Bernadette Chirac, formidable former first lady of France, dies at 93

PARIS (AP) — Bernadette Chirac, France’s iron-willed former First Lady, spent 12 years at the Élysée Palace from 1995 to 2007. President Jacques Chirac He died while building his own political power in rural Corrèze and transforming a children’s hospital charity into a national institution. He was 93 years old.

President Emmanuel Macron He confirmed her death on Saturday, saying that he and his wife Brigitte had learned with “great sadness” the death of a woman who, alongside Jacques Chirac, who died in 2019, left her mark on French history and changed the lives of millions of patients with her charitable work.

“A woman with a big heart has left us,” Macron said.

For more than half a century, Chirac was the fixed point in her late husband’s uneasy climb through Parliament, including two terms as prime minister, 18 years as mayor of Paris and, in 1995, the presidency.

In official photos, she appears with her chin lifted, her blonde hair varnished in place, a small handbag on her arm, and she looks more like an institution than a wife.

But the cartoon never fully encompassed him.

chanel suits, dark glasses, nasal voice and withering judgments became part of the national image.

Beneath them was a relentless worker and cold-blooded political operator who, almost alone among the wives of French presidents, had built a power base of her own.

Bernadette Thérèse Marie was born Chodron de Courcel in Paris on May 18, 1933, a child of money, lineage, and Catholic duty.

His father’s family included soldiers, industrialists and diplomats; an uncle had served as Charles de Gaulle’s aide in wartime London.

However, his life would be most marked by the time he spent at the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris; Here she met Jacques Chirac, a handsome and very shrewd young man whose appetite for politics would define them both.

They married in March 1956. Their union lasted 63 years and, by his own account, was a long lesson in endurance.

Jacques Chirac was famous for his warmth, appetite and instinctive connection with crowds. Observers said Bernadette’s talents were diverse.

He was controlled, socially challenging, religious, meticulous, and sometimes devastatingly funny.

Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton called her “the last queen of France” and she did little to dissuade the idea.

Her husband’s reputation as a womanizer was an open secret, choosing to meet with dry humor after so much pain.

In 1998, when the Corrèze was swarming with photographers – following rumors that Jacques Chirac could not be reached on the night of Princess Diana’s death because he was with an actress – he got out of his car and deadpanned: “Calm down. I’m not Claudia Cardinale. Or Lollobrigida.”

“It was hard at first. I was very heartbroken, but then I got used to it,” he said years later in a television documentary.

“I told myself that it was just the way it was and that I had to accept it with as much dignity as possible.”

Sent to look after the rural castle at Corrèze while her husband sought power in Paris, she did more than take care of him. In 1971, he was elected as a municipal council member in Sarran. In 1979 he became a member of the general council in Corrèze and held this position until 2015.

Its influence increased after Jacques Chirac became president in 1995. In France, the First Lady’s role has no constitutional mandate, but she has made the Élysée a place where her approval matters.

He could be loyal, tough, and unforgiving, and he understood that campaigns were not just about speeches and polls, but also about debts, slights, and resentments.

But it also opened up a space for female authority in a male political culture that showed little interest in sharing power; which made it quietly clear that she would not be reduced to his “wife”.

His deepest grief remained mostly private.

The Chiracs’ eldest daughter, Laurence, suffered from severe anorexia after meningitis in adolescence and made multiple suicide attempts. He never fully recovered and died in 2016 at the age of 58.

This difficult period led Chirac to engage in charity work that reshaped his public image.

In 1994, he became head of a medical charity that raised money for children in hospitals. For millions of French viewers, the woman once mocked for her arrogance has become the face of hospitalized children and families living in hospital beds.

He continued to rule until 2019, when he handed over the task to Brigitte Macron, wife of the current president of France, and became honorary president.

By then it had already become a political force in its own right.

“My husband doesn’t do politics anymore, but I do,” she told reporters after Jacques Chirac left office in 2007.

She famously nicknamed Élysée official Dominique de Villepin, whom she distrusted, “Nero”, but she also reportedly helped her husband reconcile with his former protégé Nicolas Sarkozy, 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 realized.

After Jacques Chirac left the Élysée, his health declined and his public voice diminished. His stayed sharper for longer. According to French media, when asked how he was doing, he replied in his flat and unmistakable voice: “He’s keeping the dog.”

Old age and grief eventually withdrew him from the public eye.

When Jacques Chirac died in 2019, he was too frail to attend the public farewell ceremony where French and foreign leaders honored him.