PARIS - Bernadette Chirac, who has died aged 93, stood by her late husband and French president Jacques Chirac through thick and thin during 12 years as first lady, but also forged her own, more discreet, political career.
Quiet, traditionally Roman Catholic and always immaculately turned out in classic suits and styled hair, she willingly dedicated herself to the career of the man she married when she was 22 years old and who died on Sept 26, 2019, aged 86.
“She is the woman of my life, we have accomplished so much together,” Jacques Chirac — who was also prime minister and a long-time mayor of Paris — wrote in his Memoires in 2012.
They met at Paris’s political science university Sciences Po in 1954 and married two years later, a match considered below the rank of Bernadette, who was born on May 18, 1933 into the aristocratic Chodron de Courcel family.
Not always easy
The marriage, during which she had two daughters, was not always easy, with Chirac admitting publicly to having a weakness for women and rumours abounding of affairs.
In her book Conversation (2001), she spoke about her Catholic faith and her opposition to abortion — but also with unusual frankness about the tests through which a family can be put by a husband’s infidelity.
Describing Jacques Chirac as a “handsome man” who had “enormous success with women”, she wrote: “Nowadays at the first difficulty people just give up. But as far as I was concerned, I hesitated because I had children, and also because I was the prisoner of certain family traditions.
“Convention had it that in this sort of situation you put up a front and just kept going. In any case I warned him often enough: the day Napoleon left Josephine, he lost everything.”
Jacques Chirac was elected head of state in 1995 and 2002, his 12 years in the job making him France’s second longest-serving president after his Socialist predecessor Francois Mitterrand.
‘Turtle’
Bernadette would describe herself as a mere “wagon” hooked onto her powerhouse “engine” spouse, while he would refer to his determined and sometimes authoritarian wife as “a turtle”.
But she was also seen as an electoral asset in his campaigning, with her cheerful personality and charity work for sick children boosting her image, while her conservatism reassured right-wing voters.
Her discretion and immaculate turnout also made Bernadette into something of an icon herself. In 2023 the French screen legend Catherine Deneuve starred in a film about her years as first lady called simply Bernadette.
Besides being patron of several charities, she carved out her own modest political career as long-time elected councillor for the couple’s rural home department of Correze and a member of the municipal council of the department’s small village of Sarran.
In 1998 she took Hillary Clinton, then also a First Lady, on a tour of Correze, leading the newspaper Le Monde to quip: “Bernadette Chirac exists. Hillary Clinton has met her.”
Onlookers were stunned in 1999 when then Chinese president Jiang Zemin grabbed her briefly for a waltz during a visit to Correze.
In darker times in later life, a protective Bernadette closely guarded information about Chirac’s deteriorating health as a degenerative neurological disorder took hold and he was confined to a wheelchair.
After his death Bernadette, by then said to be in frail health, attended a private funeral service but was not present at the main ceremony attended by dozens of world leaders.
In 2016 their eldest daughter, Laurence, died aged 58, after a heart attack and having suffered with anorexia since 1974.
