As Palace intrigue continues about what happened on Macrons’ flight, it’s just known as ‘Le Slap’

Was it a grab? A slap? A shove? Nobody knows exactly what happened in the moments preceding Brigitte Macron putting her hand on the face of her husband, French President Emmanuel Macron, as they exited a jet Sunday in Hanoi. And the world will likely never know for certain. 

But as the palace intrigue continues, the French media is simply calling the incident “Le Slap.”

Macron’s office first claimed the video footage was part of an AI-generated Russian plot, and then French officials dismissed the encounter as “playful teasing.”

“It was a moment when the president and his wife were relaxing one last time before the start of the trip by having a laugh,” a Macron staffer was quoted as saying. “It was a moment of closeness.” Emmanuel Macron reiterated the point in a later statement, stating “Everyone just needs to calm down.”

Macron clarified the video was real but said it was “showing me joking and teasing my wife.”

“Somehow that becomes a sort of geo-planetary catastrophe, with people even coming up with theories to explain it,” he continued. “People are attributing all kinds of nonsense to them.”

A lip-reader told the U.K. tabloid Express that Brigitte reportedly told her husband, “Stay away, loser!” (the audio from the incident is inconclusive.) Jesús Enrique Rosas, a body language expert, said the exchange showed “clear tension” between the two. And that Brigitte refused to take her husband’s arm as they walked off the plane appears to add to that theory. 

On Quora, a knowledge-sharing platform, one user speculated that Brigitte Macron was angry because Emmanuel Macron would not take a tougher line against Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, accused of sending Gaza to the brink of a humanitarian crisis as he tries to defeat Palestinian-backed Hamas.

To be sure, it’s never a good time for a world leader to become the subject of a viral video. 

But the 47-year-old Macron cannot afford the unwelcome attention at the Élysée Palace as he also tries to navigate the prospect of a 50% tariff on exports from European Union member nations and a second war – between Russia and Ukraine.

The incident has also shed new light on the unusual relationship between the Macrons, who met when Emmanuel was a 15-year-old high school student and Brigitte, 24 years his senior, was his drama and literature teacher and a married mother of three. Her oldest child, Sébastien, is two years older than Macron.

When Macron’s mother discovered her son was spending time with Brigitte, she originally assumed he was interested in Tiphaine Auziére, Brigitte’s daughter, who is seven years younger than her son.

The couple married in 2007, a year after Brigitte, who just turned 72, divorced her first husband.

Macron has called his wife his “anchor” and his best friend. 

“For me, it’s very important for my personal balance to have someone at home telling me the truth every day,” he has said.

But that doesn’t stop whispers that Brigitte is more like a mother to her husband than she is a true partner.

Despite all the rumors and speculation swirling around the Macrons in Vietnam, he ended up taking care of business on the trip. Before returning home, Macron and his Vietnamese counterpart Luong Cuong announced 30 agreements worth at least $10 billion, statecraft aimed at helping to diversify French trade amid worries about U.S. tariffs.