The daughter of Emmanuel Macron's wife has spoken for the first time about her mother's rumored affair with the French president.
In an interview for the magazine Paris Match, the daughter of French first lady Tiphaine Auzière, admitted she is still hurt by the "forbidden relationship" between the then-married teacher and her then-teenage student.
Auzière was only 10 years old when she learned that her mother, who worked as a teacher, was dating a student 25 years her junior. Brigitte was still married at the time, so her three young children had to endure constant speculation about a "forbidden relationship" in Amiens, northern France.
"I learned a lot about human nature then. I know that in these moments we have to focus on what is important and move forward, ignoring the criticism. And there was everything, attacks, rumors, condemnations... At that time there were no such things as social networks, but we lived in a small provincial town, everything was known. Despite this, we kept our heads high. I am an open-minded woman, I want to move forward and I have gained a lot of tolerance," said Auzière, who is now 40 years old, reports Dailymail.
She was particularly upset that her disgraced father, André-Louis Auzière, was forced to leave the family home in 1994, although he only divorced Brigitte in 2006, allowing Macron to marry her a year later. .
"Family separation can be both sadness and opportunity. Recomposition can be an enrichment. I have a loving father and stepfather," said Auzière, adding that she always spoke of her father in the present tense, even though he died in 2019, at the age of 68.
Magazine Paris Match describes how Tiphaine was a child when the scandal broke. Young Emmanuel Macron often rang Auzieres' doorbell, so the rumors grew stronger and, of course, they had an impact on the three children who were in that house. Her sister Laurence was 17 at the time and was a colleague of Emmanuel Macron because they are the same age.
Auzière said the rumors of the "forbidden relationship" were terrifying for all the children, including her brother Sébastien, who was 19 at the time. They were all students at La Providence, a Roman Catholic high school in Amiens, where Brigitte taught drama. She also said she was deeply hurt by claims on social media that her mother Brigitte had been born a boy.
"I was worried about the kind of society we live in when I heard a story circulating on social media that my mother is actually a man. Just look at the confidence with which such a thing is said and the credibility given to such a statement. How do you resist misinformation on social media networks?" said Auzière, a lawyer by profession, who now lives in Calais with her husband and two children.
We recall that the paths of Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron crossed for the first time in high school in the north of France, when he was only 15 years old. He met a professor who was 24 years his senior at the Lycee La Providence in Amiens. The professor and her student have collaborated on the show The Art of Comedy, by the Italian writer Eduardo De Filippo, every Friday night for several months.
At the time, 39-year-old Brigitte was married to banker André-Louis Auzière, with whom she has three children. She and Emmanuel worked on the script late into the night and only when the play was staged, in front of their proud parents and family, could it be hinted that this was the beginning of a love affair.
"Every Friday I went to write a play with him for a few hours. We talked about everything. It was as if we had always known each other," the French president later revealed. Brigitte was also captivated by his "extraordinary intelligence" and felt he was so talented that it was like "working with Mozart," she once admitted.
Other students noticed that the first sign that more than just putting on a show was happening was when they were spotted at a local restaurant sharing what they cryptically described as a “tender moment.” Their romance soon blossomed and caused a scandal. Macron’s parents then sent him to another school in Paris, but his desire to be with his teacher never waned.
In an interview with the magazine Paris Match, Brigitte said she kept telling herself that Macron would "fall in love with someone his age when he was in Paris," but that didn't happen in the end. She added that she delayed marrying her current husband for 10 years because of her three children, who are roughly the same age as her younger partner.
But love won out in the end and Brigitte finally married Macron in Le Touquet on October 20, 2007, after divorcing André-Louis Auzière the year before. /Telegraph/
