The French first couple has been a TikTok phenomenon since the platform first reached scale in France in 2020. Most of the videos do not concern policy. They concern the fact that Brigitte Macron is 24 years older than her husband, Emmanuel, and was his high-school drama teacher.
Some of the content is gentle and admiring. Some of it is hostile, much of it from far-right or Russian-aligned accounts that have used the age gap as the basis for conspiracy theories about Mme Macron's identity. Almost none of it engages with her public charitable work or her policy interests, which centre on education, autism awareness and inclusion.
A different kind of first ladyship
Brigitte Macron has, by French standards, taken an unusually visible role for a presidential spouse. The position has no formal constitutional status, she is referred to in the official Élysée register simply as Madame Brigitte Macron, but successive holders have used it differently. Bernadette Chirac was charity-focused. Cécilia Sarkozy and then Carla Bruni-Sarkozy split the role in opposite directions. Valérie Trierweiler and then Julie Gayet were kept almost entirely out of view by François Hollande.
Mme Macron has restored the model of a publicly active first lady, with a particular focus on the Fondation Hôpitaux de France-Hôpitaux de Paris (now Fondation Hôpitaux), the charity behind the annual Pièces Jaunes campaign that she chairs.
The TikTok cycle
That public profile has converted into an unusually persistent presence on TikTok. The biggest videos featuring Mme Macron in the 2024-2025 period are not from her own accounts (she does not maintain one) but from third-party creators: clipped public appearances soundtracked to popular music, side-by-side images of her and her husband at different ages, and a number of widely-circulating misinformation videos that the Élysée has periodically had to refute.
The most damaging of those is a years-old, debunked conspiracy theory that resurfaced in mid-2024 and triggered French defamation proceedings against several social-media commentators. Court rulings in 2025 confirmed the falsity of the underlying claims.
The communication challenge
Internally, the Élysée's response has settled on a deliberate pattern of low-key correction: limited televised interviews from Mme Macron, occasional charity coverage of her work, and selective legal action where defamation thresholds are clearly crossed. There is no official TikTok account, in part because Mme Macron's advisers regard the platform as fundamentally incompatible with the formal style of the institution.
Whether that judgment will survive the post-Macron era is one of the open questions of French presidential communication. The next first lady or first gentleman, whoever they turn out to be, will inherit not just a role but a TikTok back-catalogue measured in billions of cumulative views.
