When history comes to recount the rise of Emmanuel Macron, it might begin and end in the city of Amiens. On the big-skied lowlands of the Somme, amid the woods and fields of beet and yellow rape that cover the former bloody battlefields of the First World War, this is where the future president was born and grew up. It is a city that is arresting both for its splendour and its banality. The soaring Notre-Dame cathedral, one of the biggest Gothic edifices constructed in the thirteenth century, rises magnificently above the city centre and surrounding floodplain. But Amiens is also a red-brick working city, built on a heavy industrial base, which has bled manufacturing jobs over the years, and is struggling to hold on to the ones that are left. By 2017 it had lost one big multinational tyre factory, but kept another. Whirlpool operated a plant that manufactured tumble dryers. Until 1989 the city had been run for nearly 20 years by a Communist mayor.
When you turn off to reach the city from the A16 motorway, you drive into the featureless suburban landscape that marks the outskirts of today’s French cities: a Courtepaille fast-food restaurant; an Auchan hypermarket ringed by a vast car park; a Citroën car dealership; a Buffalo grill restaurant, topped with its insignia bearing giant red horns. Just as the surrounding flatlands of the Somme bear the scars of the First World War, the city centre of Amiens carries those of the second. Amiens was doubly bombed: by the Nazi Wehrmacht in May 1940, and then again by Allied forces on the Pentecost weekend of May 1944, as part of preparations for the D-Day landings the following month. Most of the centre of Amiens was devastated, its main thoroughfare rebuilt in charmless post-war style. This is the place that shaped Mr Macron, and the city he fled.
It was in a soulless exhibition centre on the edge of Amiens that Macron took to the stage to launch En Marche on 6 April 2016. The choice, he said that night, was ‘not unintentional. I was born here. Part of my family still lives here, and I have a strong attachment to this place.’ During his campaign Macron crafted a narrative that rooted him firmly in the industrial Picardy city, far from the parquet-floored salons of Paris, and in a family whose origins, he repeatedly underlined, were simple. It was a potent backstory. ‘I wasn’t born in a château,’ he said while campaigning in Amiens. ‘The history of my family,’ he wrote in Révolution, the autobiographical book he published before the election, ‘is that of republican ascent in provincial France.’1 This meritocratic guiding idea was behind the compulsory, free, secular education introduced in the 1880s by Jules Ferry, a whiskered deputy who became minister for public education before serving as prime minister under the Third Republic. Macron’s grandparents were among the beneficiaries. They came, he wrote, from ‘a modest background’: one was a teacher, another worked on the railways, a third was a social worker and the last a civil engineer. His paternal great-grandfather, George Robertson, was an English butcher from Bristol, who married a French woman in Abbeville, near Amiens, after World War One. His maternal grandmother, Germaine Noguès, known as Manette, was the first in her family to stay in school after the age of 15. Raised in Bagnères-de-Bigorre, in the foothills of the Pyrenees, she became a teacher and later a headmistress. Her own mother did not know how to read or write.
For Macron’s grandparents, medicine was the preferred route into the professional classes. His father, Jean-Michel Macron, had once dreamed of life as an archaeologist, but his parents judged medicine to be the safer choice. A neurologist, he still practised at the time of writing at the Amiens public hospital. Macron’s mother, Françoise Noguès, now retired, is a qualified doctor who formerly worked at the social-security agency in the city. Macron’s two younger siblings each also followed their parents into medicine. His brother, Laurent, became a cardiologist; his sister, Estelle, a kidney specialist. During the election campaign, Macron returned often to this family journey into the middle class, which began with his grandmother, a ‘child whose parents could neither read nor write’. ‘I’m a child of provincial France,’ he told a rally in Lyon in February 2017. ‘Nothing predestined me to be here today.’
