Emmanuel Macron took a swipe at Donald Trump as the French president defended suing the American podcaster Candace Owens for falsely claiming his wife was born a man.

Mr Macron, the 47-year-old French president, told Paris Match magazine that he felt he had no choice but to file a lawsuit in order to “defend his honour” over the unfounded gender conspiracy theory regarding his 72-year-old spouse.

Since last year, Ms Owens, 36, whose YouTube channel has four million subscribers, has been promoting a five-year-old French conspiracy theory that Brigitte Macron was born as a man named Jean-Michel Trogneux and changed gender.

Ms Owens serialised the subject in an eight-part podcast she released this year, called Becoming Brigitte.

That prompted the Macrons to file a lawsuit in July, arguing that they had “suffered substantial reputational damage” and spent “considerable sums of money to correct the public record”.