Brigitte, the wife of French President Emmanuel Macron, is facing a fierce backlash after a video spread of her making remarks belittling a women's movement group. The criticism is growing across politics and civil society in particular because Macron has made gender equality a core policy agenda.
According to AP and other foreign media on the 9th, a video filmed on the 7th showed Brigitte in a private conversation backstage at a theater with French comedian Ary Abittan, which then circulated online. In the video, Brigitte targets the women's movement group NousToutes (French for "all of us"), calling them "stupid bitches" and saying, "If they come back again, we'll throw them out."
NousToutes is a French women's group that has led the fight against sexism. In 2019, the group organized a protest in Paris condemning dating violence and domestic violence, drawing about 50,000 people and earning recognition for leading the largest women's movement rally in history.
Recently, four activists from the group appeared at Abittan's show wearing masks bearing his face and shouted "rapist" from the audience, causing a disturbance. Abittan was accused at the end of 2021 of raping a woman and then not indicted, and women activists opposed to his return were expressing their protest. Brigitte appears to have made the remarks while trying to console Abittan.
Brigitte's side moved quickly to contain the fallout right after the video was released. An Élysée Palace Spokesperson said, "Mrs. Macron's intention was to reassure Abittan," adding, "There was no intention to attack any particular issue (the women's movement) in any way." The Spokesperson added, however, that they "oppose 'radical tactics' such as disrupting performances."
Even so, despite the active explanation, Brigitte's remarks are causing a major uproar. NousToutes turned the first lady's expression "sales connes" (French for "stupid bitches") into a hashtag and shared it on social media, emboldening women's activists and artists—and even politicians—to join the criticism.
Attacks on the first lady are mounting especially from the progressive camp. Sarah Legrain, a lawmaker with the far-left party France Unbowed, criticized, saying, "Brigitte Macron insulted feminists," and Marine Tondelier, the head of the Greens, also pressed the attack, saying, "This is not something a first lady should say."
The noise surrounding Brigitte has not let up. She previously endured a rumor that she was originally male, fueled by claims that she is actually her brother, Jean-Michel Trogneux, living under the name Brigitte after gender reassignment surgery.
The rumor stemmed from two French bloggers, Amandine Roy and Natacha Rey, and spread again by American hard-right commentator Candace Owens. Owens posted an 11-episode YouTube series titled "Becoming Brigitte" advocating the "Brigitte gender transition theory," and each episode drew between 1.4 million and 5.7 million views, showing its wide reach.
In July, the presidential couple filed a defamation suit against Owens, and according to the complaint, Macron suffered so much from the rumor that during a meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump, he asked that "Owens be calmed down." The couple later agreed to submit chemical evidence to a U.S. court to prove that Brigitte is a woman.
Brigitte also became embroiled in controversy over being a pedophile, because Macron was 15 when they first met. The two first met in 1993 in a teacher-student relationship at a Catholic high school, and at the time Brigitte's child was also in the same class as President Macron. The timing of when their relationship turned romantic has not been clearly established.
The Macron couple won a defamation suit last year against the French bloggers Roy and Rey, who fanned the claim that Brigitte is transgender, but they lost on appeal in July on the grounds that freedom of expression should be protected.