Brigitte Macron’s push has reverberated around the world. Why was it met with a shrug in France? | Pauline Bock

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The French president’s plane has just landed in Hanoi. Its door is open and Emmanuel Macron is standing looking at his wife, Brigitte, who is still inside. Two hands – hers – push his face. Macron seems to bring his arms up in defence, and steps back. Dumbstruck, the president turns and sees the cameras on the asphalt. He’s being filmed. In a split second, his shock morphs into a smile. He waves, charmingly, at the journalists: he’s back in control. As Macron and his wife walk down the plane’s stairs, he offers her his arm. She doesn’t take it.

The strange moment was caught by Associated Press cameras, and immediately went viral, being shared around the world. Questioned by the French press, which woke up to the images on Monday morning, the Élysée Palace originally claimed that the video was a deepfake, then admitted the scene was real but was simply a “moment of closeness” shared by the presidential couple. They were “decompressing one last time before the start of the visit, larking around”, a source close to the president briefed the French press. “But that was enough to feed the conspiracy theorists.”

Macron doubled down later during the day, explaining that he and Brigitte were “bickering, or rather joking”, and that he had been “taken by surprise” by the cameras: “The video becomes a sort of geoplanetary catastrophe. In the world we live in, we don’t have a lot of time to lose. This is all a bit of nonsense.” French TV commentators were left wondering why the Élysée would deny that the whole scene happened: “It becomes newsworthy because the Élysée lied about it,” a BFMTV journalist noted. Yet the French media immediately accepted Macron’s “squabble” explanation and moved on, the story no longer leading news websites and broadcasts.

French political journalists have long applied the “bedroom rule” to their coverage: what happens in the bedroom, or in romantic relationships more generally, is private and therefore not newsworthy. This has begun to change since the #MeToo movement, thanks to a younger generation of journalists keen to highlight that the private can be political, too, but the attitude remains prevalent in France – even more so if the person in question is the president.

There were political reasons, too, to deflect attention from the video – the president is being frequently targeted by online conspiracy theories, and pro-Russia news sources have been leading on the video. Macron said: “For three weeks, people have looked at videos of me and think that I have shared a bag of cocaine with Keir Starmer, that I have fought with the Turkish president, and, now, that I am having a domestic dispute with my wife. None of that is true, yet these videos are real. Everyone should calm down.” The Élysée Palace’s denial in response to the “cocaine bag” story was funny and straight to the point: the palace’s X account simply tweeted a photo of the “cocaine bag”, which was really just a tissue, and commented: “That’s a tissue. To blow your nose.”

The incident also reignited speculation around the circumstances of Brigitte and Emmanuel’s relationship. Some people on social media were quick to point out that he was 15 and Brigitte was his 39-year-old theatre teacher when they met. Macron has brushed it off several times over the years, speaking about the inevitability of their love, and a certain amount of PR was fed to the press back in 2017, when he was first elected. The media then spoke of their “20-year age difference” and of him being a “year 12 student” when they met. It is, in fact, a 25-year age gap, and he was in year 10, not 12. Watching the video, it was hard not to wonder what the response would have been if the roles were reversed: what if an older man were to be filmed pushing his younger wife in the face? Would that be met with a shrug that it’s no big deal? The power and gender dynamics are different in each case – he is the president, after all – but all forms of partner-on-partner violence deserve attention.

There is no way to know what transpired between them at that moment, but optics do matter, especially in the leader of a country. To imply that it is normal for a “squabble” to become physical, even if in this case there was an innocent explanation, is unhelpful at best.

That Macron doesn’t see the potential problem in the video points to a narrow, obsolete understanding of couple dynamics and domestic violence. He has twice proclaimed gender equality to be the “great cause” of his presidential mandates before refusing to properly fund it; he has spoken in support of the French actor Gérard Depardieu, who has recently been found guilty of sexual assault and is soon to be on trial again for rape; and to this day, the former interior minister and current justice minister, Gérald Darmanin, who was accused of sexual assault (the case has now been dismissed), has remained in Macron’s cabinet.

It would have been easy enough to turn this moment into a public health message. He could have simply said that he’s all right, thanks for your consideration, but that men who do experience violence should feel no shame in seeking help, using it as an opportunity to discuss domestic violence prevention. Instead, he mocked the “fools” who thought anything could be amiss.