A few days ago, cameras caught Brigitte Macron, the wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, either slapping or shoving the face of her husband before they disembarked from the airplane that brought them to Vietnam for a visit.
Video of the incident went viral almost immediately.
Within moments after the incident occurred, hastily posted recordings of it flooded social media in France. Other footage showed Mrs. Macron descending the stairs from the plane behind her husband, rather than holding his hand.
Worse, the episode prompted a series of memes. Artificial intelligence soon generated sequences of France’s first lady pummeling her husband over the head repeatedly, of them engaging in something resembling a professional wrestling death match and of her shoving him down the plane’s steps.
Macron tried to put a stop to the frivolity at his expense.
He said the incident was part of a light-hearted squabble between him and his wife, one that did not involve any violence or hard feelings. He added that Russian disinformation specialists had worked hard to increase the visibility of stories that would embarrass him politically.
His argument had a certain plausibility.
Macron has assumed a leading role in assembling and maintaining a coalition of European nations resisting the territorial ambitions of Russia’s thug in charge, Vladimir Putin, in Ukraine and elsewhere. As Putin’s evil and foolish war on Ukraine has bogged down and become more and more expensive for his nation, the Russian strongman has looked more and more desperately for other people to blame for his self-created plight.
And yet … there is the video of the incident.
I’ve watched it again and again. It just doesn’t look lighthearted or jocular to me.
Brigitte Macron doesn’t appear to be joking when she strikes her husband. And his reaction in the aftermath isn’t that of a husband enjoying a silly moment with his wife.
Worse for Macron, if it is part of a Russian plot to undercut and discredit him, the disinformation specialists have found a spot where he is vulnerable to explore and exploit.
In any other nation on earth, the Macrons’ relationship and marriage would have destroyed any possibility of a political career for him. Their union is, to say the least, unconventional.
Macron, 47, met his future spouse, 72, when he was 15. She was his French literature teacher, a married mother of three children, one of whom was one of the future president’s classmates.
Macron has described their courtship as “a love often clandestine, often hidden, misunderstood by many before imposing itself.”
Their relationship prompted controversy even in France, which for centuries has shrugged its shoulders at courtships that often strained the boundaries of decorum.
Most of the criticism focused on the age difference between the two—and the fact that neither has argued, plausibly anyway, that they were not sexually intimate while he was still a minor.
The French, tolerant as they are, see such affairs as fodder for romantic farces or rites of passage. They aren’t necessarily thrilled to see their leaders choose life partners before they are old enough to buy alcohol.
The gap in their ages—and the reality that the wife was once the husband’s teacher—sparked many jokes about the president’s maturity and ability to lead. His political opponents uttered jibes about which partner in the marriage really was the nation’s leader.
That’s the tender spot Macron and his staff are doing their best to protect.
This is the part that is heartening.
The French president and his aides, while dealing with this minor controversy, have managed it every bit as clumsily as an American politician caught in a discomfiting situation would.
Macron at first denied the incident had occurred, even though visual proof that it had happened already was racing through the digital world. Then he said it was just a silly misunderstanding, a pseudo explanation that only encouraged people to watch the video again and again.
Finally, he blamed it on the Russians, neatly overlooking the fact that they didn’t create the video but merely distributed it widely.
French politicians are different from their U.S. counterparts in many ways.
In one way, though, they are remarkably alike.
When they’re in a hole, French or American, they tend to want to keep digging.
