Brigitte Macron
Source: Quirinale
The latest absurdity in the Macron household is not the July filing of their Delaware defamation suit but the September pledge to submit photographic and “scientific” evidence that Madame Macron is, in fact, a woman. It is one thing for a First Lady to host garden parties, quite another to produce pregnancy photos and gynecological affidavits in a U.S. courtroom. History has seen many humiliations inflicted on France, from Waterloo to the Treaty of Versailles and on to the present day, but never before has Marianne been asked to furnish her cervix to the Superior Court of Delaware. Yet that is precisely what her lawyer Tom Clare told the BBC she is prepared to do: provide pregnancy photos and anatomical testimony, as if the dignity of the French Republic now hinged on a clinical certification of its First Lady.
That we have arrived at this spectacle is largely thanks to an unlikely midwife: Candace Owens, the American influencer who imported the “Brigitte-is-a-man” fantasy from the French conspiratorial fringe and served it up to millions of her followers.
The right is a big tent, stitched together out of grudges and suspicions, and like any canvas stretched too wide it shelters both prophets and mountebanks—the latter being a polite 18th-century word for con artists. There are plenty of positions I share with Candace Owens: impatience with progressive pieties, a distaste for globalist boilerplate, and a relish for puncturing liberal sanctimony. But agreement on some matters does not make her serious. She is not an original thinker so much as a carnival barker, measuring her influence in clickbait and courtroom summonses.
“France is tolerant enough, and pragmatic enough, to accept a homosexual president. They might even enjoy the chic of it.”
Owens, for her part, is not hated so much as distrusted. Even among those notionally on her side, she is seen less as a standard-bearer than a performer, thriving on the algorithms of outrage while tethered to the very institutions she claims to oppose. To me, she embodies bourgeois spectacle: the endless podcast circuit, the conference stage-managed like a TED talk, the viral quarrels that never risk anything beyond a spike in subscribers. In that light she is useful, but never serious. She is willing to brush against taboos but never to cross the Rubicon into creed. She is a lightning rod, not a leader. And to those who dream of sterner politics, she is the opposite of aristocratic seriousness, the chatter of the marketplace dressed up as rebellion.
Her stock-in-trade is the carnival of distrust: UFOs and secret bases, insinuations about the wilder CIA or Mossad plots, even the casual wink at the so-called moon-landing hoax. These are not arguments so much as ornaments, flashy props hanging off a narrative whose only real currency is doubt. For an audience that prefers mysteries to explanations, such stuff is irresistible. For anyone with a taste for seriousness, it is fireworks: noisy, arresting, and gone in an instant.
The real conspiracy is not that Brigitte was born Jean-Michel, but that she is what the French call a barbe, a beard. That explanation is at once more plausible and more French. The Macron marriage, an ambitious teenager and his drama teacher separated by 24 years, is strange enough to invite speculation. And if Brigitte once had the bouquet of a good vintage, she now resembles a bottle long since corked and forgotten in the cellar.
The idea that Emmanuel Macron is homosexual is not scandalous in itself. The French have always respected privacy in such matters. Across the Atlantic, Sen. Lindsey Graham, who never met a war he didn’t want America to fight, is the running joke of Washington cocktail parties, the bachelor whose every protestation of straightness fuels further doubt. Graham has chosen discretion, a “confirmed bachelor” in the Edwardian sense. Macron, more theatrical, has chosen camouflage.
History is replete with men of power whose public lives were elaborate charades. François Mitterrand kept both his wife, Danielle, and his longtime mistress Anne Pingeot, complete with a secret daughter, in parallel households, and the French press obligingly kept the secret until after his presidency. Edward Heath, Britain’s lifelong bachelor prime minister, was the subject of endless whispers. J. Edgar Hoover presided over decades of American puritanism while sharing his home with Clyde Tolson. Even Alexander the Great, though no stranger to women, reserved his passion for Hephaestion. In each case, the arrangement was dictated by the cultural limits of the time. The puzzle with Macron is why, in an age that worships “authenticity” and pins rainbow lanyards to every NATO uniform, he bothers with such theater.
The answer lies in image. Macron has always been a performance artist: the banker in Jupiter’s toga, the heir of de Gaulle striding beneath the gilded ceilings of Versailles. He is forever auditioning for the role of statesman. Every element is stagecraft, from the choreographed walkabouts to the solemn addresses as though the Élysée were a theater in the round. The beard is part of the costume. Brigitte is not so much wife as prop, the stage furniture of normality. That she is old enough to be his mother only sharpens the suspicion: The romance is so implausible it must be camouflage.
The supporting cast supplies further comedy. Alexandre Benalla, the bodyguard caught on film thrashing a May Day 2018 protester, became the subject of rumors so persistent that Macron addressed parliament with the immortal line: “Alexandre Benalla has never been my lover.” That denial was fatal. Once spoken, it is forever inscribed in the catechism of suspicion. Add to this the photographs from Saint-Martin in 2018, where Macron posed with shirtless young men after Hurricane Irma, gazing at them with the look most men used to reserve for Monica Bellucci, and the picture writes itself.
In truth, none of this matters. France is tolerant enough, and pragmatic enough, to accept a homosexual president. They might even enjoy the chic of it. Macron’s tragedy, or comedy, is that he has mistaken himself for Louis XIV, master of the mise-en-scène. In reality he is closer to a minor character in a Feydeau farce, the husband bursting through the wrong door with an implausible alibi.
So let Candace Owens chase her transvestite chimera through the courts of Delaware. The real story is older, subtler, and infinitely more French: The Fifth Republic is ruled by a man whose marriage is a stage prop, whose wife is a beard, and whose glances are less guarded than his press office. History will not file him under “defamation victim” but among those politicians who lived one life in public and another in private. Lindsey Graham should send him a Christmas card, though perhaps unsigned, just to keep up appearances.