Not on the same page: the Macrons fight over literary lockdown
Paris: It was a shared love of literature that brought France's power couple together.
Now Brigitte and Emmanuel Macron are at loggerheads over France's love of reading, with the First Lady reportedly insistent that bookshops should remain open during lockdown while her husband has forced them to shut.
With France in confinement since last Thursday, the president has ordered all shops selling "non-essential" goods to close for at least a month while leaving supermarkets, wine and household goods stores open.
French President Emmanuel Macron's wife Brigitte Macron is a champion of bookstores and a former teacher. Credit:AFP
The decision to count books as "non-essential" in the land of Molière, Victor Hugo and Jean-Paul Sartre has prompted howls of complaint from top authors, booksellers and publishers, but also placed Macron on a collision course with his wife, according to newspaper Le Parisien.
But Madame Macron, "a fan of culture, had hoped that bookshops would be spared from the lockdown guillotine", said the capital's daily. Her husband supported this view until last Wednesday when he "changed his mind" after being shown rocketing infection and hospitalisation rates.
Like his wife, Macron is a bookworm. He met her as a 15-year-old schoolboy when she was a French and drama teacher at La Providence, a private school in Amiens, northern France.
During the first national lockdown in March, the French president urged the nation to read, saying it was "essential in the times we're going through".
But his decision to impose literary lockdown has infuriated France's 3,000-odd independent bookshops, who asked why chain stores selling essential items were allowed to offer books while they had to remain shut except for "click and collect" orders.
In a letter to the French president published by Le Monde, a host of top cultural figures and writers urged Macron to "choose culture". All sanitary measures were now in place to ensure the bookshop remains "a safe place", they insisted. An accompanying petition has garnered 185,000 signatures.
Meanwhile, a string of provincial mayors have passed decrees flouting the national ban and authorising small shops, including bookstores, to reopen.
The Telegraph, London