Brigitte Macron is regularly the target of misinformation on social media. This is once again the case with a photo widely shared on Facebook since October 10, 2025, whose caption claims to show the wife of the President of the Republic falling in front of the Élysée Palace. However, this image dates from 2015 and actually shows former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt falling in the courtyard of the presidential palace.
“Brigitte Macron victim of a fall, the news is very worrying,” read various Facebook posts (1, 2, 3). “The First Lady is rushed to the hospital,” some even claim.
The comments on these posts contain links to pages on the boosti.fr website, but when you click on them, you end up on the websites of online magazines such as Elle or Vie Pratique.
Boosti presents itself on its website as a platform designed to maximize interactions and visibility on social media.
The photo is also widely shared by pages with affectionate names like “Big Heart,” “Simply Love,” “The Love of Your Life,” and “Bisoutendresse.” Their common thread: eliciting emotional reactions to generate engagement, sometimes using content created by artificial intelligence. Some of these pages also link to sites publishing eye-catching articles, interspersed with advertisements, with very similar layouts.
These pages also sometimes serve as bait for scammers seeking to take advantage of the naivety of certain social media users.
An Image Taken Out of Context
A reverse image search reveals the origin of the photo, taken by AFP photographer Dominique Faget on January 11, 2015. It does not show Brigitte Macron but former Danish Prime Minister Helle Thorning-Schmidt.
Ms. Thorning-Schmidt, who had been received at the Élysée Palace that day along with leaders from some fifty countries who had come to participate in the “republican march” in Paris following the attack on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher store, fell while leaving the Élysée Palace, before getting up again shortly afterward.
This is not the first time this photo has circulated. It was already circulating in 2020. The far-right website FL24, already criticized several times for spreading false information (see here and here), published an article about this image in 2020, titled: “No laughing matter! Brigitte falls flat on her face in front of the Élysée Palace.”
Brigitte Macron is regularly the target of misleading or false content on social media. Photos taken out of context, medical rumors, and alarming information frequently circulate, as highlighted in several AFP articles here, here, here, here, and here.
