who is Anh Dao Traxel, their adopted daughter?

His story with the Chirac family began in 1979. Among the most popular couple in French politics, Jacques and Bernadette Chirac established themselves as figures of the Fifth Republic with their “marriage of passion and ambition”, as described by the former First Lady. Mixing willingly private life and public life, they have always put forward their two daughters, Laurence and Claude. But also the one thatthey consider as their “third daughter”Anh Dao Traxel, arrival in their family in the late 1970s. Born on August 22, 1957 in Saigon, Vietnam, Anh Dao is the fifth of a family of nine children, the daughter of a school principal father and a mother from a family of merchants.

In April 1975, his life changed. When Saigon was taken, she decided to flee Vietnam with a group of boat people, finding refuge in France. She met Jacques Chirac there in 1979, at Roissy-Charles-de-Gaulle airport. Mayor of Paris, the one who will later be elected President of the Republic decides with his wife Bernadette to collect Anh Dao then 21 years old. She will then become their “heart girl” and not their adopted daughter, at least not legally. Anh Dao Traxel was nevertheless completely integrated into the Chirac family, which lodged her at the Hôtel de Ville, taught her French, and also provided her with a job, notably as an office clerk at the international cell of the town hall, then as project manager at the Maison de la France. In 1999, she founded the European Star of Civil and Military Devotion association, of which she is the honorary president.

Did Anh Dao Traxel keep in touch with the Chiracs?

However, if the gesture of collecting it is strong and generous on the part of the Chiracs, Anh Dao Traxel was as critical as he was grateful to the former president in his book, Chirac: an unusual family, published in 2014, and relayed by France info. “Jacques Chirac is like my real father, but on the other hand, it’s a political recovery”, confided she, scrambled at the time with her adoptive family, at least, with Bernadette and Claude Chirac. On the heart side, Anh Dao Traxel has married in 1981 Michael Phama Franco-Vietnamese to whom she said “Yes” at the town hall of Paris, during a ceremony officiated by Jacques Chirac himself. Together they have three children: Bernard, Laurence and Jacques.

After her divorce in 2001, she remarried in 2004 with the police captain Emmanuel Traxel, without the Chiracs at his side. After years of loose ties with his dear family, Anh Dao Traxel revealed in the columns of Gala having been invited to the funeral of the former president in September 2019. “I was at church to say goodbye to Chirac. Claude invited me, it made me very happy. […] She took me in her arms, she kissed me, she confided then, testifying to her affection and admiration for her “sister” and Bernadette, whom her children call “granny”. And the scrambles in all that? “It’s in the past, we cut ties but we reconciled”she said.