Macron was moulded by his Mrs Robinson

AS Emmanuel Macron is sworn in as President of France, the eyes of the world will fix on his decidedly odd First Family. His wife Brigitte will embrace him, while her grandchildren and adult children, one of whom is the same age as Macron and was in his class at school, will delightedly gather round.

Impeccably turned out as ever, Brigitte will channel Brigitte Bardot’s ageing sex kitten appeal, but she will still look like the President’s mother.

The 25-year age gap between the youthful looking leader and the 64-year-old glamorous granny will be plain.

The surprise acceptance of this strange marriage by an electorate desperate to stave off the advance of Marine le Pen has been delivered thanks to two narratives.

The first is that Brigitte, a 40-year-old teacher and mother of three, was swept away by the 15-year-old when their stars crossed at their Jesuit school.

Bibi, as her husband calls her, believed he was a young Mozart and she submitted to the force of his brilliant mind. He pursued her relentlessly, swearing not to give up until he made her his bride.

THE problem with this fanciful version is it forgets that Macron was just a kid with a crush. Like our law on statutory rape that says a young teenager cannot consent to sex, even if they desire and seek it, in the eyes of our law, their bond was illegal.

The other reason voters go along with the fiction of an idyllic match rather than an unwholesome and taboo union between a child and a grown woman is their 10-year marriage and evident happiness.

But surely what seems to absolve them of scandal only makes it worse? Many parents feel envy when their teenagers start to blossom. But their Mrs Robinson moment is usually just that, a temporary thing.

But Brigitte never let Emmanuel go – and his youth and inexperience meant that he never stood a chance. She has moulded him since he was 15.

The normal development process whereby adolescents separate from their parents to bond with their peers in order to forge their identity hasn’t happened for him.

He substituted his granny, to whom he says he was inordinately devoted, with another authority figure – his teacher/lover. And as today’s show of family unity suggests, he replaced his family with her’s.

When he turned 18, Brigitte gave up her children, her husband and her job to follow him to Paris.

HIS Oedipal complex and her barmy mid-life crisis wouldn’t matter if they were unimportant people. But he’s now the President and a successful term is the only thing preventing his country falling into the hands of the neo-fascist Front National.

If he’s emotionally stunted and wholly dependent on his wife who, on the campaign trail, stopped him eating chocolate and ordered him to speak louder during speeches, then, like Donald Trump, he will have no empathy for people, for the rhythm of ordinary life, the desires and stresses that give life meaning.

He and Bibi who, for the first time in France will have a quasiofficial role, have intellectual firepower and business nous. Like Trump they are expert at pumping up people at rallies.

But the bizarre marital bubble inhabited by a protective matriarch and a man who has never truly grown up sets them apart from French citizens – and may be catastrophic for France.