BRI-SP: The pictures

Part 6: A picture says more than a thousand words, and so Brigitte stays very silent

There are only a handful of pictures of Brigitte Macron’s alleged youth that have been officially published. More pictures have been dug up by journalists, but they still remain very limited. A lot of weirdness surrounds these pictures also, which increases the speculation about their authenticity and the identity of the persons depicted.

It is noteworthy that Emanuelle Anizon and Xavier Poussard have been given pictures that they have not published. It of course adds even more strangeness to the mystery, as they are both journalists. But they claim to have been given these pictures on the promise of not having them published, but used for the facial recognition only.
An even more important point is that ALL of the school pictures of Brigitte Trogneux are being withheld. The school that prides itself of having had Brigitte Macron as a student claims they didn’t keep any archives – clearly against all rules for archiving of national educational institutions.

Just recently two pictures of André Auzière were made public by Laurence and Tiphaine Auzière, but they add nothing really new. They confirm that André Auzière existed and that he is the man in the wedding picture and on the death card. What they also confirm is that we are not allowed to see pictures of the mother of the Auzière children, because her absence in any picture from the children’s youth is endlessly more significant than what we see in the pictures. It is by now clear that if there was a picture that showed Brigitte Macron as their mother, it would have been made public long ago.

There are also a few pictures of Brigitte Macron with a bump or a bulge in the pubic region. I considered including the famous blue bathing suit one, but seeing a different picture from the same series without any un-female weirdness, I can’t seriously say whether pictures are photoshopped or whether clothing or other body parts simply do weird sometimes. As there is no evidence in such pictures, I decided to ignore them. (Just because I had nothing to match the content, I added one such pic at the end of Part 9.)

It is clear that more about this all will come out in the coming years, but here are the main pictures publicly available today:

• The family picture

  

  Published first in a documentary aired on France 3, this picture is supposedly from 1954, with Brigitte about 1 year old on her mother’s lap, and Jean-Michel as an 8-9 year old boy on the left. The other siblings from left to right are Maryvonne, Jean-Claude, Anne-Marie and Monique.
  It has later come in different version, with and without Jean-Michel, with and without the lamp shade, and there is loads of speculation whether it really is Brigitte Trogneux at all. Some try to claim that this picture cannot be from 1954, because Anne-Marie looks older than 21-22. But that is a feature of those older times: people dressed ‘adult’ from the moment they turned 18, and looked generally middle-aged due to the fact that fashion in those days didn’t differentiate between clothing for twentysomethings and fiftysomethings. It is clear that Monique is hardly out of her childhood, and so all ages seem to fit correctly with Brigitte being about 1 year old. Even though she’s doesn’t look very blond.
  However, the resemblance between Brigitte Macron and the young Jean-Michel is striking.
  
  

• The communicant picture

  

  Due to the high quality in which this picture was published (included in Virginie Linhart’s 2018 documentary), it was originally thought to be a more modern, adjusted picture instead of one from the late 1950s. The girl looks very similar to Tiphaine Auzière, Brigitte Trogneux’ daughter. It was therefore claimed that this was a picture of Tiphaine’s communion, de-colourised to look as if from around 1960. Xavier Poussard, however, established that this picture is original and fits into a series of pictures that he was given a few of, taken on the day of Brigitte Trogneux and her classmates’ First Communion, a big celebration in the catholic tradition, taking place in the spring around the age of 6. The huge dress-up fits totally with the period, and if Tiphaine would have dressed like this for her First Communion in 1990, she would have looked absurdly overdressed and out of time, she would have stood out like a clown at a funeral.
  
  

• The wedding picture

  

  Another picture that has elicited endless dispute and great speculation about forgery, is this picture of the 1974 marriage of Brigitte Trogneux with André Auzière. It was published first in a magazine that pre-released the more juicy pages of Sylvie Bommel’s book as a story about Brigitte Macron’s earlier life.
  By that time, Pressibus and Natacha Rey had already seriously advanced in their research, and the complete lack of proof of existence of André Auzière made them believe that in fact, Jean-Michel Trogneux was the father of the Auzière kids, and the mother was unknown. Natacha Rey found Catherine Audoy, married to Jean-Louis Auzière, and concluded she had to be the mother. Pressibus went further into pure speculation and still claims there has to be some ‘Brigitte née Auzière’, who is the mother of the kids, and who gave them the Auzière name.
  When this picture was dropped, both Natacha and Pressibus fell out of a blue sky: this would completely ruin their elaborate theories. Hence they concluded, not irrationally, that since suddenly after all this time this picture is shown, that it has to be a fake created as a reaction to their sleuthing. They’ve tried with full force to somehow prove it is a forgery, a collage of different pictures with different people. (The original picture is b/w, this is an AI coloured version.)
  However, it has been found in different newspapers of the time also, so it is not possible anymore to claim this is a fake picture. The rational standpoint has to be to let go of old hypotheses and to simply accept that Brigitte Trogneux married André Auzière in 1974, with very extraordinary things happening to them later in life.
  
