France Backs Away From First Lady Role for Brigitte Macron

Brigitte Macron, center, the wife of President Emmanuel Macron, in Paris last month. Nearly 300,000 people have signed a petition against any official recognition of the first lady. CreditPool photo by Christophe Archambault


PARIS — Proposals to make official the role of France’s first lady ran aground after a public outcry over suggestions by the French president that it was time to consider enshrining in law the role of presidential spouse.

Although President Emmanuel Macron had yet to specify what role he envisioned, a petition against any official recognition of the first lady began circulating on the internet three weeks ago. By the end of Tuesday, nearly 300,000 people had signed it, and with Mr. Macron’s popularity ebbing somewhat, the government backed away from proposing statutory changes and sought to calm the rising controversy.

There will not be “any modification to the Constitution, any new resources nor any remuneration” for Mr. Macron’s wife, Brigitte Macron, a government spokesman, Christophe Castaner, said in a series of Twitter posts on Tuesday.

The main goal, Mr. Castaner said, was to make clear that “she plays a role, she has responsibilities.”

“We want to be transparent,” he said.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Macron had gone considerably further, saying that he would like to see a statute that gave a legal framework to the work of the president’s spouse.

This summer, however, was not a good time to push ahead on the project. The French Parliament is working on an ethics law for politicians that would, among other things, ban the hiring of relatives because some politicians have used the practice to augment their own incomes.

Although Mr. Macron’s goal was to modernize the presidential system, many people appear to have construed his efforts, which have included having an internal committee discuss different approaches, as a favor to his wife.

Ahead of voting on “a decree forbidding lawmakers to hire a family member, we cannot in all decency support a statute specifically for the wife of President Macron,” said Thierry Paul Valette, the author of the popular online petition.

It could also be costly, Mr. Valette said. Although Ms. Macron already has an office, secretaries and a security detail, giving her an official position might enable her to claim more of the budget and hire “numerous collaborators, drivers, security and take other advantages,” he said.

The resonance of Mr. Valette’s petition hardly came as a surprise to pollsters who have surveyed the public on this question on several occasions in the past couple of years. One 2016 poll by IFOP, a major French pollster, found that 69 percent of those surveyed did not want an official role for the first lady, said Jérôme Fourquet, the director of opinion polling for the organization. People were particularly allergic to the idea that she might be paid — although that was not one of Mr. Macron’s proposals. Another poll found similar percentages.

Beyond the stated arguments are both history and a French culture that even as it embraces a monarchlike president, remains leery of going too far down that road. It reminds people of some of the most violent and bloody periods in French history, including that of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who were beheaded during the French Revolution.

“There’s a complicated rapport between this country and the monarchy,” Mr. Fourquet said. “For the French,” he said, “to give power to a spouse goes back to monarchal power: The French elect a man, not a family. The notion of a couple reminds them too much of the monarchy and the royal couple.”

Adding to the complexity is an ambivalence over how much the French want to see or know about the first lady.

“The French respect that it was the husband who was elected by the people,” Mr. Fourquet said. “So the woman is present ‘in the photo,’” he said.

From an American perspective, the French furor over defining an official position and responsibilities for the first lady looks like a tempest in a teapot: First ladies, whether Republican or Democrat, at least since the presidency of Herbert Hoover, have pushed boundaries — some more than others. And while controversy dogged some of them, they have gradually become more and more accepted as public figures.

While there is no statute in the United States defining the first lady’s role and the position is unpaid, since 1978, when President Jimmy Carter signed a law authorizing a budget and a staff, it has become accepted that the presidential spouse has a number of duties and needs assistance to carry them out. Recent first ladies have had staffs of 16 to 25 people, according to a report on the office of the first lady for Rice University’s Baker Institute in 2016.

Even in the United States, the status of first ladies has not been a steady progression by any means, said MaryAnne Borrelli, a professor of government at Connecticut College who has researched first ladies. Most modern first ladies have increasingly come to accept a role as public figures and be accepted by the public.

The dilemma, she said, is that “the first lady has always been on the public stage, yet women, especially in an earlier era, were supposed to be in the private sphere, so how do you negotiate the ideal balance?”