No other "First Lady" has left such a mark on French political life. Her aristocratic reserve and dry wit eventually made her a popular figure who far surpassed the traditional right-wing wing, which she embodied for several decades alongside her husband, the President. Although she was portrayed in a unique biographical film from 2023 by Catherine Deneuve, she had long since withdrawn from public life. Bernadette Chirac died on Friday evening at the age of 93, announced by her daughter, Claude Chirac, on Saturday morning. The current President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron, paid tribute to the memory of the "great lady with a golden heart." François Hollande, who was her political rival in Corrèze, described her on Saturday as "determined, strong, and undoubtedly a devoted woman, but above all independent."

Spicy Defender of Presidential Monarchy

The former First Lady, born Bernadette Chodron de Courcel on May 18, 1933, in Paris, grew up in the heart of the 16th arrondissement of the capital in a family of wealthy diplomats. As a student at the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris, specifically on Rue Saint-Guillaume, she met Jacques Chirac. Despite the hostility of her family, who viewed this as a mismatch—an episode Bernadette Chirac often recounted with an ironic tone—she married him in 1956. They shared lives for more than sixty years. Initially, she remained in the background, raised as a bourgeois wife of a high-ranking civil servant. From government ministries to Matignon, from the RPR party to the Paris City Hall, and finally, on her third attempt, she patiently accompanied Chirac's rise to power until the evening of his election on May 7, 1995. Entirely relaxed in her role as the lady of the estate, a passionate defender of presidential monarchy, she left employees of the Élysée Palace with no less than unpleasant memories. This was the era of the peak of Guignols, a satirical puppet theater that solidified her image as a polished and respectable figure who holds a handbag in a legendary sketch.

Turning point: her candidacy in Corrèze. "The best day of my life was when Jacques asked me in 1979 to run in the cantonal elections in Corrèze," she explained in Erwan L'Eléouet's biography "Secrets of Conquest." Although she is not the only First Lady of a head of state who held a prominent position, she is—and remains—the only one who held an independent political office, namely that of General Councilor for Corrèze, into which she was continuously elected from 1979 to 2015.

Her husband's offer was, of course, selfish. Given that Jacques Chirac was too busy with Paris and his presidential campaign, he needed Chirac to "hold" Corrèze. Bernadette developed a taste for her role and honed her real political acumen, which she later used well in the Élysée Palace. After the unsuccessful dissolution of parliament in 1997, when the left returned to power, she did not hide her criticism of the man nicknamed "Nero," Dominique de Villepin, the then General Secretary of the Élysée Palace and architect of the dissolution.

Patron of the "Yellow Ribbon" Campaign

She has been increasingly appearing in the media, first as the president of the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital Foundation, and then as the patron of the annual "Yellow Coins" campaign. At the end of her first term, Bernadette Chirac became a prominent political figure with the publication of the journalist Patrick de Carolis's book of personal reflections, "Conversation," which sold 300,000 copies. At that time, she was a true publicist for her husband, trapped in a cohabitation government that, at the time, in the period leading up to the 2002 presidential elections, seemed to be working against him. During the municipal election campaign, right-wing candidates competed for her presence, which ultimately resulted in a heavy defeat for the left.

Opposition to Abortion

Jacques Chirac's re-election in 2002, after the shocking elimination of Lionel Jospin and the participation of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the second round, was seen as a vindication by Bernadette Chirac, who had warned, without being taken seriously, about the rise of the far right. The devout woman did not hesitate to question secularism, for example, by advocating for flags to be lowered to half-mast after the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005. Although she supported the gender parity rules introduced by the Jospin government, she confirmed her disagreement with the Pacte civil de solidarité (PACS), then a limited version of civil marriage, but the first official option for union for homosexual and lesbian couples. In the "Conversation" program, she even expressed her personal disagreement with abortion.

Supports Nicolas Sarkozy's far-right movement.

Bernadette Chirac's political influence was evident towards the end of Jacques Chirac's second term. As early as 2002, when the right was divided between the Villepin and Sarkozy camps (Sarkozy was then Minister of the Interior), the First Lady supported the rise of the former mayor of Neuilly, who had nevertheless betrayed her husband in 1995 by supporting the candidacy of Édouard Balladur. In 2004, she supported Nicolas Sarkozy's rise to power by being present in the front row when he definitively took control of the Chirac party at the UMP congress. She supported him throughout his presidency, until his unsuccessful return in the right-wing primaries in 2016. In 2012, when Jacques Chirac, visibly ill, publicly declared his support for François Hollande, it was she who cast her vote for him on the basis of representation.

Since the stroke suffered by the President of the Republic in 2005 and their subsequent departure from the Élysée Palace, Bernadette Chirac took the lead in the couple's life and managed the legal disputes that followed the splendor of the Élysée Palace. In 2016, the couple faced the death of their eldest daughter, Laurence Chirac, who had suffered from anorexia since contracting meningitis at the age of 15, and had attempted suicide several times. The funeral of Laurence Chirac was one of the last public appearances of Bernadette Chirac, as she herself was very frail. She was unable to attend all the ceremonies held after the death of Jacques Chirac in 2019.

humanite.fr/gnews.cz