“If I had had two perfectly healthy children…”

Bernadette Chirac was unfortunately faced with a terrible ordeal: her daughter Laurence struggled with anorexia nervosa throughout her life, until the illness took her away in 2016. Before that, the latter had already attempted suicide in 1990. It was at this time that the former First Lady decided to become fully involved in Operation Yellow Pieces…

Bernadette Chirac, faced with her daughter’s illness: “When the test came…“

The widow of Jacques Chirac had been fighting in the shadows since her daughter Laurence was diagnosed, as a teenager, with meningitis which plunged her into a deep depression and led to anorexia nervosa. In 1990, the young woman threw herself from the fourth floor of a Parisian building, while her parents were in Thailand. Laurence Chirac barely survived but her mother knew that her life was hanging by a thread.

A few years after her child’s suicide attempt, Bernadette Chirac therefore wanted to get involved in the Yellow Pieces operation – now taken over by Brigitte Macron -, a cause to defend, at the very time when she was privately facing one of the most trying periods of her life. “When the test came, I faced it. I’m not saying I’ve succeeded, but if I can help others to keep courage, to find reasons to hope…“, she confided in the book Conversation by Patrick de Carolis, released in 2001, 15 years before the death of his daughter Laurence.

Bernadette Chirac, frank: “If I had had two perfectly healthy children…”

The Hôpitaux de Paris-Hôpitaux de France foundation was created in 1990 and, in 1993, the former First Lady was elected president of the organization. She notably participated in the creation of a music, reading and games space for adolescents at Necker hospital. But the woman who is also the mother of Claude Chirac, would she have been so involved in the foundation if she had not gone through this painful ordeal with her daughter Laurence?

“If I had had two perfectly healthy children, I like to think that I would have done the same, because I carry within me this desire to help others“, she assured in the book. The one who had studied at Sciences Po, where she met Jacques Chirac, then obtained a master’s degree in archeology at the Sorbonne University, could also have worked in the medical field in another life.

“If I had benefited from the right environment, I would certainly have been attracted to study medicine. Life decided otherwise“, she confided. Bernadette Chirac, who is now 92 years old, has not made a public appearance since 2019 for the launch of Operation Yellow Pieces where she appeared alongside Didier Deschamps. From now on, she lives as a recluse helped daily by her daughter.