Bernadette Chirac was France’s answer to Hillary Clinton; the first French president’s wife to come out of the shadows and make her own political splash.
Seen as dowdy and stuck-up when her husband, Jacques, was first elected, the aristocratic first lady had her own political ambitions.
Now Catherine Deneuve, the grande dame of French cinema, is to portray Bernadette in a comedy film of the same name to be released later this year.
In a teaser trailer released on Monday, Deneuve is seen portraying Chirac arriving at the Élysée Palace after her husband’s presidential win in 1995.
An adviser explains that the new first lady will have to work on her image, which is judged “old-fashioned, austere and cold”.
“But don’t panic. We’re going to make sure the French discover the real you,” he says before engaging Karl Lagerfeld to give Bernadette a makeover.
The film is said to be based on real events during the Chiracs’ tenure at the Élysée between 1995 and 2007.
Director Léa Domenach said it was a kind of “benevolent satire”, not aimed at making fun of the former first lady. Domenach’s father, Nicolas, wrote several books on Jacques Chirac, who died in September 2019 aged 86.
Deneuve, 79, has said she was sceptical about the project until she read the script. It was “the story of a woman who emerges from her mould and acquires strength and freedom over time”, the actor said.
“It was never a question of copying her, but of taking inspiration from her,” Deneuve told the French newspaper Libération last year.
Born Bernadette Chodron de Courcel in Paris’s chic 16th arrondissement, and descended through her mother’s side from Louis XIV’s banker Samuel Bernard, she met Jacques Chirac as a student at the Instituts d’études politiques in Paris in 1951.
They married five years later; Bernadette’s family was not impressed by her choice of husband from a more modest background.
In a 2004 interview with Elle magazine, Mme Chirac, who is now aged 90, outlined a typical day at the Élysée. After consultations with florists and staff, she often went to the Chanel or Dior fashion houses for a fitting.
She was, however, a “hard worker”, she said. Lunch, when possible, was solitary and simple then followed by an afternoon’s charity work and cinema or a rock concert, Johnny Hallyday by preference, in the evening.
In 1971, Bernadette was elected a municipal councillor for Sarran in her husband’s Corrèze constituency, and eight years later became the first female councillor in the département of Corrèze, a seat she held until 2015.
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As president of the French hospitals foundation she was also the public face of the popular “Yellow Coins” campaign to raise money for children in hospital. In the Elle interview she said she was considering running for the French Senate.
She also tolerated her husband’s many extramarital affairs.
As Marie Darrieussecq, the French novelist, wrote in 2008: “Jacques Chirac officially led his little life with thoroughly bourgeois discretion, married to Bernadette since the dawn of time.”
Behaviour that would once have sunk the career of a British or American politician was politely ignored in France until the soap-opera saga of Chirac’s successor, Nicolas Sarkozy, and his wife Cécilia erupted. The Socialist president François Mitterrand led a double life, maintaining a mistress and daughter, a fact the media kept secret for 21 years.
Jacques Chirac admitted he loved many women, “as discreetly as possible”. The chauffeur who would drive him to meet them wrote that Mme Chirac would often ask: “Where is my husband tonight?” The French public did not care.
In a 2001 book, Bernadette revealed she had considered leaving her husband because of his infidelity but stayed for the sake of their two daughters and because she was a “prisoner of certain family traditions”.
The couple still used the formal “vous” not familiar “tu” throughout their marriage, but the Bernadette that emerged from the book was warm, outspoken and witty.
“It wasn’t just a marriage of love, but a marriage of ambition,” she said.
It is not known what Mme Chirac thinks of the film, Bernadette, which will be released in October. Daughter Claude, 60, who worked closely with her late father, told Paris Match the family had not been approached by the director or producers.
“Perhaps they’re unaware that Bernadette is still alive,” she said.