Happy St Brigid’s public holiday. January’s done and 2026 is motoring. Dear Brigid, bearer of good news.
The name is favoured by the French. Brigitte Bardot, for instance, who died on December 28th aged 91. Her “full” life involved 17 relationships, including four marriages, the last of which was longer than her three previous marriages combined.
Then, as she once explained: “I have always looked for passion. That’s why I was often unfaithful. And when the passion was coming to an end, I was packing my suitcase.” Busy suitcase.
Last May (aged 90) she said, “Feminism isn’t my thing. I like guys.” Quelle surprise!
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She liked other animals too, setting up the Brigitte Bardot Foundation for the welfare of animals in 1986 and becoming vegetarian.
Then there is Brigitte Macron, who is 72, wife of French president Emmanuel Macron, 24 years her junior and in breach of the seemingly last taboo – the forbidden love involving a woman who could be the man’s mother by age. It doesn’t apply the other way around.
Brigitte was a mother of three when she first came across the precocious Emmanuel, then 15, at a school where she taught and where one of her daughters was his classmate. They married in 2007 when he was 29.
Few public figures have attracted such vile criticism as Brigitte Macron, fanned inevitably online by such as US conspiracy theorist Candace Owens, alleging Brigitte is really a man who seduced her husband when he was a minor. In a French court last month 10 people were found guilty of posting and reposting such malicious comments on social media about her.
The Macrons have also filed a US lawsuit for defamation against Owens, whose response to the French case was “Brigitte is dangerous. That he wakes up everyday, puts on a fake wig, lipstick and mascara and declares war on those who know his true identity is nothing short of psychopathic.” It seems clear where the real psychopathology lies in this case.
Santa didn’t come to me (again!) last Christmas but a friend’s daughter, who I describe as “my favourite fascist”, gave me a present of the book Becoming Brigitte by Owens (and Xavier Poussard) – 357 pages of most cogently argued sh1te.
Regardless, that friend’s daughter remains my favourite fascist.
Calumny, for “slander”, from Latin calumnia.
