President Biden and first lady Jill Biden welcomed French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife to the White House on Thursday for the first state visit hosted by the US administration — with key international issues including the war in Ukraine, China’s aggression and global climate policy on the agenda.
Biden, 80, and Macron, 44, were scheduled to hold a joint press conference at 11:45 a.m., with a State Dinner to follow in the evening.
“France is our oldest ally, our unwavering partner in freedom’s cause,” Biden said during the welcoming ceremony with Macron standing at his side.
President Biden and French President Emmanuel Macron will discuss a number of sensitive issues, including climate change. REUTERS“Our history has been shaped by the courage of the women and men who crossed the Atlantic carrying in their hearts a flame of liberty. Today that flame burns more brightly than ever, and the alliance between our two nations remains essential to our mutual defense,” he continued.
The president said the world stands at an “inflection point” and the choices made in the years ahead “will determine the course of our world for decades to come,” adding that the US could not ask for a “better partner in this work than France.”
Macron said the two countries, allies for more than 200 years, are “sisters in their fight for freedom.”
President Biden and first lady Jill Biden greeted French President Emmanuel Macron and his wife at the White House. AFP via Getty Images“The spirit of fraternity must enable us to build an agenda of ambition and hope as our two countries share the same faith in freedom, in democratic values, in empowerment through education and work, and in progress through science and knowledge,” the French leader said.
This is Macron’s second state visit to Washington since taking office in 2017. The French president met with former President Donald Trump in November 2018.
Biden and a contingent of administration officials gathered on the South Lawn to greet Macron and his wife Brigitte as a band played the French national anthem “The Marseillaise” followed by the “Star-Spangled Banner.”
Among the US delegation were Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as hundreds of visitors and White House staffers waving French and US flags.
The two presidents have met before since Biden took office in January 2021, most recently at the G20 summit in Indonesia last month, and have spoken to each other numerous times on the telephone.
Their last one-on-one meeting took place during the United Nations General Assembly in September.
As part of their welcome, the Macrons brought a CD of the original soundtrack of the 1966 film “Un Homme et une Femme” for the president and the first lady, paying tribute to the movie the Bidens went to see on their first date.
The Macrons also gave Jill Biden, who teaches English at the Northern Virginia Community College, the classic French novel “Madame Bovary” by Gustave Flaubert and a collection of works by Albert Camus, including the novels “The Plague” and “The Fall.”
The Bidens presented the Macrons with a custom mirror made by an American furniture maker from wood that had fallen on the White House grounds.
It is a reproduction of a mirror from the White House collection that hangs in the West Wing.
The president also gave his French counterpart a custom vinyl record collection of great American musicians and an archival facsimile print of Thomas Edison’s 1877 patent for the American phonograph.