  

• The picture with ‘le Petit Gros’

  

  This is a picture that seems totally normal, but is actually super weird. Even though ‘le Petit Gros’ is seen in the videos of inauguration, it doesn’t follow that a picture like this was ever taken, especially not since the man did not behave at all as if he was part of the family or even part of the higher society.
  The clearest indication that we’re looking at a good forgery is the man’s left shoulder. Brigitte has her hand on his left shoulder, and this shoulder is somewhere close above her right breast. At the same time, his arm is magically around her waist. Which is only possible if it goes through her body...
  Also his face and her hair don’t blend naturally at all, it seems his face was cut out and had a different background. Same with his right hand which holds the glasses.
  It seems clear that this is a collage of a picture of Brigitte Macron at the Elysée holding someone else, and le Petit Gros pasted in from a different picture.
  
  

• The school pictures as a child

  

  Xavier Poussard has managed to dig up 4 pictures of Jean-Michel Trogneux as a schoolkid. (Three are shown here, the fourth is on the cover of Xavier Poussard’s book, added to the Introduction.) Face++ has a good resemblance result with Brigitte Macron for the pictures that have a good posture for comparison (the most left picture has him looking down too much). (The pictures are b/w only, this is coloured by AI.)
  
  

• The school pictures as a teacher

  

  There are quite a lot of pictures available of Brigitte Macron as a teacher, both from the Lucie Berger Lyceum in Truchtersheim (1986-1991) as from the infamous La Providence Lyceum in Amiens (1991-2007).
  Even Candace goes about making claims about scarfs and teeth in these pictures, but I can honestly not find a full chronological list that proves ‘before/after’ procedures. (Remember that I don’t have the Faits & Documents newsletters, which are not public.) The scarfs show up in the Providence pictures, while there is no Adam’s apple visible in the Lucie Berger pictures, which are older. How does that make sense? (See Part 10 for a short discussion of the teeth issue.)

  

  I personally find the pictures very confusing. Because the person teaching in Truchtersheim seems to be different from the person teaching in Amiens, with the pictures of Amiens looking more male than the ones of Truchtersheim, which makes no sense chronologically.
  
  

• The androgynous picture from 1991

  

  Just like the diamond wedding anniversary picture, this picture has a stamp of SPIEGEL Geschichte on it (Der Spiegel is of course the famous German magazine, and ‘Geschichte’ refers to its history category).
  I know nothing about this picture: as with the diamond wedding anniversary picture, I have no idea when and in which article or context Der Spiegel published it.
  But I find this picture quite remarkable in its androgyneity. Compare this to pictures of for example the German duo Modern Talking during that same period.
  
  

• The local elections candidate picture

  

  In 2017, national TV channel France 3 publishes a find: an election leaflet from 1989, in which “Brigitte Auzière” apparently runs for mayor in the village she lives and works in at that moment: Truchtersheim, near Strasbourg. The picture we get is very vague, one really wonders why they don’t get a better picture or a simple scan of the election flyer.
  The picture is way too vague to be used for facial recognition.
  
  

• The picture at 18 years old

  

  This picture was the big reveal of Xavier Poussard’s book launch and the accompanying series of Candace Owens.
  It is a picture taken from the ‘trombinoscope’ (the French equivalent of a face book, which many higher educational institutions used to keep long before the internet and digital photography became a thing) of the school year 1963-64 of the Ecole Supérieure des Travaux Publics (a very weird school for Jean-Michel to attend after his time in Algiers and being a Trogneux). It took Xavier a truckload of sleuthing, insisting, a court case, and the school claiming they don’t have pictures anymore, to finally obtain it from the Departmental Archives.
  Pressibus is convinced that this picture is not Jean-Michel Trogneux, even though their Betaface comparison scores remarkably high.

