Cecilia Attias was born Cécilia María Sara Isabel Ciganer-Albéniz. Her father, André Ciganer, was a Moldovan immigrant born in Bălți, Bessarabia in 1898 of Russian-Jewish lineage. He left home at the age of 13, just before the First World War. Ciganer moved to Paris, where he became a furrier. In 1937, he converted to Catholicism and married Spanish-Belgian Diane Albéniz de Swert, a daughter of Alfonso Albéniz Jordana, a Spanish diplomat who played with Real Madrid in the early 1900s. and a Belgian mother. Her maternal great-grandfather was the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz. Cécilia Sarkozy Attias has three older brothers:
Born with a heart defect, she suffered from cardiac problems which hampered her growth. She underwent open cardiac surgery when she was 13, and she made up quickly for her growth delay. She stands 1.78 m tall. She studied piano, and obtained a baccalauréat B, after studying for 13 years in a French religious institution, Sœurs de Lübeck. She enrolled at Panthéon-Assas University for law studies but abandoned them and went on to become a parliamentary assistant to René Touzet. She also was a fitting model for Schiaparelli, the French fashion house, and worked for a public-relations company.
Political life
When her husband was a minister, Cécilia Sarkozy had an office next to his, serving as his close adviser. In 2002, she was appointed to the Office of the Ministry of the Interior. In 2005 she was appointed Chief-of-Staff for the UMP Party. Cécilia Sarkozy visited Libya twice in July 2007 to visit Muammar al-Gaddafi and helped in securing the release of five Bulgarian nurses and one Palestinian doctor who had all spent years on Libya's death row after allegedly being tortured into confessing to infecting Libyan babies with the HIV virus. The French left asked for Cécilia Sarkozy to be heard by the Parliamentary Commission expected to be created in October 2007 concerning the terms of the release of the six, as she had played an "important role" in their liberation according to Pierre Moscovici. The release process is described in the book Notes from Hell from the perspective of one of the medics, Valya Cherveniashka.
Personal life
Cécilia Ciganer-Albéniz moved in with the popular French TV host Jacques Martin in 1983. They married on 10 August 1984. The wedding took place in Neuilly-sur-Seine at the town hall, and Nicolas Sarkozy, then the mayor of Neuilly, conducted the wedding. The Martins had two daughters, Judith Martin and Jeanne-Marie Martin. She has a grandson, Augustin and a granddaughter Diane Elizabeth, born of her daughter Jeanne-Marie. In 1987, Sarkozy, who was married to his first wife at the time, met Cécilia Martin again and has said he felt "struck by lightning". Other sources, however, state that Sarkozy fell in love with the bride on their wedding day. Cécilia Martin left her husband to live with Sarkozy in 1988 and obtained a divorce three months later. Once Sarkozy had himself obtained a divorce in 1996, they married in Neuilly on 23 October 1996. The witnesses were Martin Bouygues and billionaire businessman Bernard Arnault. Six months later, on 23 April 1997, Cécilia Sarkozy gave birth to the couple's only child, Louis. Nicolas Sarkozy had two sons from his first marriage. Nicolas Sarkozy once declared that Cécilia Sarkozy was his "strength and Achilles' heel". Nicolas Sarkozy wrote in his 2005 book, Testimony, "Today, Cécilia and I are reunited for good, for real, doubtless for ever... e are not able and do not know how to separate from each other." He has said his wife is his "true soulmate" and "the person without whom nothing I do would be possible". In July 2007, he said, "At the end of day, my only real worry is Cécilia." Rumors had circulated since Sarkozy's election as president in May 2007 that the couple had separated, and further rumors surfaced in the French media in October 2007 that they were soon expected to announce their plans to divorce. On 18 October 2007 the Élysée Palace released a statement declaring that the Sarkozys “announce their separation by mutual consent.” Shortly afterwards, the palace corrected the separation announcement by stating that the Sarkozys had actually officially divorced. On 19 October 2007, an interview with Cécilia Sarkozy was published on the front page of L'Est Républicain, a regional French newspaper. In it, she admitted that she had run away with her lover, Richard Attias, in 2005 and that though she eventually returned to Sarkozy, they were unable to repair their marriage. "What happened to me has happened to millions of people: one day you no longer have your place in the couple. The couple is no longer the essential thing of your life. It no longer functions; it no longer works." She married Attias, Executive Chairman of The Experience, an events management company, on 23 March 2008, at Rockefeller Center in New York.
Cécilia Attias Foundation for Women
In October 2008, Cécilia Attias announced the launch of the Cécilia Attias Foundation for Women, which "helps to actualize concrete improvement in the lives of women around the world by providing a strategic, financial, networking, and media platform for established nongovernmental organizations, social enterprises, and associations that champion the cause of women's equality and well-being."
