When Mathieu Gallet realised that the Paris rumour mill had labelled him Emmanuel Macron’s gay lover, he dismissed the notion as ludicrous. Gallet, then chairman of Radio France, the state broadcaster, was in a relationship with a 20-year-old student. And anyway, he found Macron unstylish, with an old-fashioned dress sense, and not at all his type of guy.
He was wrong to take the rumour lightly. It spread across France, became a national sexual fantasy amplified by Russian online bots, angered Brigitte Macron and ended up costing Gallet his job, or so he believes. Now he is talking publicly for the first time about what he calls a “very French story” — the combination of intrigue and farce into which he was unwittingly dragged as Macron prepared to become president of France in 2017. He has written a book on the subject, Jeux de pouvoir (Power Games), which chronicles the dirty tricks that riddled his four years as the head of Radio France, notably when he became a collateral victim of a failed plot to prevent Macron’s rise to the Elysée by depicting him as a closet homosexual.
“In French stories there is always a mix between the serious and the less serious. In this case, the serious is the politics and the less serious is this business of the rumour with Emmanuel Macron,” Gallet, 45, says when we meet in an upmarket Californian-style café in Paris. Gallet had been appointed chairman of Radio France in 2014 at the age of 37 after pledging to modernise a broadcaster that, like much of the French public sector, seemed to be stuck in a time warp. Listeners were deserting, expenditure was bloated and unions were determined to prevent change.
At about the same time Macron, hitherto an anonymous backroom adviser to François Hollande, the socialist who was president at the time, had emerged from the shadows after being made economy minister. He used the post to prepare a career path that involved quitting the left-wing government, setting up his own centrist political party and running for the presidency on a promise of sweeping economic reform.
The rumour that Macron and Gallet were having an affair began circulating in Paris in late 2016, just as it was becoming obvious that the centrist leader was a serious contender for the Elysée. It took hold on social media, swept through the French political class and became a pillar of dinner-party conversations. Paparazzi staked out Gallet’s flat, and supposedly well-informed sources told journalists that compromising photographs of him with Macron were about to be published.
Even provincial backwaters heard the rumour. Gallet’s aunt, for instance, was told about the “affair” at a dinner party in La Rochelle, in western France, while his grandmother, who lives near Bordeaux, was sent an email informing her that he had moved in with Macron.
It was not only France that gossiped. Gallet says that state-backed Russian agents latched on to the rumour in the hope of destabilising Macron’s 2017 presidential election campaign, just as they had interfered in the race between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the US. Fake accounts relayed talk of “the affair”, and “Mathieu Gallet and Emmanuel Macron” became a top search on Google, as Gallet discovered to his embarrassment when he led a team of Radio France executives to the platform’s Californian headquarters and found that he was trending on the search engine.
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Just about the only place where there was no mention of the rumour was in the French media, which is coy about prying into the private lives of the great and good. Press, television and radio ignored “the affair” until Macron went public, jokingly dismissing it at a campaign rally shortly before the 2017 election. Gallet says the media’s reluctance to address the rumour somehow helped to turn it into a nationwide “fantasy”, swirling around the internet but never quite pinned down.
The whole thing was a total invention from start to finish, Gallet says — he wasn’t even a friend of Macron. “I know you’re keen on sexual scandals in Britain but in France they take quite a detestable direction. Macron and I knew each other, of course, we had friends in common, but we had only ever actually met three or four times.
“The people who created this rumour were not pulling the thread of a friendship to say that it was more than a friendship. They were creating a complete fiction.”
If the plotters chose to cast Gallet as “the lover” it was probably because he had never hidden his homosexuality, he was the same age as Macron, he was eminently seductive — handsome, affable and articulate — and he was controversial. During his time at Radio France Gallet fell foul of unionists, who leaked to the press details of a €100,000 renovation of his office. The refit had been approved before his appointment, but the disclosure nevertheless hurt his reputation. Gallet was also at odds with the socialist government of the day, which discovered that he had failed to respect public sector procurement regulations in his job as head of the National Audiovisual Institute. Ministers tipped off prosecutors, and Gallet ended up with a €30,000 fine.
In other words, the plotters almost certainly thought they could depict him as an electoral liability for Macron — not only homosexual, but given to financial extravagance. Gallet is convinced that the “affair” was invented by Macron’s socialist cabinet colleagues of the day, who contrived to spread it across social media. He blames Manuel Valls, then prime minister, who denies the claim. “I think the socialists realised that Macron was ambitious and thought, ‘This guy, he’s going to beat us [in the race to become France’s next president]. We have to stop him by creating the rumour that he is gay.’ ”
He says the plot was rooted in prejudice. Noting the age difference between Macron, who is 44, and his wife, who is 69, the plotters “said to themselves, ‘A heterosexual man cannot have a true relationship with a woman 24 years older than him, and therefore it means he is gay.’
“It is an idea based in absolute misogyny.”
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Macron’s rivals were also homophobic, he says. “Those who created this rumour said to themselves that French society would say, ‘No, we cannot elect a gay president or a closet gay president,’ and that people would think to themselves, ‘If he hides things about his private life, he is going to hide things from the nation.’ ”
The plan appeared to fly in the face of historical precedent, given that the country has always taken a laid-back view of extramarital affairs. In 1899, for instance, Félix Faure, then president, expired during an amorous encounter with his lover on a sofa in the Elysée, allegedly after taking too many aphrodisiacs. Almost a century later François Mitterrand, the socialist who was then head of state, installed his mistress and their daughter in the Elysée on a permanent basis. On the night of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997, Jacques Chirac, Mitterrand’s successor, could not initially be contacted because he was with Claudia Cardinale, the Italian actress.
These and countless other affairs were hushed up at the time, and never did much damage to the reputations of those involved when they were revealed. François Hollande, the head of state between 2012 and 2017, was less fortunate when a glossy magazine published photographs of him going to see his mistress in 2014. But if there was reprobation it was more because he was caught by paparazzi looking unstatesmanlike on a night-time escapade on a motorcycle than because he was being unfaithful to the first lady.
Macron’s opponents thought public opinion would show far less tolerance towards an extramarital liaison if it involved a gay lover, Gallet says. In short, they thought voters shared their homophobia. But they misjudged public opinion, he believes — the gossip did nothing to damage Macron’s reputation, and may have boosted it. Indeed, Macron’s press team let the rumour circulate for months without trying to counter it.
“I think . . . they thought it made him look good in the eyes of some voters, probably young voters,” Gallet says. “What those who created this rumour got wrong was that French society is in fact much more relaxed about these things than they thought. People don’t care, in fact.”
Macron was elected triumphantly in 2017, and won a second election on April 24. In the end, there may have been only two victims of the gossip mongers. The first was Brigitte Macron, who is said to have been left hurt and angry by it all. The second was Gallet, who was dismissed from his post at Radio France after being convicted of breaking the procurement law in 2018.
Macron was in office at the time and could easily have chosen to overlook the offence and to have left Gallet in his job, he says. Instead, the order came down to terminate his contract. “Basically, sacking me was a way of putting a definitive end to the rumour and of showing that I was not being protected,” says Gallet, who now works in the private sector at the head of a start-up that touts itself as the Netflix of podcasts. He has been left with a sense of “waste”.
“Everyone recognises that I did a good job at Radio France. We put the ratings back up and modernised the radio. But I have the impression that it all ended halfway down the road because of that stupid rumour.”
