French presidential candidate Emmanuel Macron’s marriage to his former teacher, who is 24 years his senior, might have some people drawing comparisons to American Mary Kay Letourneau and her illicit relationship with her minor student, but let's just chalk it up to cultural differences.
Macron met his wife, Brigitte Trogneux, when he was a teenaged high school student. She was his teacher and a married mother of three at the time, Yahoo News reported. Trogneux later divorced her husband and married Macron, now 39, in 2007.
"Other than using a cheeky nickname for Macron, 'chouchou,' or teacher’s pet, the French press seems to treat Macron and Trogneux as a couple more closely resembling John and Jacqueline Kennedy in Camelot than Vili Fualaau and Mary Kay Letourneau," Gabby Kauffman wrote for Yahoo News.
Letourneau, 55, had two children with her former student, who’s now 33. The two got married in 2005 after Letourneau finished serving a seven-year jail sentence for the relationship that started when Fualaau was a minor.
Trogneux, now 64, was teaching drama when she met a teenaged Macron, who’s the same age as her daughter, at a Jesuit school in France, The Sun reported. It was around that time that their romance reportedly began.
Writer Anne Fulda wrote a book detailing the relationship called "Emmanuel Macron: A Perfect Young Man."
Macron’s parents originally thought Macron was in love with his wife’s daughter, and they were later shocked to find out that it was actually the drama teacher whom their son had fallen in love with, according to Reuters.
"We couldn’t believe it," Macron’s mother reportedly told Fulda. "What is clear is that when Emmanuel met Brigitte we couldn’t just say: ‘That’s great.’"
She once told Brigitte: "Don’t you see. You’ve had your life. But he won’t have children with you."
When Macron was in high school, his father told Trogneux to stay away from his son until Macron was 18, Reuters reported.
"I cannot promise you anything," a teary-eyed Trogneux reportedly said at the time.
The book doesn’t say exactly when Macron and Trogneux’s romance first started, but Emmanuel’s parents emphasized that they did not pursue charges for corruption of a minor, Reuters reported.
Trogneux has said that "nobody will ever know at what moment our story became a love story. That belongs to us. That is our secret."
Reuters reported that Macron, who is hoping to beat out far-right candidate Marine Le Pen in the runoff French election next month, said, "Nobody would call it unusual if the age difference was reversed. People find it difficult to accept something that is sincere and unique."
The cultural differences between France and the U.S. could also have something to do with reactions to their unique love story.
“Our countries and our media have very different approaches to the issue of private lives of public figures,” Sylvie Kauffmann, editorial director of French newspaper Le Monde, told Yahoo News. “The question has been put to him in many interviews. He has addressed it squarely, explaining basically that he was aware that it was uncommon, but that it had happened and worked fine.”