Macron and le slap! What does it really mean?

Times

28-05-2025

There can now be few people who aren't aware that Brigitte Macron, the wife of President Emmanuel Macron of France, has been caught on film striking or pushing her husband.
The video was taken on the tarmac at Hanoi airport on Sunday night, moments after the presidential plane landed on Vietnamese soil and the door was opened. In the Airbus's interior Brigitte, just out of view — only her outstretched arm is visible — can be seen raising her hand to her husband's face and shoving him. The slap (although it's really more of a one-handed shunt) went around the world within hours, and now we're all calling it Le Slapgate.
Members of the president's entourage were quick to play it down. 'A moment when the president and his wife were decompressing … a moment of togetherness,' was their somewhat implausible explanation. Macron himself claims he was 'simply joking with my wife, as we do quite often'. But anyone who has watched the video can see him visibly recoil, and that red-jacketed arm meant business. It's hard to spin the incident as mere horseplay.
In any case, however much they protest, this glimpse behind the curtain will not be so easily dismissed. The real issue here is that the Macrons have fascinated onlookers from the moment in 2017 he became France's youngest president at 39 when his wife was 64, and now the world has been thrown a titbit, a morsel of something sinister or not, that's sent the slumbering rumour mill into overdrive.
The quarter-of-a-century age gap is intriguing, but more controversial is the circumstances of their meeting. He was a schoolboy of 15 and she was his drama teacher, a 39-year-old mother of three, one of whom, her middle child Laurence, was his classmate. Her eldest son, Sebastien, is two years older than Macron.
History does not relate at what point their relationship became public, but Macron's parents removed him from the school in Amiens and sent him to Paris to finish his education in the hope that the separation would end their liaison. They hoped in vain, and the couple married in 2007 when he was 29 and she was 54. So far so weird.
• I waited ten years to marry Emmanuel Macron, says Brigitte
On top of that unusual beginning, or because of it, there have been rumours about Macron's sexuality. ('To say that it is not possible for a man living with an older woman to be anything other than a homosexual or a hidden gigolo is misogynous. And it's also homophobia,' Macron has said.) But the gossip that, perhaps inevitably, has gained the most traction is that their relationship is more like that of a mother and son than a husband and wife. She is said to organise everything from his diary to his clothes, and it is not unusual for her to 'scold him for doing something wrong'.
There are many theories about what goes on in this marriage, and now we've all got a theory about Slapgate and what's behind it. These are the top nine conversations we've had since.
1. To be fair it wasn't a slap, it was more of a chin push, and we've all been there haven't we?
Not to say that normal happy couples lash out at each other, except for, they occasionally do. We're not talking about taking a swing, to be clear, but if you are inclined to playfully push someone who is amusing/annoying you, or give them a light jab to the upper arm (No! You cannot be serious!), or push their face away when sitting next to them on the sofa (Why aren't you listening!), then you are also capable of the less frequent shunt of exasperation, the barge past, or the most French of them all, now we come to think of it, the hand-off.
If aimed at the head (as Brigitte's was) this is pretty full-on but also not astonishing. It looks a lot like a 'No I am still furious with you … Va-t-en!' move. Or maybe 'Don't come near me, I hate your job!' Or there could be an element of 'Don't speak to me' going on there too. We've all clapped a hand over our partner's mouth to stop them talking, haven't we? Usually when they were saying 'and just when I thought you'd finally stopped, you poured yourself another drink and started to tell Geoff he needed to lose three stone'.
2. This proves they're a regular couple
We're slightly surprised to find Petit Macron and Mrs Macron exhibiting marital frustration because we rather assumed this was more of a slick arrangement involving two people who support each other professionally, whose union is mutually desirable, but who are not (how shall we put it) passionate about each other. We thought they were a team, not so much a fighty couple who sometimes really get on each other's nerves.
3. It's Melania and Donald all over again
There's a private plane, a hand-hold rejected, two stony-faced people standing on foreign tarmac looking as if they want to be anywhere but there with each other. It is all familiar. But Melania Trump (others might venture) would never raise a hand to Donald because she would go quite a long way not to have to touch him. And there's something about this moment that suggests a passionate argument not yet resolved to Mrs Macron's liking, whereas with M and D it's more like 'you booked me for three publics and two foreign trips and this was not in the pre-Flotus document'.
'The job demands upbeat smiles and flesh pressing and endless meet and greets'
NHAC NGUYEN / AFP/GETTY IMAGES
4. She's fed up with the job
Never mind the packed tour of southeast Asia stretching ahead, the job demands upbeat smiles and flesh pressing and endless meet and greets and wardrobe changes and long, long dinners sitting next to minor dignitaries, and she might just have been expressing her wish that he could do all this on his own for once.
5. They are French
They are French, and the French, as all Brits have been brought up to believe, do things differently, especially when it comes to men and women. We're a bit blurry about the details but we know this much: French men are rogues and philanderers and all have a bit of cinq à sept on the side and they don't like feminism and are very much not on board with égalité. Your basic nightmare. French women are long-suffering but also the older ones (Brigitte?) quite like the old-style 'dance' (see the established French actresses coming out against MeToo and the tacit support for Gérard Depardieu and the like) and they all believe man-pleasing to be a basic feminine duty. They also will happily slap that man hard across the face if he transgresses and then all hell will break loose and there will be shouting, extravagant gesturing, lots of storming about (her wearing his shirt, him smoking a Gitane). We're not sure if any of this is true IRL but it's part of the French myth and there is no doubt that we expect fireworks from this lot. Slaps at the very least.
• So the 'French paradox' was actually a fallacy
6. If it was the other way around and he'd pushed her you'd be horrified
You would. Absolutely fair.
7. Things happen on planes, don't they?
Well they do if you drink all your duty-free allocation, you are delayed on the runway for four hours and then the airline tells you they have been unable to load the meals and the loos are locked. Not so much on the French equivalent of Air Force One. But also it is true that 16-hour overnight flights do not bring out the best in people, especially people who need to be on parade the second they hit the tarmac.
8. Maybe it was 'horseplay'
We've all got an actual horseplay story that didn't end well. The time you threw a potato (raw) at him and it chipped his tooth, for example. But look, if it genuinely was horseplay, we know how this goes: he would have grabbed her wrists and she'd have lurched forwards, they'd both have lost their balance and ended up sprawling on the floor and then we'd all be asking: is Macron the new Biden? So no point trying that one.
9. Is she the (very) scary power behind the throne?
Macron did look taken aback, but did he maybe also look a bit like someone who was used to getting a clip around the ear if he displeased his handler? Very hard to say, of course, but factor in the mother-son stuff and bear in mind that middle-class French mamans are absolute tyrants, and you might be onto something.