  Their correspondents have all concluded that there are too many differences in primary facial features to accept the picture as genuine (much broader neck, smaller ears, hair split on the other side etc.).
  A strong point in their argumentation is the fact that the trombinoscope as a whole (Xavier Poussard was sent a picture of the whole picture board, which can be found in his book and on the Pressibus website) is – who expected anything else – weird.
  The passport pictures are coming loose, one is missing, but remarkably, according to the accompanying name list, the pictures’ alphabetical order is messed up exactly from the picture of Jean-Michel Trogneux. I don’t know what to make of all this, but these are the facts.
  Because of the glasses, the picture cannot be used by the Face++ facial recognition software, according to Xavier Poussard. However, online information says it should not matter (which is logical if it is used by the Chines government to tell 1.5 billion Chinese apart). (See Part 7 for a bit more discussion about the facial software usage.) Pressibus reported that Xavier did the comparison regardless, and it turned out to be much lower than expected, which is why he did not publish it.
  Personally, I find the resemblance striking: the same chin, puffy cheeks, mouth and nose, and yes, also ears. I consider the seemingly shorter ears to be the result of foreshortening: this picture has the head slightly tilted upwards. The main indicator to know the tilt of a face are the nostrils. It is very easy to compare how much of the nostrils is visible, and we clearly see the nostrils in the glasses picture while not in the family picture. Foreshortening is a very important perspective concept to know and understand when dealing with 2D images. Everyone can try this out in the mirror: lifting the chin only a centimetre or two brings down the top of the ears compared to the eyes in a serious manner.
  I leave it for everyone to consider for themselves if they accept this picture to be possibly Jean-Michel Trogneux or not. Pressibus gives their arguments in different locations (as they update the site whenever new info comes to light), but you can find all the links in section 7 of this page, even though for now only in French, I think).

  

  Pressibus has published a very strange result of the comparison with the less performant Betaface facial recognition software. The resemblance with Brigitte Macron and the 1991 androgynous pictures is very high, near-identical. But with the pictures from Lucie Berger, it’s much lower. It’s a bit difficult to see, but the percentages are 71, 88, 87, 67 and 64. Note that the lower results are with colour pictures while the base picture is b/w.
  
  

• The diamond wedding anniversary picture

  

  If you think that anything in this affair is going to be normal or straightforward, think again. Here’s another mystery.
  This picture was published by Der Spiegel, and taken at the occasion of the 60^th marriage anniversary of Jean Trogneux and Simone Pujol, on September 26^th 1991. This was a Thursday, and I have no information about who dated the picture. The celebration may have been on another day in September 1991.
  I suppose that Der Spiegel and not @_KOTS_, who posted this picture on Twitter, dated and captioned it, because this person is a self-declared Brigittologist. They would not caption this person “Brigitte T 38”. Brigittologists caption this person “Jean-Michel T 46”.
  The most obvious weirdness here is: where is the real group picture? This clearly was a picture taken in preparation for the ‘official’ group picture, which is not published. Why not? Why show a picture where nobody looks at the camera (except for the little girl in the middle, with the KOTS watermark under her face, who looks at us with a very intriguing ‘I know something you don’t’-smile) and where several people are still hidden in the back as they have not taken their places yet? (It seems obvious to me that this is preparation for a group picture, not the aftermath, as the adults are still getting in place, while the children are already waiting. The children would also be the first to run away: it’s always children first, then adults. Since the children are ready, it logically has to be before the ‘real’ picture was taken.)
  The second most obvious question is: where is Jean-Michel Trogneux? “In the bathroom” is the most idiotic and absurd answer, that however was given by some Brigitte Macron apologists.
  The third most obvious question is: where is André Auzière? “He took the picture” is another stupidity-revealing answer produced.
  The fourth question then is: is Véronique Dreux present? Some suggest she was indeed present, and that therefore also the official picture wasn’t released.
  In any case: another picture that raises way more questions than it answers.
  
  

• The beach picture of André Auzière

  

  Presented as proof in the second court case against Natacha Rey and Amandine Roy, this picture came as a shock for about everybody: who has ever seen a funeral card of an elderly person with a full-body beach picture? It’s as if each and every fact in Brigitte Macron’s past has to be utterly weird.
  Still, the picture is there, and even though the resemblance between this bald guy and the young bridegroom is not so evident, facial recognition has proven this is indeed the same André Auzière as in the wedding picture, who is not Jean-Louis Auzière, as Natacha Rey claimed.
  Jean-Louis Auzière admits to Emmanuelle Anizon that this was the only picture left of André Auzière, and that “all others were destroyed”. One can only speculate why ALL pictures of Brigitte Trogneux’s husband had to be destroyed. It certainly adds to the total weirdness of this whole affair.
  In the meantime, Laurence and Tiphaine Auzière have released two more pictures of their father, which are clearly the same person but at different ages, confirming that André Auzière was a real person and almost certainly the father of the three Auzière children.

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