Can Emmanuel Macron reunite France?
Even as France emerges from the pandemic it remains in a dark and dangerous mood, torn over issues of national identity and migration.
On a sunny spring morning on the Left Bank, le tout Paris turned out in finest funereal chic to mourn a national treasure, Jean-Pierre Pernaut, who died of lung cancer at the age of 71. A hero of the French hinterland, he presented the lunchtime television news for more than three decades and was famous for rushing through grim world events to dwell lovingly on stories about shellfish, terroir and cheese.
“Look, there’s Sarko!” said an onlooker behind a metal barrier outside the Sainte-Clotilde church. The former president, Nicolas Sarkozy, arrived with his wife, Carla Bruni, the singer and former supermodel, her face obscured by a dark scarf and large sunglasses. Then an elegant blonde woman appeared in a long black coat. It was Brigitte Macron, 68, a former schoolteacher and now the première dame. “Qu’elle est belle!” exclaimed a woman on my right. “But where is Manu?”
When he was elected president in 2017, promising a French renaissance, modernisation and a wave of reforms, Emmanuel Macron was the youngest French leader since Napoleon. Now aged 44, he is widely disliked after five years of protest and strikes. Even as France emerges from the pandemic it remains in a dark and dangerous mood, torn over issues of national identity and immigration.
Macron did not make it to Pernaut’s funeral – in the approach to the presidential election he was wary of crowds. But two days earlier, in his first campaign meeting or “conversation”, he made an appearance in Poissy, an hour northwest of Paris. He sounded almost contrite. “I’m here with a lot of humility,” he told a hand-picked audience almost outnumbered by stagehands, press minders and security men in a local cultural centre.
Macron had visibly aged since I last saw him five years ago, with lines beginning to mark the once boyish visage. Events have taken their toll, from violent rioting to the pandemic and the eruption of the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II. Mock guillotines and dummies of his – and Brigitte’s – head on a pike appeared on the streets during the yellow-vest protests that engulfed his presidency for five months from November 2018, sparked by a fuel price rise and a lower speed limit on rural roads. Cries of “Death to the king” were also heard and, on one occasion, the president’s armour-plated Citroën was mobbed by a crowd banging on the roof and windows, kicking the tyres. “I thought they were going to lynch me,” he was reported to have told Brigitte later that day. Last year a man linked to the gilets jaunes slapped him on the face as he mingled with citizens in a town in southeastern France.
The figure once described by the press as “Jupiter”, king of the gods, who had won victory in May 2017 under the banner of a centrist movement he had founded only the year before, has crashed from Olympus. He no doubt regrets having told an unemployed gardener he met on a walkabout in 2018 that all he had to do was “cross the street” and he would easily find a job in catering or construction. Campaigning in 2017 for the presidency, he infuriated people with quips about “slackers”, people who are “nothing” and their “unreformable country”. It helped to promote the image of him as scornful and aloof.
Yet for all the fury this art-loving former Rothschild banker and finance minister has risen once more, becoming the first president in 20 years to win a second term in office. For this resounding victory he can thank the failings of his rivals, notably Marine Le Pen, who couldn’t manage to detoxify her far-right National Rally party. At Macron’s victory party the atmosphere was restrained – a low voter turnout and Le Pen’s historic high score dampened any sense of triumph.
Change in France has long been accompanied by lynch mobs and bloodshed – fear of the mob is encoded in the DNA of French presidents. I covered three of them: the Gaullist Jacques Chirac, known for his fondness for sumo wrestling; Sarkozy, mocked for his love of “bling”; and the scooter-riding socialist François “I hate the rich” Hollande. They fascinated – and occasionally shocked – the nation with their tangled sex lives and financial affairs. At Pernaut’s funeral, for example, Sarkozy was thought to be wearing an electronic ankle bracelet after being sentenced last September to a year’s home detention over an illegal campaign funding scandal.
He and his predecessors were reviled for having the temerity to attack France’s almost religious commitment to short working weeks and early retirement, and ended up backing down. The uproar over Macron’s attempts at reform is further proof of how chronically allergic France is to change. It also demonstrates the limits of its presidential system, effectively an elected monarchy crafted six decades ago for the Fifth Republic and Charles de Gaulle. “It’s difficult to be president,” explains Jean Garrigues, a leading historian on France’s political culture. “The president has more power than virtually any other executive position in the world, even more than an American president.” By contrast the Assemblée nationale, France’s parliament, is an empty shell.
No recent French leader has embraced these powers with quite the same gusto as Macron. He has revelled in welcoming foreign heads of state to the Palace of Versailles, delighting, like most of his predecessors, in strutting the world stage. But he has also exercised his presidential right to decide more rarefied matters that might otherwise have been left to panels of experts, from how to rebuild the fire-ravaged Notre Dame cathedral to who should lead the Paris Opera.
“The president is responsible for everything, so he ends up personally being blamed for everything,” says Gaspard Koenig, a philosopher campaigning for a more participatory democracy. “It’s an impossible task for any human being.”
