Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron whipped the internet and conservative media into a frenzy over the weekend, when video circulated showing the latter aggressively shoving the former’s face just before they stepped off a plane in Vietnam. Were they in the midst of a domestic dispute? Does the French first lady regularly manhandle her husband when she’s seemingly unaware that cameras are rolling? Is their marriage in trouble? According to the French president, none of the above. Instead, what people saw was merely part of their standard repartee, which he doesn’t expect prudes like you to understand.
On Monday, Macron said he and his wife were simply “bickering and, rather, joking around,” saying that’s something “we often do.” Speaking to TMZ, a French official called the interaction “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.” Maybe in your unsophisticated circles this sort of thing is uncommon, but for the Macrons, it’s their thing; if there weren’t state business to attend to, perhaps it would have led to throes of passion and a shared cigarette.
Commenting on the reaction to the footage, Macron said, “I’m surprised by it. It turns into some kind of global catastrophe where people are even coming up with theories to explain it. It’s nonsense.” He added that conspiracy theories about the footage were part of a disinformation campaign started by “crazy people.” Nearly three weeks ago, a video featuring Macron, German chancellor Friedrich Merz, and British prime minister Keir Starmer showed a tissue on the table they were sitting around, leading to wild claims that it was a “bag of cocaine.” In response, Macron’s office said in a statement: “When European unity becomes inconvenient, disinformation goes so far as to make a simple tissue look like drugs. This fake news is being spread by France’s enemies, both abroad and at home. We must remain vigilant against manipulation.”
A right-wing French commentator told Europe 1 that the video of the Macrons indicated “there may be domestic violence against men” and that the French president “cannot even command respect from his wife when there are cameras in front of him.”
In his remarks to reporters, Macron also referred to a video of a recent handshake between him and Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, which he said was another source of disinformation against him. “It’s been three weeks—if you look at the international agenda of the president of the French Republic, from Kyiv to Tirana to Hanoi, there are people who have watched the videos and believe that I shared a bag of cocaine, that I had a ‘mano a mano’ with a Turkish president, and that right now I’m having a fight with my wife. None of this is true,” he told reporters. “So everyone needs to calm down and focus on the real news.”
The Macrons, who met when Emmanuel was 15 and Brigitte was 39—and a teacher at his school—are hardly the first duo to be captured on camera in an exchange that left people wondering about the state of their relationship. In 2014, Beyoncé was seen watching her sister, Solange Knowles, kick and hit Jay-Z in an elevator following a Met Gala after-party. A few years later, first lady Melania Trump appeared to slap her husband’s hand away as he tried to hold hers after disembarking from Air Force One in Tel Aviv. She eventually shared in her memoir that the red carpet that had been laid out for the couple, Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and his wife, Sara, “simply could not accommodate all four of us abreast,” claiming that interpretations to the contrary were the work of the media and “gossipmongers.”
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