French president Emmanuel Macron’s relationship with his wife Brigitte is a hot topic after a video emerged in which she appears to push him in the face.
The video, taken by The Associated Press, shows the couple arriving in Hanoi, Vietnam, at the beginning of a tour of Southeast Asia. Brigitte Macron can be seen reaching out her arms and seemingly shoving her husband before he descends from the plane. After appearing to register the camera, Macron smiles and waves.
The footage is the latest occurrence in the couple’s dramatic relationship history, which has been enshrouded in controversy, from their first meeting, when Mr Macron was just 15 and Brigitte was 39.
Mr Macron has three step-children through his marriage to Brigitte. They do not have children together. The couple live together at the opulent Élysée Palace, the official presidential residence.
Here’s a look back at the couple’s story and the unanswered questions that the latest incident has raised.
How did Emmanuel Macron meet his wife?
Mr Macron was 15 years old when he first met Brigitte Trogneux, then 39, a teacher at Lycee La Providence in Amiens, a city in Northern France. She was his drama teacher.
The pair co-authored an adaptation of The Art of Comedy, working together every Friday night for months, according to the Daily Mail.
Ms Trogneux was dazzled by Mr Macron. She said to a friend years later: “The day when we wrote the play together, I had a feeling I was working with Mozart.
“The writing became an excuse. I felt that we had always known each other.”
Brigitte Trogneux was married to a banker named André-Louis Auzière at the time. But working on the play brought her closer to Mr Macron.
“As the audience clapped before the curtain came down, the teenager took a bow and kissed his teacher on each cheek as she smiled with obvious delight, with the start of a love affair between Macron and Brigitte emerging,” The Daily Mail reported.
Mr Macron’s parents were less happy with their son’s bourgeoning relationship. Initially, they thought that their son was dating his teacher’s daughter, Laurence, until the truth was revealed via a family friend.
Author Anne Fulda, who wrote Emmanuel Macron: A Perfect Young Man spoke to the French president’s parents about the affair.
They told Fulda that they’d decided to meet with Ms Trogneux, requesting that she would not see her son again until he was an adult. She refused to “promise anything”.
Francoise Nogues-Macron, Emmanuel’s mother, said that his maternal grandmother was more open-minded about the relationship.
“My mother, who would never have tolerated such a situation for her own children, showed herself to be much more open and tolerant with regard to her grandchildren’s love affairs,” she said.
The politician’s parents decided to send him to boarding school in Paris. However, both deny that they threatened to kick him out the house and say that attending Lycee Henri IV was always the plan.
Brigitte Trogneux told Paris Match that Mr Macron had promised to marry her when he was just 17, vowing to come back to her after Paris. However, she confessed that she believed he would fall in love with someone his own age.
Yet Mr Macron stuck to his promise. The couple married in the autumn of 2007, the same year that Brigitte divorced her husband. Her three children attended the wedding, which took place in a city hall in Le Touquet, a seaside town in northern France, where Ms Trogneux married her first husband.
Mr Macron said: “I had to fight in order to live both my private and my professional life as I wish.
“I had to fight and it wasn’t the easiest or most obvious, not the most automatic thing to do, nor did it correspond with established norms.”
What has been said about their age gap?
While some have raised eyebrows about the couple’s age disparity, others have interpreted the relationship differently, describing the backlash as sexist or misogynistic.
“What is fuelling endless chatter about Macron’s position in the relationship and his history with Brigitte is the fact that she is his senior. If Macron had been a woman and Brigitte a man, likely there would never have been such an uproar — at least in France,” The Independent wrote.
“In the US, there has been no backlash against Donald Trump, whose flamboyant wife Melania Trump is 24 years younger than him — strangely enough, that’s the same age gap as the Macrons.”
Mr Macron has pushed back against the age gap scrutiny. "If I had been 20 years older than my wife, nobody would have thought for a single second that I couldn't be [an intimate partner]," he told Le Parisien. "It's because she is 20 years older than me that lots of people say, 'This relationship can't be tenable, it can't be possible.'"
Mrs Macron has also publicly addressed their age difference. “There are times in your life where you need to make vital choices,” she told Elle France. “Of course, we have breakfast together, me and my wrinkles, him with his youth, but it’s like that.”
However, others have commented that it is not the couple’s age disparity but the student/teacher dynamic that is an issue. “Of course we should celebrate a relationship in which the usual gender and age differences are swapped,” The Guardian wrote.
“But to conflate the idea of older woman/younger man relationships with a woman shacking up with her student is just de trop.”
Response to recent events
The recently circulated video appears to show Brigitte Macron pushing her husband in the face as he descended from a plane on Sunday.
An Elysee official has since played down the moment, stating that the footage did not show an argument between the couple but a moment when the president and his wife were relaxing one last time before the start of the trip by having a laugh.”
“It was a moment of closeness,” the official said.
Mr Macron later told reporters that the couple were merely joking around.