François Mitterrand, the former socialist leader whose nickname was “God”, is remembered for “great works” such as the Louvre’s giant glass pyramid. Macron, too, has a passion for playing the Sun King. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his modifications at the Panthéon, a monument to French glory and resting place for national heroes such as Voltaire, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Victor Hugo.
When I visit one evening, celestial voices emanate from speakers hidden high in the cavernous expanse. Guests have gathered beneath the extraordinary dome for the first public performance of an unusual work by Pascal Dusapin, regarded in the music world as one of the greatest living composers. Macron personally commissioned choral pieces by Dusapin – as well as paintings and sculptures by Anselm Kiefer, the war-obsessed German artist, another favourite at court. The works were ordered to accompany the “Panthéonisation” in 2020 of Maurice Genevoix, an author who fought in World War I and wrote of its horrors in The Men of 14. It was the first time in nearly a century that a French president had ordered the creation of new works for this national monument. So thrilled was Macron by Dusapin’s piece that he commissioned a second, longer choral work, which is now echoing all around us.
“I wanted to make the stones sing,” says Dusapin, 66, a towering figure with an impressive mane, as we stroll beneath the 80m-high dome. Nearby are two vast canvases by Kiefer evoking no man’s land as well as a series of his installations hinting at the trenches, with coils of tangled barbed wire and rusting metal enclosed in giant glass cases. Segments of Dusapin’s original work, interspersed with the names of thousands of dead soldiers read by his wife, Florence Darel, a well-known actress, will now play every 15 minutes during public opening hours at the fabled secular temple on the Left Bank. A computer program ensures that no sequence of notes in this eternal loop is ever repeated, according to Dusapin.
Macron was involved every step of the way. “I spent a lot of time discussing it with him,” Dusapin says, referring to meetings with the president, sometimes over a fine malt whisky in the Élysée Palace or under the Panthéon dome. The president, an accomplished pianist who once won a prize at the Amiens conservatoire, was in the habit of dropping in on the work site to sample the astonishing acoustics for himself. “From architecture to music and literature, he is really very cultivated,” Dusapin says. “He has a real respect for the value and power of art.”
One evening last year the grateful president invited Dusapin, Darel and the Kiefers to dinner with him and Brigitte at home in the palace. After champagne and turbot, Macron poured them vodka from a bottle nestling, along with half a dozen shot glasses, inside an outsized Fabergé egg, a gift from Putin in happier days before the war.
Dusapin and Darel approve of Macron’s efforts to talk sense into the Russian president in more than a dozen marathon telephone conversations since his invasion of Ukraine. “Can you imagine any of the other presidential candidates talking to Putin with such confidence or authority?” asks Darel.
From the beginning of his reign the ambitious French leader had pivoted to Putin, inviting him to Versailles, eager to strengthen European ties with Russia to secure its co-operation in the dispute over Iran’s nuclear ambitions and other global flashpoints. “Pushing Russia away from Europe is a profound strategic error, because we will push it either into an isolation that increases tensions or into alliances with other great powers such as China,” he told a gathering of ambassadors in Paris in August 2019. Acting now as Putin’s chief European interlocutor, he takes inspiration from Sarkozy, who played the same role when Russia invaded Georgia in 2008.
Even if Macron’s diplomacy failed, it has done him no harm. On the contrary, the war put pro-Putin populists on the defensive. Le Pen had to destroy a million campaign leaflets depicting her shaking the Russian leader’s hand. Macron, by contrast, has been able to use all the levers of office to cast himself on a plane above the vulgar mêlée of those who attempted to dethrone him. “He believes in strong leadership – strong leaders are good in Macron’s book,” says Vincent Martigny, a professor of political science at the University of Nice. “And to be strong on the international stage, you have to show signs of strength,” he adds, citing Macron’s extraordinary handshake with Donald Trump, when he beat the American president at his own power game by refusing to let go of his hand for 29 seconds. “He resisted the handshake of Trump,” Martigny says. “He wanted to do the same thing with Putin, to show he’s the strong guy in the West against him.”
Martigny rightly predicted a Macron victory “even though people don’t like him”. “He’s young, bright, quick and clever – qualities the French appreciate. He has tackled huge crises and is still there, he’s survived. Many people will respect that.”
Even so, Macron remains something of an enigma. Some commentators have likened him to the 1970s television cartoon character Barbapapa, a shape-shifting pink blob who takes his name from the French word for candyfloss. “He has absolutely no ideological vertebrae,” Martigny adds. “If he needs to go to the right, he’ll go to the right, if he needs to go to the left, he’ll go to the left. He thinks one thing and the opposite very easily.”
In the hope of learning more about the polymath president I turn to Françoise Noguès, 71, a former doctor who is one of the guests at Dusapin’s sonorous show. A male bodyguard shoots me a suspicious glance as I approach the mother of the president, a figure in a dark coat clutching a black purse, but she offers a friendly smile. She must be impressed with her boy, I suggest, for scaling such lofty heights. She nods, smiling, but then explains how nerve-racking it has been to see her son so reviled and threatened by the yellow vests. She holds up a hand with a laugh: “Look, I’ve lost my nails. I can’t bear to put on the news anymore.”
