- Bernadette Chirac died on Friday June 5 at the age of 93.
- The former First Lady and wife of the late President Jacques Chirac had not been seen in public since November 2020.
- Immersed for love in the bath of politics, she went through half a century of conquest and exercise of power.
“Brittle”,
“authoritarian”
, “cold”
… Unsightly adjectives have marked the life and career of Bernadette Chirac. The former First Lady died this Friday June 5, 2026 at the age of 93, her daughter Claude Chirac announced on Saturday. Behind this strong personality, however, hid a woman from the French bourgeoisie, shy and very retiring during her youth. Born Chodron de Courcel on May 18, 1933 in Paris, she had to force her nature through contact with a husband, the late president Jacques Chirac, seductive and charismatic. “It was not just a marriage of love, but a marriage of ambition”,
had also recognized in 2015 the one who was the only First Lady to have exercised a real political career, for more than 40 years.
The girls were galloping.
The girls were galloping.
Bernadette Chirac about her husband
Although at first she refused to get involved in politics, under pressure from her husband who wanted to secure a local foothold, she gave in in 1971 and was elected for the first time municipal councilor of the small Corrèze commune of Sarran, where the Bity castle is located that the Chirac couple bought in 1969. She then became from 1977 second deputy mayor and was constantly re-elected until 2020, after a final re-election during the 2014 election. Then, in 1979, she earned her stripes as a politician by becoming the first female councilor General of Correze. However, her national notoriety was not evident when her husband became the Élysée in 1995.
The discreet wife, daughter of a family of diplomats from the 16th arrondissement, married in 1956 to this promising talent he met at Sciences Po, against the advice of his parents who saw in him a man without fortune, without religious faith and with excessive pride, is at first a self-effacing woman. Relegated to the shadows by his daughter Claude, who then reigns supreme over her father’s communication. Not to mention her husband’s antics and his numerous absences that she has to put up with without flinching (or almost). The sequence, during which Bernadette puts a speech on hold to call her husband to order, more interested in his neighbor, general councilor Sophie Dessus, than in what she says, has since passed into posterity. Marital confidences skillfully distilled in 2001 in a book of interviews with Patrick de Carolis, “Conversation”
in which she says: “He had tremendous success… A handsome man and very flirtatious, very cheerful, so the girls were galloping.”
Political conquests…
But Bernadette Chirac is not fooled. In parallel with her own political career, she took the helm of the Fondation Hôpitaux de Paris-Hôpitaux de France, and gained real notoriety by taking over the Pièces Jaunes operation (of which she passed the torch to Brigitte Macron in 2019), intended to finance hospital developments for the benefit of hospitalized children. It is she who ensures the media coverage of this event and makes it a popular annual event, through the TGV Pièces Jaunes which tours France and famous and appreciated sponsors such as the Olympic champion judoka David Douillet or the singer Lorie.
Beyond its “old France” image that the satirical show cheerfully conveys The Guignols of the info
on Canal Plus, Bernadette Chirac remains a politician and as such, she travels around her favorite region, Corrèze. She can be seen strolling around in a field jacket, but signed Dior. She is also keen to give her opinion, and sometimes enters into a struggle for influence with her husband’s advisors: she thus opposes the dissolution of the National Assembly of 1997, advised by the general secretary of the Élysée, Dominique de Villepin. In 2002, the relegated first lady became one of the main architects of her husband’s retention at the Élysée. ready even to have been the only one to warn him of the danger Jean-Marie Le Pen, whom he faced in the second round.
Read also
Jacques and Bernadette Chirac: sixty years of political struggle
…and family drama
Beneath this political saga there are also family dramas: the anorexia of his eldest daughter Laurence, whose sudden death in April 2016, at the age of 58, shocked the clan. “The drama of my life”
the modest Jacques Chirac once confided. “Suffering”
of a mother and “very great loneliness of families”
faced with illness, Bernadette added. To respond to this need for “dialogue and listening” among families, his foundation financed the “Maison de Solenn” in Paris, the first multidisciplinary structure in Europe dedicated to the management of adolescent disorders.
A few months later, in September 2016, Bernadette and Jacques Chirac were both hospitalized a few days apart at Pitié-Salpêtrière, he for a lung infection, she “to recover a little”
. After the death of her husband in September 2019, Bernadette Chirac gradually disappeared from the political scene. In his homage, she went to the Saint-Louis-des-Invalides cathedral, where no image of her filtered through, and did not attend the funeral mass celebrated at the Saint-Sulpice church. Those around him then specify that his health is very precarious. She had not been seen in public since November 2020 and an outing with her daughter Claude, in Paris; she then appeared in a wheelchair.
