Leave Brigitte Macron alone. We French need to lay off our first ladies

it’s almost a ritual. In France, it takes only a few months after the election of a new president for essays, pamphlets, picture albums, novels even, about the great man’s political ideas – but also his “true” or “hidden” personal story – to start flooding bookshops. More surprisingly, and perhaps more revealingly, France’s first ladies get a similar treatment.

Although Emmanuel Macron has been in power for only 18 months, his wife, Brigitte, has already been the subject of five books. In January 2018, Brigitte Macron: L’affranchie came out, followed four months later by Brigitte Macron: La confidente. We were also treated to Les Macron and Lettre Ouverte à Brigitte Macron, a plea for assisted dying by an author hoping she would pass the message on to her other half so he’d make it legal.

Madame la Présidente, published last week by two journalists from the daily newspaper Le Parisien, follows this seemingly inexorable trend. This time, the authors promise to reveal all about the first lady’s real political role. The president’s close guard of advisers, reportedly nicknamed the Mormons’ Club, have had to learn how to deal with Mrs President and work alongside her. You will have easily guessed the thesis of this new book: Brigitte is Emmanuel’s first and last adviser on all matters, the president’s real eminence grise. I can almost hear the extreme right, with its dodgy take on French history, branding Brigitte France’s new Richelieu. Cherchez la cunning femme.

This new book tells us, for instance, that, in the evening, after the counsellors have gone home and the shutters have been drawn, Brigitte gives the president her lowdown on the day’s events. Nothing escapes her and she alone can be frank with her president husband – frank as in blunt, frank as in honest.

Although reportedly more to the right than her husband, we are told that Brigitte is “intuitive, hypersensitive” and keeps her husband’s feet firmly on the ground. She is the first to worry whenever she feels he is not understood, the first to raise the alarm whenever he is perceived as more on the side of the privileged and the first to encourage him to be less aloof and explain himself and his policies better to the French people. Number one on the Amazon booksellers’ list, Madame la Présidente has already been denounced by the anti-Macron press as saccharine spin doctoring. In other words, it’s being too kind to the president and his wife and makes them appear too normal.

In fact, whether this umpteenth book tells the truth or not about Brigitte’s political role is almost irrelevant. Like all the others before it, it is here to feed an unhealthy ancien regime thirst. Though they may value their privacy, the French like nothing more than a glimpse into the lives of the president and his consort or favourite. Nicolas Sarkozy was allegedly blessed with both, his moody and erratic second wife, Cécilia, who didn’t even bother voting for him, and his third wife, model-chanteuse-heiress Carla Bruni, who is richer than he is.

Next, François Hollande and France’s first girlfriend, Valérie Trierweiler, were a rather unhappy presidential couple to observe until the president was seen on a scooter at night going to secret meetings with the actor Julie Gayet, his now official muse.

If all France’s first ladies have had to cope with the increasingly invasive curiosity of their compatriots, few have known the level of scrutiny endured by Brigitte. At first celebrated, the Macrons are now more often than not vilified to a degree rarely seen in France. Since the summer, mentions of a €34,000 prefab pool at their French Riviera official residence or of a new Sèvres porcelain service and new carpet fitting at the Elysée Palace have fed the rancour of the extremes.

In just a few months, Emmanuel has become a figure of hatred for the gilets jaunes protesters, but also for many on the extremes of left and right. Brigitte may remain more popular than her husband in the polls, yet she has also been the target of the gilets jaunes’ wrath. At first admired for being a bourgeoise who shattered social conventions by marrying a former pupil 24 years her junior, and for being the love and mentor of a remarkable young man who rose to the top with lightning speed, she now suffers regular appalling misogynistic attacks. Slogans painted by the gilets jaunes in the streets of Paris reveal nothing but pure, sexist violence. Among them: “Brigitte, we are going to rape you.” It feels as if the protesters and political extremes have found their Marie Antoinette, a woman they can simply blame for all their woes.

In the end, those many essays on France’s first ladies, whether written by sycophants, critics or professional haters, are far more revealing about their authors and French society as a whole than about their subject. They shed light on a people and a country that often feels stuck in the 1790s. Always busy replaying the revolution in the streets, we French can’t help playing with the idea of deposing our king and his queen.

To think that Brigitte Macron might in fact be no Marie Antoinette, no Pompadour, nor Josephine is almost too hard to envisage – a real killer blow to the eternal revolutionaries bogged down in sexist cliches.