In reality, Macron grew up in a more comfortable, professional family than this campaign narrative suggested. The family home was in the quiet residential neighbourhood of Henriville, considered the bourgeois enclave of Amiens. First developed in the mid-nineteenth century, after the railways arrived and the old ramparts were torn down, this quarter lies just to the south of the city centre. An unkind observer in 1928 described Henriville as ‘deathly boring, with its streets laid out in lines, its dreary appearance, its houses in the style of luxurious stables, its rare passers-by well dressed and its brick church pitifully ugly’.2 Today, busy tree-lined boulevards frame the neighbourhood’s northern and southern edge. Along them, a number of tall early twentieth-century villas rise behind wrought-iron gates. Other treeless terraces are more modest. Macron’s childhood home in Amiens is to be found in one of these: an unpretentious two-storey red-brick house, which sits just back from the pavement, in a narrow street of flat-fronted terraced homes. The first time I saw it, while on a reporting visit to Amiens during the 2017 presidential election campaign, it seemed unremarkable. Purple hibiscus and white hydrangeas were growing in the little front garden. A narrow off-road parking space was fringed by a yew hedge.
It was a childhood of privilege by most measures, a world away from the forbidding tower blocks and housing estates of Amiens-Nord, on the rougher side of the city. In the Macron household there were piano lessons, foreign holidays and skiing trips. Emmanuel learned to play tennis at the club that lies down an alley in the street where he grew up. Macron’s father, a reserved figure who later described himself as ‘allergic’ to the celebrity-style coverage of his son’s political life, read widely and taught his son Greek, as well as introducing him to philosophy. His mother limited her working hours in order to spend time with her three children, driving them to music classes and sports lessons.
The three young Macron children attended the local state primary school, but were later sent to a private Catholic school, aptly called ‘La Providence’. It was their grandmother Manette, by then a retired teacher, who persuaded the family to enrol them for a more academic secondary education at ‘La Pro’, as its pupils call it. A lycée run by Jesuits in Henriville, the school lies on one of the arterial boulevards within walking distance of their house. Destroyed in a fire during the bombing of Amiens in 1940, it was rebuilt in the late 1940s. When I went to take a look, the place from the outside resembled a boxy American post-war high school, fronted by symmetrical square lawns, and equipped – unusually for a French school of any sort – with an indoor swimming pool. It is a private institution, although not quite as exclusive a place as this might suggest. In 2017 its fees varied, according to family means, from €520 to €980 a year. The school runs an extensive bursary programme, and offers the technical stream of the baccalauréat for the non-academic.
A childhood spent around books, a private Catholic school, piano lessons, a local tennis club: Macron had a more securely middle-class upbringing than he hinted at on the campaign trail. Yet his version is not wholly disingenuous. To this day, the neighbourhood of Henriville feels comfortably bourgeois, rather than flashy, or glamorous. It is not Versailles or Neuilly-sur-Seine, those leafy quarters home to the moneyed French classes, nor is it a bastion of understated established wealth such as you find on the chic Paris left bank. When it comes to understanding Macron’s origins, and the path he then travelled, this seems an important distinction. A former investment banker at Rothschild’s, and a graduate of the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), the hyper-selective training school for elite civil servants, Macron appears to be in so many ways the embodiment of privilege. Ever since he entered public life, he has been the subject of caricature to this end. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a fiery far-left class warrior who ran for election under the banner of a political movement called Unsubmissive France (La France Insoumise), accused Macron during the presidential campaign of being a ‘grand bourgeois’. Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Paris, who preferred her party’s candidate, Benoît Hamon, for the presidency in 2017, described Macron as ‘the incarnation of the social reproduction of the elites’.
