Bernadette Chiracthe former first lady of France steel-willed woman who spent 12 years at the Elysee Palace from 1995 to 2007 alongside President Jacques Chirac, while she built her own political power in rural Corrèze and turned a children’s hospital charity into a national institution, has died. He was 93 years old.
ANDthe president Emmanuel Macron confirmed his death on Saturday and noted that it was with “great sadness” that he and his wife, Brigitte, learned of his death. of a woman who marked the history of france alongside Jacques Chirac, who passed away in 2019, and changed the lives of millions of patients through his charitable work.
“A great lady of the heart has left“Macron indicated.
For more than half a century, Chirac was the fixed point in her late husband’s restless rise: through Parliament, two terms as prime minister18 years as mayor of Paris and, in 1995, the presidency.
She appears in the official photographs with her chin up, her blonde hair set with hairspray, a small bag on her arm, with an air less of a spouse than of an institution.
But the cartoon never quite contained it.
The Chanel suits, the dark glasses, the nasal voice and the devastating trials became part of the national image.
Beneath it all was a tireless worker and a cold-eyed political operative who, almost alone among the wives of French presidents, built a power base of her own.
Bernadette Thérèse Marie Chodron de Courcel was born on May 18, 1933 in Paris, into an environment of money, lineage, and Catholic duty.
His father’s family included soldiers, industrialists and diplomats; an uncle had served as assistant to Charles de Gaulle in wartime London.
But her life was marked above all by her time at the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris, where she met Jacques Chirac, a handsome and highly courted young man whose appetite for politics ended up defining them both.
They married in March 1956. The union lasted 63 years and was, according to their own story, a long lesson in resistance.
Jacques Chirac was famous for his warmth, his appetite and his instinctive connection with crowds. Bernadette’s gifts were different, observers said.
She was controlled, socially imposing, devoted, demanding and at times devastatingly funny.
The Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton called it the “last queen of France”, and she did little to discourage the idea.
Her husband’s reputation as a womanizer was an open secret that she chose, after much pain, to confront with dry humor.
Surrounded by photographers in Corrèze in 1998—following rumors that Jacques Chirac had been untraceable the night Princess Diana died because he was with an actress—she got out of the car and, with complete seriousness, blurted out: “I’m not Claudia Cardinale. Not Lollobrigida.”
“At first it was hard. It broke my heart, and then I got used to it,” he said years later in a television documentary.
“I told myself that this was how things were and that I had to accept it with the greatest dignity possible,” he stressed.
Sent to guard her husband’s rural stronghold in Corrèze as he pursued power in Paris, she did much more than guard it. In 1971 she was elected municipal councilor in Sarran. In 1979 she became general councilor in Corrèze and held the seat until 2015.
Her influence grew after Jacques Chirac became president in 1995. The role of first lady in France has no constitutional power, but she made the Elysée a place where her approval mattered.
He could be loyal, acerbic and relentless, and he understood that campaigns are not only made of speeches and polls, but also of debts, slights and resentments.
Even so, a space was also opened for female authority within a political culture masculine with little interest in sharing power, silently making it clear that she would not be reduced to “the wife of.”
His deepest pain was largely kept private.
The Chiracs’ eldest daughter, Laurence, developed severe anorexia after meningitis as a teenager and attempted suicide on more than one occasion. He never fully recovered and died in 2016 at age 58.
That ordeal pushed Chirac toward charity work that transformed his public image.
In 1994, he took over running a medical charity that collected coins for children in hospitals. For millions of French viewers, the woman once ridiculed for her haughtiness became the face of hospitalized children and families living around hospital beds.
She remained at the helm until 2019, when she handed it over to Brigitte Macron, the wife of the current president of France, and she became honorary president.
By then it had long since become a political force in its own right.
“My husband is no longer involved in politics, but I am,” she told journalists after Jacques Chirac left office in 2007.
She famously nicknamed Dominique de Villepin, the Elysée official she distrusted, “Nero” but also reportedly helped orchestrate her husband’s reconciliation with Nicolas Sarkozy, the former protégé who had betrayed him politically.
Her 2001 memoir, “Conversation,” written with journalist Patrick de Carolis, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and introduced the French to a woman who was more outspoken, funnier and more independent than many had assumed.
After Jacques Chirac left the Elysée, his health deteriorated and his public voice faded. Hers stayed sharper for longer. When they asked him how he was doing, according to French media, he responded in his plain and unmistakable voice: “He takes care of the dog.”
Age and grief ended up separating her from public life.
By the time Jacques Chirac died in 2019, she was too frail to take part in the public farewell in which France and foreign leaders paid tribute to her.
