May-December romance spices up French election
PARIS — Emmanuel Macron, the front-runner in Sunday’s French presidential election, shares something with President Donald Trump: a 24-year age gap with his wife. The difference is that Macron’s wife is the older one.
That cliche-busting fact — a candidate young enough to be his wife’s son, rather than old enough to be her father — is a little social “revenge” that delights many French women, including Martine Bergossi.
“Why can’t we marry younger men? I date them all the time,” said Bergossi, the stylish owner of Alternatives, a secondhandcouture shop in Paris, who prefers to leave her exact age to the imagination.
“It’s normal to see men with younger women,” she said. “So it’s rather great to see the opposite.”
France is famous for its laissez-faire attitude toward sex and love, yet the MayDecember romance between Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron has added a little ooh-la-la to a presidential campaign that is otherwise a deadly serious matter.
Macron, a pro-European Union centrist, is facing off against far-right candidate Marine Le Pen, a blunt populist who rails darkly against immigration and threatens to yank France out of the European Union and NATO.
Macron, a former investment banker, is 39 and his wife, Brigitte, just turned 64.
Macron was only 15 when he met Brigitte Trogneux, a married teacher at his high school in northern France who had three children. Macron’s parents sent him to Paris to put distance between the teacher who ran the drama club and their precocious son, but their bond lasted, she divorced, and 10 years ago they were married. Brigitte Macron is now a grandmother.
Le Pen, if elected, would make history as France’s first female president, but men turned out in greater numbers for her than women did in the first round of elections, according to polls. In interviews, many women said that although they would like to see a female president, they were deeply concerned about Le Pen’s anti-immigrant, antiglobalist views and her party’s conservative views on women’s reproductive rights.
Nearly all of the women interviewed said they were more interested in Macron because his marriage breaks the mold.
French politics has long been dominated by men with younger lovers.
François Hollande, the current president, separated from his partner, Valerie Trierweiler, after a very public affair with an actress 18 years his junior. Former president François Mitterrand took a mistress when he was in his 40s, a decidedly younger woman who famously stood near his wife at his funeral in 1996.
“Did men ask anybody when they started marrying younger women?” asked Karin Lewin, an artist with a studio in Montmartre. “Who sets the rules?”
She likes that Macron is shaking up the men’s political club.
So do others. “Every single day, I see an older man with a woman his kids’ age coming into the hotel,” said Chloe Tournadre, 26, who works at a luxury hotel.
Lilach Eliyahu, a fashion designer, said the fact that Macron has a wife who “has wrinkles and cellulite makes me think of him as a feminist. He is the opposite of Donald Trump.”
Cecile Alduy, a French professor at Stanford University who is in Paris this semester, said political spouses in France do not command the public attention they do in the U.S. “It was so unusual and commented on” when Brigitte Macron joined her husband on stage after he won the first-round vote, she said. Many women find it interesting that Macron is putting his wife in the spotlight, even appearing on the cover of a magazine with her in a bathing suit at the beach.
Speaking of the beach, the Macrons also have been the subject of jokes. A widely circulated mock photo on the Internet purports to show the couple’s “first date”: a woman walking hand in hand at the beach with a toddler.
“I can’t remember a day since I got out of college when I wasn’t boozing or had a spliff, or something,” Pitt said.
Pitt said he now realizes he was trying to escape from his feelings. By the time he started a family, he was done with marijuana and was just using alcohol as his numbing agent. But things got out of control. (There were rumors that an altercation on an airplane that sparked the separation was the result of Pitt’s drunkenness.) So he quit.
“And I’m really happy, it’s been half a year now, which is bittersweet, but I’ve got my feelings in my fingertips again,” he said.
It isn’t always easy — he owns a winery.
He isn’t going to start a custody battle
Luckily for him, he and Jolie agreed to work things out privately. He thinks court battles turn into longterm nightmares featuring “vitriolic hatred.”
He’s having an existential crisis
Pitt seems somewhat disgusted with himself, even calling himself an “a——” at one point.
He delved into his tendency to ruin a good thing (his failed marriage to Jennifer Aniston will come to mind): “I tend to run things into the ground,” he said. “I’ve got to run it off a cliff.”
These days, he’s sculpting, seeing a therapist and examining his shortcomings.
“For me this period has really been about looking at my weaknesses and failures,” he said. “And this is coming from a guy who hit the lottery. ... I hit the lottery, and I still would waste my time on those hollow pursuits.”
He’s listening to a lot of Frank Ocean
He said for the first time he’s understanding R&B, seeing it as a celebration that comes from pain. He’s also been playing Marvin Gaye’s “Here, My Dear.”
In addition, Pitt keeps coming back to a story about an African mother he met once. She had lost nine of her family members but had the biggest laugh he’d ever heard.
His constant companion is a bulldog named Jacques
He doesn’t do much except lie around, “but he’s very loyal,” Pitt said.
He’s gotten really into matcha green tea
Pitt has found a new beverage of choice.
“He deliberately sprinkles some green powder in a cup with a sifter, then pours in the boiling water, whisking with a bamboo brush, until the liquid is a harlequin froth,” according to GQ’s Michael Paterniti. It seems to be just one of the ways Pitt is trying to keep himself occupied.
“If I’m not creating something, doing something, putting it out there, then I’ll just be creating scenarios of fiery demise in my mind,” he said. “You know, a horrible end.”