Bernadette and Jacques Chirac were married in the nearby Sainte-Clotilde chapel, where the funeral of the couple’s eldest daughter, Laurence, was also held in 2016.
On the square, a small crowd gathered around the barriers was able to follow, through speakers, the mass during which her only grandson, Martin Rey-Chirac, 30, spoke to salute the “inexhaustible energy” of his grandmother.
“The mission that inhabited him has never varied: to stand by the most fragile, to make the hospital more humane for children and old age less lonely for our elders,” he underlined.
For decades, Jacques and Bernadette “will have offered a most sophisticated and irresistible play where humor, twists and turns and role plays have always responded to adversities and trials”, he said. added.
Many personalities from the world of politics and entertainment were present inside the basilica, starting with the wife of the head of state, Brigitte Macron, who succeeded Bernadette Chirac at the head of the Fondation des Hôpitaux at the origin of Operation Yellow Pieces.
At the end of the ceremony, Brigitte Macron confided having seen her for the last time on May 1st. For her, “the important thing was to hold on in all circumstances”, she noted, highlighting her “strength” and her “rigor”.
Also present were the former president Nicolas Sarkozy with his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, the singer and actress Line Renaud, a very close friend of the Chirac family, as well as Muriel Robin, Michèle Laroque…
“Thank you to Line who allowed Bernie to live his last days in a little paradise of love, flowers and birdsong”, in his house in Rueil-Malmaison (Hauts-de-Seine), greeted Claude Chirac in the church.
The former socialist president François Hollande, elected from Corrèze like Bernadette Chirac, also made the trip with Julie Gayet at his side. Just like the President of the Senate Gérard Larcher and the former Prime Ministers Jean-Pierre Raffarin, Dominique de Villepin and Edouard Philippe.
Among the anonymous people who came to pay tribute to him, Laurence said he remembered an “intelligent, brilliant person”, with a “strong personality” and an “extremely acute political sense”.
Jeannine, retired from French Documentation who claims to have known her, speaks of a woman “so smiling”, “in admiration of Jacques Chirac, who ultimately loved his wife very much, despite everything that is attributed to him”.
Romain, aged around twenty, explains that he wanted to say goodbye to “an exceptional first lady”, “a woman of action, a woman of character”.
At the end of the ceremony, the former first lady was buried in the family vault at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris, next to her husband, who died in 2019, and her eldest daughter Laurence.
Died last Friday at the age of 93, Bernadette Chirac, born Chodron de Courcel, was the only first lady to have herself exercised a political mandate in her own name, that of general advisor of Corrèze, department where she was continuously elected from 1979 to 2015.
It is in this territory that a tribute will also be paid to him on Sunday, first with a religious ceremony at 10:00 a.m. in the town of Corrèze then a “friendly and remembrance moment” at 2:00 p.m. at the Sédière estate, open to “all the Corrèzians so dear to him heart”, said Claude Chirac.
