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| - Macron's face was added to an unrelated school photograph.
In early January 2025, a popular (but since deleted) Reddit post purported to show "future French President Macron with his future wife," referencing Brigitte Macron, whose maiden name is Trogneux.
Since at least 2017, various croppings of the above photo have been shared alongside the claim that they show Macron and his wife at the ages when they first met.
A popular iteration of the claim labeled a wider crop of the same photo, usually in French, as "the husband, the wife and the lover" — implying that the third person was Brigitte Macron's ex-husband, André-Louis Auzière.
While it is true that Macron developed a relationship with Trogneux when he was a 15-year-old student and she was his 39-year-old drama teacher, the photo above has been both manipulated and mis-captioned.
The original photo used as the basis for these memes first widely appeared following a November 2016 France3 documentary about Macron — "La Stratégie du Météore." The future French president was not present in the version of the photo shown for that documentary, however:
Fact-checkers for the French language newspaper Libération identified the man to Trogneux's left as Claude Hugot, a since-retired teacher at the La Providence high school that employed, or was attended by, the Macrons.
Libération also noted that the photograph used as the source of Macron's head came from the same France3 documentary. The context in which the photo appeared in the film, the news story said, suggested that it depicted Macron younger than 15.
As told by France24 in July 2017, "Macron fell in love with his 39-year-old drama teacher, whose three children included a daughter his own age." As reported by the Times of London, Trogneux and Macron avoided a public relationship, for the sake of her children, for 10 years. In 2006, Trogneux divorced her estranged husband, Auzière. She married Macron in 2007.
Because the photo does not authentically show both Trogneux and Macron, we rate the claim as false.
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