LAST week was a decisive moment for the French president and his team as they gathered one more time before leaving on summer vacations in country’s different regions or, in a few cases, abroad. As you are reading these lines Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron are enjoying the bright sunshine and sea views of Marseille.

Though after his one hundred days in office a number of opinion polls award the president somewhat dismal popularity rates, the question on everyone’s lips concerns a possible job that would be offered to the First Lady when she returns to Paris next month.

Technically speaking the French president’s wife has no role to play in public life, save that of a smiling hostess during official dinners and receptions at the Elysée Palace. But Macron, soon after his election three months ago, had promised to change things by creating a law clearly defining the job that the First Lady will be expected to perform with the help of an exclusive staff at her disposal.

There are many who are opposed to such a move, arguing the whole idea is basically an American concept that has no liaison with the French political tradition. Ugo Benalicis, an opposition member at the National Assembly, says: “The president is only trying to find a way to allocate special funds for the First Lady’s personal activities. I insist the people who had voted for Macron were not trying to elect his wife also for anything whatsoever.”

Other critics point out that the very appellation ‘First Lady’ is a fairly recent imposition on the French politic scene and that President Charles de Gaulle’s wife was affectionately known to the public as ‘Aunty Yvonne’ while her successor Claude Pompidou had kept her distance from the Elysée Palace which she had often qualified as a “house of distress”.

Former president François Hollande, well-known for his romantic adventures, never actually got married and had no First Lady to speak of. His predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife Carla exclusively concentrated on her career as a singer and an actress but nothing else. While living in the Elysée Palace for five years between 2007 and 2012, she professionally recorded many songs and acted in movies, including Woody Allen’s Paris at Midnight; but playing the First Lady was never her cup of tea.

In the United States as well the official status of the First Lady, though the title has been used for the past two centuries, is relatively recent. It was only on Nov 2, 1978 that a law was passed under the presidency of Jimmy Carter allowing the First Lady to have a team of about a dozen White House employees directly under her orders.

Another curious fact that normally escapes public attention is the identity of the husband of a lady in power anywhere in the world. Former US president Bill Clinton narrowly missed becoming the ‘First Dude’ as he himself termed it, when his wife Hillary was defeated in the last US election. But the German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s husband, a professor of theoretical chemistry named Joachim Sauer, has successfully managed to keep himself out of the media’s hype for the past twelve years. The same is true for the British Premier Theresa May’s husband, the banker Philip John May.

To give credit to Brigitte, she was constantly seen by her husband’s side during the election campaign but has managed to keep herself distant from the media’s attention since his swearing-in ceremony last May.

“All this is going to change…” promises the youthful president who has vowed to lead a political as well as cultural revolution in the country: “…as we are going to bring an end to the French hypocrisy of allowing no more than a ceremonial role to the First Lady.”

—The writer is a journalist based in Paris.
ZafMasud@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 20th, 2017