While she has always fascinated the French, Bernadette Chirac withdrew from public life a few years ago. But before this forced departure, the ex First Lady often confided in his couple who marked the country.
Now 92 years old, Bernadette Chirac lives far from the cameras and the political arena. Widowed since 2019, the former first lady lives recluse in a mansion in Paris where her daughter Claude watches over her, ensuring a difficult role “caregiver“As she said.
A life that has nothing to do with that led for years under the gold of the Republic and the splendor of the Elysée, after the election of Jacques Chirac as president. And besides, his love story with the former head of state was not won in advance …
“He must take drugs …” : the doubts of Bernadette on Jacques Chirac
In 2014, Bernadette Chirac had granted one of her latest rivers in RTS, Swiss television. And at the old First Lady, much appreciated by the French for her work with the yellow pieces, to come back, without any taboo, to the beginnings of her love story with her husband. The two lovebirds met in Sciences Po Paris, where they frequented the same method conferences. But we are far from love at first sight!
It must be said that Bernadette’s first impression about Jacques Chirac was not the most flattering. “We were in the same conference in the first year, I saw that he was waving his feet a lot under the table. He was a square (…), I said to myself ‘this boy, he must or drink a lot of coffee, or take drugs'”, she said then. And it is up to her to add, when he had seduced her to his home: “Nothing at all!”
Jacques Chirac, a “bulldozer” ? Bernadette Chirac confirms
In the process, the widow of Jacques Chirac, which she accompanied in her two presidential mandates, but also at the head of the town hall of Paris and in Corrèze, returned to the volcanic character of her husband. “He always needed to have a great activity (…) in all of this, it was not very easy for family life, but I still managed”she said.
And to the one who has always been her husband, by family tradition, to return to a advice that Georges Pompidou slipped to him at the start of Jacques Chirac’s career: “Be careful not to get crushed by the bulldozer”. “It is true that in a way, it was a bulldozer, it was necessary to bear it”concluded Bernadette Chirac.
