Bernadette Chirac, the steel-willed former first lady of France, has died. She was 93.
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Here's how to dry out your smartphoneThe electric guitar spawned garage bands, rock-god dreams — and generations of popular music4 years running, Southern Baptists weigh tightening ban on churches with women pastorsLas fuerzas armadas de EU esperan claridad del Pentágono tras vaivenes de Trump en EuropaWorld NewsBernadette Chirac, wife of former French President Jacques Chirac attends a ceremony to pay tribute to Simone Veil in the courtyard of the Invalides in Paris, France, Wednesday, July 5, 2017. French President Jacques Chirac, center left, and his wife First Lady Bernadette Chirac are surrounded by the crowd after addressing New Year wishes to the inhabitants of the region of Correze, in Tulle, southwestern France, Saturday, Jan. 14, 2006.
From left: Cherie Blair, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair Bernadette Chirac, wife of French President Jacques Chirac, Lyudmila Putina, wife of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and First Lady Laura Bush, converse as they walk to a press conference site at the G-8 Summit on Sea Island, Ga. , Wednesday, June 9, 2004. French President Jacques Chirac and his wife Bernadette arrive at the airport in Hanover, Germany on Sunday, June 25, 2000.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy speaks with former first lady Bernadette Chirac during the inauguration of the Foundation Claude Pompidou, Centre teaching and research on Alzheimer’s disease, Monday, March 10, 2014, in Nice, southeastern France. Bernadette Chirac, wife of former French President Jacques Chirac attends a ceremony to pay tribute to Simone Veil in the courtyard of the Invalides in Paris, France, Wednesday, July 5, 2017.
Bernadette Chirac, wife of former French President Jacques Chirac attends a ceremony to pay tribute to Simone Veil in the courtyard of the Invalides in Paris, France, Wednesday, July 5, 2017. French President Jacques Chirac, center left, and his wife First Lady Bernadette Chirac are surrounded by the crowd after addressing New Year wishes to the inhabitants of the region of Correze, in Tulle, southwestern France, Saturday, Jan. 14, 2006.
French President Jacques Chirac, center left, and his wife First Lady Bernadette Chirac are surrounded by the crowd after addressing New Year wishes to the inhabitants of the region of Correze, in Tulle, southwestern France, Saturday, Jan. 14, 2006. From left: Cherie Blair, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair Bernadette Chirac, wife of French President Jacques Chirac, Lyudmila Putina, wife of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and First Lady Laura Bush, converse as they walk to a press conference site at the G-8 Summit on Sea Island, Ga.
, Wednesday, June 9, 2004. From left: Cherie Blair, wife of British Prime Minister Tony Blair Bernadette Chirac, wife of French President Jacques Chirac, Lyudmila Putina, wife of Russian President Vladimir Putin, and First Lady Laura Bush, converse as they walk to a press conference site at the G-8 Summit on Sea Island, Ga. , Wednesday, June 9, 2004.
French President Jacques Chirac and his wife Bernadette arrive at the airport in Hanover, Germany on Sunday, June 25, 2000. French President Jacques Chirac and his wife Bernadette arrive at the airport in Hanover, Germany on Sunday, June 25, 2000.
Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy speaks with former first lady Bernadette Chirac during the inauguration of the Foundation Claude Pompidou, Centre teaching and research on Alzheimer’s disease, Monday, March 10, 2014, in Nice, southeastern France. Former French President Nicolas Sarkozy speaks with former first lady Bernadette Chirac during the inauguration of the Foundation Claude Pompidou, Centre teaching and research on Alzheimer’s disease, Monday, March 10, 2014, in Nice, southeastern France.
PARIS — Bernadette Chirac, the steel-willed former first lady of France who spent 12 years at the Élysée Palace from 1995 to 2007 besidewhile building her own political power in rural Corrèze and turning a children’s hospital charity into a national institution, has died. She was 93.confirmed her death Saturday, saying he and his wife Brigitte had learned with “great sadness” of the passing of a woman who marked French history beside Jacques Chirac, who died in 2019, and changed the lives of millions of patients through her charitable work.
