Out of the ordinary

There are two things I want to touch on about Emmanuel Macron’s victory in France. First is his victory as the President of France. He is the young head of a political movement called En Marche! (Onwards!) who has had no political experience. And second about his marriage to his teacher who is 25 years older than he was. Both are out of the ordinary. I think that is what the French were looking for. 

On the political side I like Andy Borowitz’s article in the New Yorker saying that the results reflect the intellectual superiority of the French compared to the Americans. They wanted change but not foolish enough to vote for Marie Le Pen.“A lot was at stake today “the future of our liberal tradition and our democracy itself.” “The French were in cafes toasting their superiority.”To them the greatest loss would have been their right to look down on Americans.

“Thank God that has been secured,” writes Borowitz.

On the personal level the tabloids went to town writing stories on Emmanuel Macron who married his teacher older than him by 25 years. I find this even more out of the ordinary than the political. As Macron himself has said it is misogyny if it is all right for an older man to marry a much younger woman. Why can’t women have equal treatment?

Macron went against all convention to marry the woman he loved. While others would look for a pretty face, a curvaceous body, wealth and what other makes for the physical side of courtship. No one could stop the love he found in Brigitte Trogneaux, his teacher. His parents tried to stop him from what they called a school boy romance but he could not be talked out of it. 

A book has already been written about the romance. His father told the teacher that she should stay away from his son. A daughter of Brigitte was Macron’s classmate. That is, if he had been ordinary. When Macron was a young teenager, his father told Brigitte Trogneux, a married mother of three, to stay away from his son until he reached 18 years of age, according to the book.

“I cannot promise you anything,” a tearful Trogneux replied. The relationship continued and the couple married in 2007 after Trogneux divorced her husband.

The book did not have much, if any, impact on the 39-year-old’s election chances.

But the details of Macron’s romance, which began at a Jesuit college in the provinces where he was a teenage schoolboy and Trogneux, a teacher, did capture the public imagination in the final days before the election.

He was about 16 at the time and she was in her late 30s. The romance blossomed when he studied drama with Trogneux, the book said.

Journalist Anne Fulda, who interviewed Macron, his wife and both of his parents for the book, said they were shocked when they found out that it was the mother, not the daughter that Macron fell in love with. 

“We couldn’t believe it. What is clear is that when Emmanuel met Brigitte we couldn’t just say: “That’s great!’,” Macron’s mother was quoted as saying.

She later confronted Trogneux saying: “Don’t you see. You’ve had your life. But he won’t have children with you.”

Their story was their secret, a spokesman for Macron said when asked to comment. It was regrettable that Fulda had not sought Macron and his wife’s opinion on his parents’ opposition to the romance.

The book left unclear when exactly the romance turned into a full-blown love affair. Fulda wrote: “Emmanuel’s parents were keen on emphasizing that they did not lodge a complaint against Brigitte Auziere (Trogneux’s married name) for corruption of a minor.”

And Trogneux, who will become France’s first lady if Macron wins the election, remained discreet about the origins of the affair. “Nobody will ever know at what moment our story became a love story. That belongs to us. That is our secret,” she was quoted as saying.

The affair continued between the two after Macron left the town of Amiens to continue higher studies in Paris and his subsequent move into banking where he made a fortune before entering politics.

The book quoted him as decrying the “misogyny” generated by his marriage to Trogneux. “Nobody would call it unusual if the age difference was reversed,” he said. “People find it difficult to accept something that is sincere and unique.” I agree.

Fulda said Macron’s parents did come around to accept the relationship despite the early opposition to the romance, writing that Macron's mother described Trogneux as “adorable.”

The book also recounted how Macron’s mother reacted when she heard rumors that her son might be gay, speculation that he himself dismissed at a rally last February.

“You’re going to deny this, aren’t you!” she said to him. To which he replied: “Of course not, Mum. To reply would only mean feeding unfounded and uninteresting rumors.”

The answer to the unusual victory of Macron may have more to do with what Carl Gustav Jung called a phenomenon of synchronicity. For us Filipinos we can proudly say that this departure from the ordinary began with the election of our own President Digong.

Although France is so far away from the Philippines, the similarity of the two events is striking. From my point of view both departed from the old traditions of how to win elections.

There are pictures of Emmanuel Macron arriving outside Whirlpool factory outside the Amiens Cathedral on April 26, 2017. In the meeting with the workers, Macron came to Amiens after French far-right presidential candidate Marine Le Pen upstaged him by making a surprise visit to the factory as he was meeting workers.

President Digong did the same thing, meeting workers and farmers in a generally rightist and aristocratic society. Macron’s reply could very well have come from President Digong himself. “I am not part of the system.” That goes for his unconventional love story and his politics.

According to Wikipedia, synchronicity is a concept, first introduced by analytical psychologist Carl Jung. It holds that events are “meaningful coincidences” if they occur with no causal relationship yet seem to be meaningfully related.

Jung believed that, just as events may be connected by causality, they may also be connected by meaning. Events connected by meaning need not have an explanation in terms of causality, which does not generally contradict the Axiom of Causality.