Former first lady of France, Bernadette Chirac, passed away at 93, President Emmanuel Macron paid tribute.
According to Associated Press, the steel-willed former first lady of France spent 12 years at the Élysée Palace from 1995 to 2007 beside President Jacques Chirac while building her own political power in rural Corrèze and turning a children’s hospital charity into a national institution.
Macron 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.
He said, “A great lady of the heart has departed.”
The Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton called her the “last queen of France,” and she did little to discourage the idea.
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.
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.
