children — and 24 years his senior. Now 64, she is married to Macron and set to become the first lady of France. In the recent television documentary Emmanuel Macron — The Strategy of a Star, Brigitte Auzière Macron says she never felt the age difference between them. She describes the bond that first formed when they worked together to rewrite a play.

“We wrote together every Friday,” she says in the film, “and little by little, I became completely subjugated by the intelligence of this young man. His mind is so full and perfect. His capacities are completely beyond any normal human being’s.”

Years later, Auzière confided to a friend that she had the feeling she was “working with Mozart.”

Macron’s parents were shocked when they found out about the relationship with his teacher. They asked Auzière not to see their son again until he was 18. Biographer Fulda says the story is like something right out of the classic French novels by Balzac or Stendhal that Macron devoured as a child. Fulda says his relationship with Auzière caused a complete scandal in the small, provincial city of Amiens in northern France.

“You’ve got to imagine that this story begins in a provincial city, where everybody knows what everybody does, everybody speaks,” says Fulda. “So it’s difficult to live this story in a small city like Amiens. And especially because Brigitte Macron comes from a prominent and well-established family that has a chain of shops specializing in macaroons.”

Macron’s parents sent him to Paris to finish secondary school at one of the country’s best high schools. But his bond with his former teacher only became stronger.

“They spoke for hours on the phone every day,” says Fulda. “And Emmanuel told Brigitte, ‘I will be back for you. Whatever you do, I will marry you.’ ”

They married in 2007. In a video from the reception, the handsome young groom thanks the guests for their support over the previous 13 years.

“We’re not exactly a normal couple,” he says. “But you have accepted us and stood by us — and we exist, thanks to you.”

Macron has said his parents initially “took it badly.”

“Strength of conviction was required,” he told Fulda. “They thought on several occasions that it was going to stop and naturally did everything to encourage that. … You have to learn to fight for things, to bear the burden and have a life which does not in any way correspond to other peoples’ lives.”

[From NPR]

I’m sorry, but I laughed at “Brigitte Macron comes from a prominent and well-established family that has a chain of shops specializing in macaroons.” Macaroon-shop-owning family = local French A-list. But seriously, this story is… not telling us what they think it’s telling us. They are trying to frame it as “he’s always been a leader, he’s always known what he wants, he’s always been passionate and intense and brilliant.” But what it’s really telling us is that a naive-yet-precocious teenage boy developed an intense crush on his married teacher, and instead of shutting it down, Brigitte groomed him and wouldn’t release him, and instead built up this intense fantasy of Emmanuel being this one-of-a-kind visionary and their love was different and special. This says terrible things about her.

Photos courtesy of Getty.

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