For more than half a century, Chirac was the fixed point in her late husband’s restless climb — through Parliament, two terms as prime minister, 18 years as mayor of Paris and, in 1995, the presidency. She appears in the official photographs with her chin lifted, blond hair lacquered into place, a small handbag on her arm, looking less like a spouse than like an institution.
Beneath them was a relentless worker and a cold-eyed political operator who, almost alone among the wives of French presidents, built a base of power that was her own. She was born Bernadette Thérèse Marie Chodron de Courcel on May 18, 1933, in Paris, into money, lineage and Catholic duty. Her father’s family included soldiers, industrialists and diplomats; an uncle had served as an aide to Charles de Gaulle in wartime London.
But her life would be most marked by her time at the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris, where she met Jacques Chirac, a handsome and much-courted young man whose appetite for politics would come to define them both. They married in March 1956. The union lasted 63 years and was, by her own account, a long lesson in endurance. Jacques Chirac was famous for his warmth, appetite and instinctive connection with crowds.
Bernadette’s gifts were different, observers said. She was controlled, socially formidable, devout, exacting and sometimes devastatingly funny. The Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton called her the “last queen of France,” and she did little to discourage the idea. Her husband’s reputation as a womanizer was an open secret she chose, after much pain, to meet with dry humor.
Swarmed by photographers in Corrèze in 1998 — after rumors that Jacques Chirac had been unreachable the night Princess Diana died because he was with an actress — she stepped from her car and deadpanned: “Calm down. I’m not Claudia Cardinale. Or Lollobrigida. ” “At first, it was hard.
I was very heartbroken, and then I got used to it,” she said years later in a television documentary.
“I told myself that was how things were and that I had to accept it with as much dignity as possible. ” Sent to tend her husband’s rural stronghold in Corrèze while he pursued power in Paris, she did far more than tend it. In 1971, she was elected municipal councilor in Sarran. In 1979, she became a general councilor in Corrèze and held the seat until 2015.
Her influence grew after Jacques Chirac became president in 1995. The role of first lady in France has no constitutional power, but she made the Élysée a place where her approval mattered. She could be loyal, cutting and unforgiving, and understood that campaigns are made not only of speeches and polls but of debts, slights and resentments.
Yet she also carved out a space for female authority inside a male political culture that had little interest in sharing power — making it quietly clear that she would not be reduced to “the wife of. ”The Chiracs’ elder daughter, Laurence, developed severe anorexia after meningitis in adolescence and attempted suicide more than once. She never fully recovered and died in 2016 at 58. In 1994, she took over a medical charity that collected coins for children in hospitals.
To millions of French viewers, the woman once mocked for hauteur became the face of hospitalized children and families living around hospital beds. She continued running it until 2019, when she handed it to Brigitte Macron, the wife of France’s current president, and became honorary president.
“My husband no longer does politics, but I do,” she said to journalists, after Jacques Chirac left office in 2007. She famously nicknamed Dominique de Villepin, the Élysée official she distrusted, “Nero,” yet also reportedly helped engineer her husband’s reconciliation with Nicolas Sarkozy, the former protégé who had betrayed him politically.
Her 2001 memoir, “Conversation,” written with journalist Patrick de Carolis, sold hundreds of thousands of copies and introduced the French to a franker, funnier and more independent woman than many had assumed. After Jacques Chirac left the Élysée, his health declined and his public voice faded. Hers remained sharper for longer. Asked how he was, according to French media, she answered in her flat, unmistakable voice: “He keeps the dog.
”By the time Jacques Chirac died in 2019, she was too fragile to take part in the public farewell where France and foreign leaders honored him. Adamson is a foreign reporter based in Paris for The Associated Press. He covers European politics, culture and style. He has reported across the continent in an over two-decade career.
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