Bernadette Chirac
| Bernadette Chirac | |
|---|---|
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| Born |
Bernadette Thérèse Marie Chodron de Courcel 18 May 1933 Paris, France |
| Residence | Quai Voltaire, Paris (personal) Bity Castle, Sarran, Corrèze (personal) |
| Nationality | French |
| Spouse(s) | Jacques Chirac (m. 1956) |
| Relatives |
Claude Chirac (daughter) Martin Rey-Chirac (grandson) Anh Dao Traxel (adoptive daughter) |
Bernadette Thérèse Marie Chirac (born Bernadette Thérèse Marie Chodron de Courcel on 18 May 1933) is a French politician and the wife of the former President Jacques Chirac.
She and Chirac met while both were students at the Paris Institute of Political Studies (better known as Sciences Po), and were married in France on 16 March 1956. They have two children: Laurence (born 4 March 1958, deceased 14 April 2016) and Claude Chirac (born 6 December 1962), and a Vietnamese foster-daughter, Anh Đào Traxel.
Since 2001, Bernadette has been a leading member of the "Pièces Jaunes" (Yellow Coins), a charity that aids children in French hospitals by collecting small change. On 3 September 2007, she became the president of the "Fondation Claude-Pompidou" (Claude Pompidou Foundation), following the death of its founder, Claude Pompidou.
She also helped her husband's being elected in 1995 and is herself an elected official in Corrèze, the couple's home département.
Born in Paris on 18 May 1933, Bernadette Thérèse Marie Chodron de Courcel was the daughter of Jean-Louis Chodron de Courcel (1907–1985), sales director of Emaux de Briare Inc., and Marguerite de Brondeau d'Urtières (1910–2000). She was the oldest of three children: her sister Catherine was born in 1946 and her brother Jérôme in 1948.
Her family was devout Catholic and she received a strict education from her mother. Her father was called into the French Army in 1939 and imprisoned in Germany during the Second World War until 1945. In June 1940, she fled into exile with her mother to Lot-et-Garonne, where she attended the Sainte-Marthe school in Agen. From 1941 to 1943, after the occupation of the zone libre, they fled again to Gien in the Loiret. There she attended Sainte-Marie-des-Fleurs-et-des-Fruits school until the return of her father in 1945. The family settled in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. She ultimately started at the Paris Institute of Political Studies in 1950 where she met her future husband but did not graduate.
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