She is upset by a Macron biography that claimed her son does not talk to her and was mainly brought up by his grandmother. “It’s just not true,” she tells me, adding that they speak and message each other often. As for her relationship with the première dame, who fell in love with her son, 24 years her junior, while teaching him drama at school, she says: “Brigitte and I are good friends.” Then adds with another laugh: “We’re almost the same age.”
That is not the only curiosity about life chez les Macron. Two of Macron’s stepchildren, Laurence, a cardiologist, and Sébastien, an engineer, are older than him. There is nothing France appreciates more than a love story – and the story of Macron’s infatuation with Brigitte Trogneux, as she was known when he met her, aged 15, at the Jesuit school he went to in Amiens, is like none other. Brigitte was married to André-Louis Auzière, a banker, and already a mother of three. The future president was in the same class as Laurence Auzière, one of Brigitte’s two daughters, and would spend long hours at her house nearby. “I thought he was in love with Laurence,” says Noguès, who now lives in Paris.
The relationship between the adolescent pupil and his after-school drama club teacher became a scandalous topic in Amiens. Noguès and her husband had urged their son to stop seeing her until he was 18. “He replied he would rather give up his studies than be separated from her,” Noguès recalls. “Brigitte also said she thought parting would be impossible.” The future president was sent off to Paris to finish school at a prestigious lycée and Brigitte visited him on weekends, eventually divorcing her husband (who died in 2019, aged 69) and marrying Macron in 2007.
People who have seen them together are struck by how close they seem as a couple – certainly in relation to previous presidential duos: Mitterrand kept a mistress and illegitimate daughter at the expense of the state and Sarkozy divorced and remarried in office. Hollande booted his girlfriend out of the palace to install an actress as première dame. “Macron is probably the first faithful president we’ve had since Pompidou,” says Françoise Degois, author of The Man Who Had No Friends, a political essay on Macron’s first term. “Politics is not his first love like the others. Brigitte is.”
After the show, Dusapin and Darel invite me to dinner at Macron’s favourite restaurant, La Rotonde, a famous art deco brasserie in the Montparnasse district. On the way the conversation turns to the growing national clivage – the societal “fracture”, as Chirac used to call it. From the back of the car, David Madec, administrator of the Panthéon, recalls the solemn, pomp-filled ceremony Macron presided over in November when Josephine Baker, the stage performer, civil rights campaigner and wartime resistance hero, became the first black woman to be interred in the mausoleum.
“What was extraordinary was the number of vicious, hate-filled messages we got from people opposed to the idea,” he says. Darel chips in: “The hostility against Macron is incredible.” A recent book, Macron, Why So Much Hatred? by Nicolas Domenach and Maurice Szafran, claims that no leader has attracted such acrimony since Louis XVI was executed by guillotine in 1793.
We take our seats at La Rotonde, whose heritage goes back to Picasso and Modigliani. Today’s most famous regular is Macron. I learn there have been two attempts to burn the place down, apparently because of the association with him. The president often used to turn up at the restaurant years ago as a young economics minister with his British counterpart, George Osborne. Since he entered the Élysée, relations with Britain have soured over Brexit: the fiercely pro-European French president criticised the UK-made AstraZeneca Covid vaccine and called Boris Johnson a “clown” in a private conversation with advisers. Not so privately, he also soured relations with Australia when he branded Prime Minister Scott Morrison a liar over a cancelled submarine contract.
Will winning a second term make him any more successful at healing France’s divisions or managing better relations with allies? Macron expressed regret for his high-handed, top-down leadership style, promising more widespread consultation. He’s acknowledged the nation’s fractured state after an election in which 60 per cent of voters backed anti-establishment radical right and left candidates in the first round. “Many of our compatriots voted for me not out of support for my ideas but to block those of the far right,” he said. “I want to thank them and I know that I have a duty towards them in the years to come.”
For some analysts, though, France needs a lot more. Koenig, the philosopher, wants a new constitution, an end to the quasi-monarchy allowing Macron so many powers. “Britain has gone from Thatcher to Blair to Brexit – big changes,” he says. France, by contrast, is immobile. “In France, it is all about the relationship of one man and the people. One man is supposed to know everything and solve everything, even the potholes on village streets. People don’t go to their representatives to complain about things. They take to the streets.”
Koenig rode a horse around the country in 2020 in order to gauge the popular mood ahead of his own presidential campaign. In the end he did not win enough endorsements from mayors to continue his quixotic quest for the throne. But what he discovered was disquiet with a paternalistic, monarchical system run from Paris and a growing sense of alienation in la France profonde, the hinterland, which feels scorned by the Parisian elite.
Despite Macron’s re-election, Koenig thinks the next revolution is coming. “The country is reaching breaking point,” he says. “People don’t feel they are in command of their own destiny. They feel they’re not allowed to do anything, even repair a village roof, without it going all the way up the chain to Paris.” His journey through France left him deeply uneasy. “France is in ferment. The pressure keeps building, I don’t know when it will blow. But one day it will.”