French president Emmanuel Macron told wife he'd marry her when she was 41 and he was just 17
French President Emmanuel Macron first met his now-wife when he was just a teen and vowed to marry her, despite their age gap.
The age difference between 44-year-old Macron and his 69-year-old wife Brigitte has attracted much media attention since he became the President of France in 2017.
The pair tied the knot in 2007, but they actually met many years earlier when Macron was 15 and a pupil at La Providence High School in Amiens - where Brigitte worked.
The pair reportedly met after Brigitte, who was 39 and married at the time, ran a drama class which Macron attended.
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Despite the 24-year age gap, it seems as if the French president was smitten and promised that he would one day marry Brigitte.
Speaking to Paris Match back in 2016, Brigitte revealed: "At the age of 17, Emmanuel said to me 'whatever you do, I will marry you'.”
According to the 2018 documentary Brigitte Macron: A French Novel, Macron’s parents told her to stop seeing him until he turned 18 and sent the future president off to Paris to finish his schooling but the pair kept in touch.
In his book and political manifesto Revolution, Macron said their relationship began as 'a love often clandestine, often hidden, misunderstood by many before imposing itself.'
Brigitte divorced her first husband in 2006, marrying Macron months later - but it almost didn’t happen, according to friend Pascale Bourdel.
Bourdel told the documentary makers that Brigitte had concerns that Macron might want children in the future, which wouldn’t be possible due to their age difference.
Bourdel said: “One day, Brigitte said to me, ‘Emmanuel wants us to get married’.
“She was a little reluctant and I told her that I could not see why, and she said to me, 'You do realise how old he is, and how old I am? Maybe he'll want children.'
To which Borudel said she replied to her friend: “So, Brigitte, you're happy with him, choose happiness!"
While Macron has previously hit out at the attention surrounding the age-gap in his relationship, saying no would care if it was the other way around.
He told Le Parisien: “If I was 20 years older than my wife, nobody would think for a single second that we couldn’t be legitimately together.
“It’s because she is 20 years older than me that a lot of people say, ‘this relationship can’t be tenable, it can’t be possible.'”
Topics: Politics, World News
Claire Reid