Farewell to Bernadette Chirac, widow of the French President

Bernadette Chirac, widow of former French President Jacques Chirac, died last night at the age of 93, her daughter Claude Chirac announced to Afp on Saturday. Madame Chirac, born Bernadette Chodron de Courcel, 'passed away peacefully in the evening, surrounded by her family. She had just turned 93 years old' on 18 May, her daughter said. She was the only First Lady to have held political office in her own name, as general councillor of the department of Corrèze, where she was elected continuously from 1979 to 2015.

Bernadette was one of France's best-loved First Ladies. Before representing the former president in the last years of his life, Bernadette Chirac lived for a long time in the shadow of her husband, who held the posts of minister and prime minister several times, before becoming President of the Republic from 1995 to 2007.

'By fulfilling Jacques Chirac's destiny, she fulfilled herself,' said journalist Erwan L'Eléouet, author of Bernadette Chirac, les secrets d'une conquête (Fayard) in Le Figaro in 2023. But at the same time, she was also an elected political figure in Corrèze and dedicated herself to the hospital, in particular through the Pièces Jaunes (Yellow Coins) campaign. For this work, she was awarded the rank of Officer of the Legion of Honour in 2024.

She was Jacques Chirac's wife, but above all she was a woman of character. Bernadette Chirac was fond of quoting the biblical saying: 'No one knows the day or the hour. She seemed to entrust the thread of her existence to the Creator,' recalls Le Monde. 'However, this surrender to the divine did not exclude her desire to choose the moment of her death, sometimes wishing to 'die sooner'. Jacques Chirac's death on 26 September 2019, almost seven years before her, left her no choice. But this reference to the man with whom she shared her life somehow explains her own fate. The Catholic philosopher Jean Guitton, her friend,' writes Le Monde again, 'considered her the last queen of France. And it is true that she looked like it, protected by that slightly haughty air she maintained even when she was in a bad mood, with her high, protruding forehead, aquiline nose and thin mouth, which sometimes let the guillotine of her disfavour drop on the head of some dazzled courtier.