Engagement 22

  Born in Amiens, Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron is the son of Françoise Macron (née Noguès), a physician, and Jean-Michel Macron, professor of neurology at the University of Picardy.[1][2] The couple divorced in 2010. Macron has two siblings, Laurent, born in 1979 and Estelle, born in 1982. Françoise and Jean-Michel's first child was stillborn.[3] The Macron family legacy is traced back to the village of Authie in Hauts-de-France.[4] One of Macron's paternal great-grandfathers, George William Robertson, was English, and was born in Bristol, United Kingdom.[5][6] His maternal grandparents, Jean and Germaine Noguès (née Arribet), are from the Pyrenean town of Bagnères-de-Bigorre, Gascony.[7] Macron commonly visited Bagnères-de-Bigorre to visit his grandmother Germaine, whom he called "Manette".[8] Macron associates his enjoyment of reading[9] and his left-ward political leanings to Germaine, who, after coming from a modest upbringing of a stationmaster father and a housekeeping mother, became a teacher then a principal, and died in 2013.[10] Although raised in a non-religious family, Macron was baptized a Roman Catholic by his own request at age 12; he is agnostic today.[11] He was educated mainly at the Jesuit institute Lycée la Providence[12] in Amiens[13] before his parents sent him to finish his last year of school[14] at the elite Lycée Henri-IV in Paris, where he completed the high school curriculum and the undergraduate program with a "Bac S, Mention Très bien". At the same time he was nominated for the "Concours Général" (most selective national level high school competition) in French literature and received his diploma for his piano studies at Amiens Conservatory.[15] His parents sent him off to Paris due to their alarm at the bond he had formed with Brigitte Auzière, a married teacher with three children at Jésuites de la Providence, who later became his wife.[16] In Paris, he failed to gain entry to the École normale supérieure twice.[17][18]