She appears in the official photographs with her chin lifted, blond hair lacquered into place, a small handbag on her arm, looking less like a spouse than like an institution. But the caricature never quite contained her. The Chanel suits, dark glasses, nasal voice and withering judgments became part of the national image. Beneath them was a relentless worker and a cold-eyed political operator who, almost alone among the wives of French presidents, built a base of power that was her own.
She was born Bernadette Thérèse Marie Chodron de Courcel on May 18, 1933, in Paris, into money, lineage and Catholic duty. Her father’s family included soldiers, industrialists and diplomats; an uncle had served as an aide to Charles de Gaulle in wartime London. But her life would be most marked by her time at the prestigious Sciences Po university in Paris, where she met Jacques Chirac, a handsome and much-courted young man whose appetite for politics would come to define them both.
