Bernadette Chirac, the aristocratic, imposing and frequently outspoken wife of the former French president Jacques Chirac, who became an elected official in her own right as well as a charity leader, died on Friday. She was 93.
President Emmanuel Macron of France announced the death on social media, writing: “Bernadette Chirac changed so many lives with discretion and obstinacy. A great lady of the heart has departed.”
Mrs. Chirac’s daughter, Claude Chirac, also confirmed the death, to Agence France-Presse, but did not specify a cause or say where her mother died.
As France’s first lady from 1995 to 2007, Mrs. Chirac presented a flawless, somewhat haughty image in Chanel suits and dark Dior glasses, a leonine coiffure framing her high forehead.
But she was no cutout figure and was known for brusque candor. Her judgments of Mr. Chirac’s political advisers could seal their fates. “I’m like my snakeskin bag: I bite,” she once said on the campaign trail.
After being omitted from a photo spread in the glossy Paris Match magazine that portrayed her husband as a devoted grandfather, she said, “Did you know the president is a widower?”
Mrs. Chirac endured with stoicism and sometimes dry humor her husband’s widely rumored extramarital affairs.
After her death, a well-known clip resurfaced on social media showing Mr. Chirac flirting with a young woman behind Mrs. Chirac’s back as she addresses a crowd. Mrs. Chirac turns and shoots her husband a withering look.
In a frank 2001 autobiography, “Conversation,” Mrs. Chirac acknowledged her husband’s philandering. “I have been jealous at times, very!” she said. Yet she stayed in the marriage, she explained, for her children.
“Convention dictated that one put up a facade and hung on,” she said. “I warned him several times: The day Napoleon abandoned Josephine, he lost it all.”
Her autobiography, published on the eve of her husband’s successful run for a second presidential term, transformed Mrs. Chirac’s steely image into an empathetic one, with appeal to her husband’s conservative base and to readers on the left.
She remained by his side through 63 years of marriage, until his death in 2019, as he rose from a member of the National Assembly in 1967 to prime minister of France in 1974, mayor of Paris in 1977 and, after two failed attempts, president of France for 12 years.
Shortly before her husband moved into the Élysée Palace in 1995, Mrs. Chirac became president of a charity that collects small change for hospitalized children. She turned the effort, Operation Yellow Coins, into a national phenomenon, traveling the country and appearing on TV.
She was motivated in part by the ordeal of the Chiracs’ daughter Laurence, who had meningitis as a girl and later developed severe anorexia and attempted to take her own life.
Mrs. Chirac entered politics at the suggestion of her husband, according to the French newspaper Le Monde. He wanted a family member to have an on-the-ground presence in Corrèze, a farming region in central France that he claimed as his electoral base, while he pursued ambitions in Paris.
Mrs. Chirac was elected as a councilor in the commune of Sarran in 1971, and to the departmental council in 1979. She held the position for 36 years, well after her husband’s career ended. In 2004, she added thousands of miles to her 25-year-old red Peugeot while running for her fifth term, defying her husband’s suggestion that, at 71, she was too old for the job.
“My husband literally said to me, ‘Isn’t this one time too many?’” Mrs. Chirac told The New York Times that year. “I didn’t answer.”
The article described how, while visiting a pig farm, she balanced a piglet in her arms while carrying her Chanel handbag.
Bernadette Chodron de Courcel was born on May 18, 1933, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. Her mother, Marguerite, was a descendant of counts in the Brondeau d’Urtières family. Her father, Jean Chodron de Courcel, came from a family of soldiers, industrialists and diplomats. He and other family members owned factories that manufactured Gien faience and Émaux de Briare mosaic tiles. Her uncle Geoffroy Chodron de Courcel was Charles de Gaulle’s aide-de-camp in London during World War II and later de Gaulle’s secretary general when he became president of France in 1959.
When Bernadette was 6, her father was taken prisoner by the Nazis and held in Germany through the war. Her mother took refuge with Bernadette at a relative’s chateau in the countryside.
In 1951, Bernadette entered the Paris Institute of Political Studies, or Sciences Po, where she met Mr. Chirac, a fellow student who was popular, well-spoken and handsome. He invited her to join a study group. They married in 1956.
Besides her daughter Claude, Mrs. Chirac is survived by a grandson. Laurence died of a heart attack in 2016.
After Mr. Chirac declined to run for a third term as president in 2007, giving scant explanation, he led a quiet life. His wife continued to attend fashionable dinners and make comments in the news media.
When asked about her husband, she would say, “He’s looking after the dog.”
