If “Weird” Al Yankovic wants to break through in the French market, I have a parody idea for him: “We Don’t Talk About Brigitte.”
Granted, there’s probably a short shelf-life to the controversy, given that French President Emmanuel Macron is term-limited to 2027. However, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” is a pretty timeless song, provided you can get Disney’s blessing, and the fact that the French media don’t seem to want to discuss the preternatural relationship between the president and his wife Brigitte seems pretty ample fodder for material.
In the latest bizarre twist in a marriage that has exhausted the thesaurus’ synonyms for the words “strange” and “unnatural,” the 72-year-old Brigitte was seen shoving her 49-year-old husband as he was getting off a plane in Vietnam.
What is the French media saying about it? Well, therein lies my idea, Mr. Yankovic. Because despite the fact that this has been viewed millions of times on innumerable accounts and other nations’ media outlets…
If you look closely, you can see Emmanuel Macron’s wife Brigitte forcibly shove him in the face with BOTH of her hands.
This is clearly assault, whether Macron takes it as such or not.
How long has it been going on?
— Maria Leah (@maria_leah385) May 26, 2025
French President Macron’s wife getting physically. I don’t know if that was a slap as much and face shove. She needs to calm down. pic.twitter.com/OAd2DdEKhm
— VeLore (@Oddland66) May 26, 2025
… it turns out the answer is, at least if you’re a member of the French media: Quelle shove?
Do you think Macron was abused by his wife in the viral video?
From CNN:
A quick shove. A split-second clip that would have dominated US news for days aired in France for just 24 hours and then it was gone.
When a viral video appeared over the weekend showing French President Emmanuel Macron’s wife, Brigitte, pushing his face just as he was about to deplane during a visit to Vietnam, not a single French newspaper front page featured it the next morning.
Was it because Prime Minister François Bayrou was speaking about the financial efforts the French would have to make under his soon-to-be-unveiled budget? Or that people were detained recently in a string of crypto kidnappings?
More likely, it highlighted a cultural divide between France and the Anglosphere – a long-standing French belief that politicians’ private lives should be protected.
Yes, those wacky cultural standards. This particular cultural standard, CNN did point out, hasn’t really led to positive outcomes for the Fifth Republic.
For instance, former President François Mitterrand had a second family with an illegitimate daughter that was more or less covered up by the French press until after his death, CNN notes. That’s perhaps something voters should have known about before the man’s rise to power, and something the media did know about. But questions weren’t asked, because that’s just how the French are.
(There are also, it’s worth noting, questions about how much the press and/or government officials knew about the prostate cancer that Mitterand had since the early 1980s. It went metastatic during his final term and eventually led to his death shortly after he left office in 1996, at which point he was in significantly diminished physical condition due to both the disease and treatments — but that one hits kinda close to home and doesn’t really emphasize the “cultural divide between France and the Anglosphere” at the moment, now, does it? Whatever the case, it goes unmentioned by CNN.)
Then there was Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former head of the International Monetary Fund. Despite the fact that he was a known serial adulterer and aggressive womanizer, Strauss-Kahn was viewed as the presidential frontrunner for the Socialist Party before he was arrested on charges of sexual assault in New York City in 2011. Despite the fact those charges were eventually dropped, Strauss-Kahn’s career was effectively over because the American media had no compunctions about reporting on his history. (The charges were eventually dropped, although the scandal and the numerous allegations of misconduct that followed led to his dropping out of the 2012 race.)
However, in the case of the Macron shove, he released a statement saying there was no “squabbling” and he and Brigitte were just “joking.”
“Everyone needs to calm down,” he said, according to the New York Post, chastising those who, he said, were turning it into “a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe.”
“People are saying all sorts of nonsense,” he said.
Another source close to the Macrons echoed that statement: “It was a moment when the president and his wife were decompressing one last time before the start of the trip by joking around,” an insider claimed. “It’s a moment of togetherness. No more was needed to feed the mills of the conspiracy theorists.”
However, if you believe body language experts, Judi James is one and she said the bleeding obvious in an interview with the U.K. Daily Mail: No, this definitely wasn’t “joking.”
“I would not describe the gesture we saw from inside the plane as one of ‘play’ as has been claimed,” James said in a piece published Monday.
“There is no follow-up shared laughter, grins or teasing rituals,” James added. “Macron performs a ‘think-on-your-feet’ wave before stepping back in towards his wife, but he seems to touch his face too, in a checking gesture.”
“This will inevitably be turned into a ‘joke’ by some people but I would call it genuinely shocking and I would say the same if it was any other couple walking down any street, no matter who did it to who,” she said. “If this had been his hand and her face would it have been called ‘playful?’ … So it should not from her to him.”
While I’m generally the sort that thinks “body language expert” is right up there with “aromatherapist” in terms of air-quotes “professions” too frequently claimed by pseudoscientific grifters, this is actually pretty spot-on about the Macrons’ exchange, if just because of the obviousness. Yet still, nothing from the French media, in any real capacity, past the first 24 hours.
And CNN actually didn’t think this was such a bad thing, noting a conspiracy theory spread that Brigitte Macron is actually a man (most prominently put forward in the Anglosphere by former Daily Wire commentator Candace Owens, who — in case you haven’t been following her recent travails — isn’t, um, living her best mental health life now, as Joel Osteen might phrase it).
In fact, CNN was incensed that Macron had to deign to defend his wife:
At a Paris event in March 2024, Macron addressed the rumor head-on saying that the worst part of being a president is having to deal with “the false information and fabricated stories.”
“People end up believing them, and it disrupts your life, even in your most private moments,” Macron said.
His words now feel prophetic, with the world speculating on a deeply intimate exchange we may never be let into.
Ah, yes, those poor Macrons. A man who met his future wife at age 15 when she was his 39-year-old married tutor should never have his “deeply intimate exchange[s]” examined closely like this, lest the conspiracy theorists of the world make too much of — again, I cannot emphasize this enough — the freaking obviousness of how wrong this particular exchange was and how it fits into a pattern of decided weirdness.
This is a moment of unhealthy fractiousness in the most unhealthy relationship I can think of any recent world leader having, and this includes undisclosed ones with interns. Even if Kamala had theoretically dragged Doug to 1600 Pennsylvania in an alternate history of last November, they’d still be miles behind the Macrons in terms of open dysfunctionality. That’s almost talent on the Macrons’ part.
But those French, oui, oui, oui! Them and their private lives! We shouldn’t interfere, non?
Look, “Weird” Al: The idea is out there. I’m giving it to you free of charge. Rights signed away. You and your accordion may have at it, Mr. Yankovic.
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