Bernadette Chirac, wife of French president Jacques who overcame brickbats to become a respected public figure

Bernadette Chirac, who has died aged 93, was the long-suffering aristocratic wife of the French president Jacques Chirac; though ridiculed as a starchy, frumpy figure when her husband first became president in 1995, through charity work and judicious public interventions she became popular – so much so that centre-Right politicians were almost as keen to be seen with her as with her husband.

She was born Bernadette Chodron de Co​urcel on May 18 1933 in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, the eldest of three children of Jean-Louis Chodron de Courcel, an Eton and Cambridge-educated industrialist; through her mother she was descended from Louis XIV’s banker Samuel Bernard.

She met her husband in 1951 when they were both students at the Instituts d’études politiques in Paris, and married him in 1956, resisting the disapproval of her parents, who felt that she could have done better than marry a middle-class youth intent on becoming a civil servant.

Yet Bernadette, according to one biographer, chose to make Chirac her “lord and master”, abandoning her studies to support him through the École nationale d’administration. “My husband went into politics in 1967 and I’ve never known anything other than standing by his side and watching him fulfil his political destiny,’’ she told Paris Match in 2005.

There was another side to Bernadette, though. The Chiracs had two daughters, and as they grew older she returned to her studies, taking a Master’s degree in archaeology at the Sorbonne. In 1971 she was elected a municipal councillor for Sarran in her husband’s Corrèze constituency, and eight years later became the first fe​male councillor in the département of Corrèze, a seat she held until 2015.

But she had much to put up with. During her early years as First Lady, Chirac often seemed to encourage the public derision she endured, referring to his wife as la tortue (“the tortoise”) and recalling that when they met as students she was the slower in class.

Then there was his well-documented philandering – extreme, even by the standards of French politics. As president he was allegedly nicknamed “Mr Three Minutes, Shower Included” by his office staff, while the chauffeur who would drive him to assignations wrote that Mme Chirac would often ask: “Where is my husband tonight?”

In a frank 2001 autobiography, Conversation, Mme Chirac acknowledged that her husband’s serial infidelities had threatened their marriage. “I have been jealous at times, very!” she wrote, yet “convention dictated that one put up a facade and hung on… I warned him several times: The day Napoleon abandoned Joséphine, he lost it all.”

With her designer suits, stiff blonde bouffant and stern demeanour, Bernadette Chirac seemed the very image of the icy aristocratic French wife. But the autobiography, published on the eve of Jacques’s successful run for a second presidential term, transformed her image. The woman who emerged was warm, outspoken and witty.

So pronounced was her transformation that some compared her with Hillary Clinton. She blossomed into the star of her husband’s re-election campaign and developed a reputation as a sounding board for ministers. In 2003 she became the only French first lady to have undertaken an official visit on her own overseas when she made a trip to Afghanistan. In 2004 there were suggestions (wrong it turned out) that she might run for the Senate.

She was loudly praised, too, for her charitable work. From 1994 to 2019 she was president of the French Hospitals Foundation, becoming the public face of the popular “Yellow Coins” campaign to raise money for children in hospital.

Her involvement had been influenced by the travails of her elder daughter Laurence, who died in 2016 after suffering from acute depression and anorexia for more than four decades.

Jacques Chirac died in 2019 and Bernadette is survived by her younger daughter.

​Bernadette Chirac, born May 18 1933, died June 5 2026

[Source: Daily Telegraph]