Yet Macron is not a member of what the French call the haute bourgeoisie. His childhood home is not grand. At the end of the street there is a neighbourhood charcuterie-traiteur on one corner, and a medical-supplies outlet on the other. A café-bar-tabac, selling cigarettes and lottery tickets, lies just across the boulevard. ‘We were average parents,’ Jean-Michel Macron told Macron’s biographer Anne Fulda, describing it as ‘a banal life’.3 ‘Of course it was a privileged background, but it depends what you mean by privileged,’ Renaud Dartevelle, a close school friend of Macron’s from the age of ten, told me. I had tracked him down in the southern suburbs of Paris, where he now teaches history in a high school. He had learned English by watching Downton Abbey. ‘I come from the same kind of background,’ Dartevelle said. ‘His grandparents came from poor backgrounds; my grandparents did too. And that was not uncommon among this kind of bourgeoisie in Amiens. La Providence is not a school only for the very few.’ When we met, Dartevelle was keen to underline this point about Macron. ‘I don’t think it’s fair to say that everything was set up for him from day one,’ he told me. ‘He is sincere when he thinks that he owes what he has to his talents and efforts. Being part of the country’s top elite is not an obvious outcome for someone of this kind of background.’4
Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron was born on 21 December 1977. It was a time of great uncertainty in France, after the end of the trente glorieuses (1945–73), those three fabulous decades of rapid post-war economic growth, industrialization and shared faith in the future. But it was also a time when the French were pushing the boundaries of modern science and taste. Concorde took to the skies with regular flights for the first time. The Pompidou Centre opened in Paris, and shocked architectural purists. TGV fast trains were under development, as was Minitel, the French connected personal computer and precursor to the internet, which was launched in 1982. For Macron’s parents, it was a period of hope, as well as apprehension. Their first baby, a daughter, had been stillborn. ‘Emmanuel’s birth,’ said his mother, ‘was a moment of great happiness after difficult times.’5 A chaplain who visited the new parents told them that they had given their baby son a name that in Hebrew means ‘son of God’. Macron’s father said that they chose the name just because they liked it.6
That Macron was an unusual child emerges unequivocally from the recollections of those who knew him during his childhood, as well as his own account in Révolution. Macron credits his grandmother, Manette, with his early interest in books and learning. With her lifelong passion for education, she taught him to read from the age of five. After school, he said, he would spend ‘long hours’ with her learning grammar, history, geography and French literature, and ‘entire days’ listening to her reading aloud from works by Molière, Racine or François Mauriac. At the first-round television debate during the presidential election of 2017, candidates were invited to bring along an object that held particular value to them; Macron chose the French grammar book his grandmother had used to teach him. ‘I spent my childhood,’ he said, ‘in books.’ In Macron’s telling, his was an upbringing in which the world came alive through the written word, enchantments discovered through literature, poetry and soaring prose. Guided by the watchful Manette, he grew up in ‘happy seclusion’, he wrote, his nose in books, his mind transported elsewhere.
Others tell a rather less singular version of those early years. There were the long drives during the holidays across the country, from Amiens in the north of France down to Bagnères-de-Bigorre, which nestles in the valley beneath the snow-capped peaks of the Pyrenees, nearly 1,000 kilometres away. On holiday there, with his maternal grandparents, the young Macron would spend much of the day outdoors, chasing lizards, or off on fishing trips on the nearby stream with his grandfather, Jean Noguès. Nicole, Macron’s mother’s cousin, remembered them spending days playing pétanque or ping-pong, or out on walks. During the campaign, Macron recalled that it was in the Pyrenees, at La Mongie, that he learned to ride a bicycle up and down arduous mountain roads, and to ski. His world was not just one of books, and his discovery of it not purely through the enchantments and reveries of literature.
What does seem indisputable, though, is that Macron was a precocious reader, an eager learner, and that Manette loomed large in shaping those interests. ‘He wanted to know everything about everything,’ recalled Sylvie, his cousin, who today runs a clothing shop in Bagnères-de-Bigorre.7 Manette, said Sylvie’s mother Nicole, did not impose all these books and literary discussions on the young boy; the hunger to learn came from him too. ‘His brother was more into toys, but he wanted to work; it was his nature,’ she said. Tiphaine Auzière, Brigitte Macron’s daughter from her previous marriage, who has her mother’s petite frame and blonde hair and became a fervent supporter of En Marche, had no doubt about the towering influence of Macron’s grandmother when I spoke to her during the election campaign. I wanted to know how much Amiens had shaped him. ‘I would say that he was less influenced by the place he grew up than the person with whom he grew up, his grandmother, a very strong character,’ she told me: ‘He was very, very close to his grandmother, who was a teacher and gave him a taste for education and learning and also, I think, the idea that wherever you come from you should have the same opportunities to evolve.’8
The defining nature of Manette’s relationship with her grandson was the way she cultivated him ‘like a plant’, said Antoine Marguet, who was also at La Providence at the same time as Macron. ‘She saw how promising the plant was, and ensured it had the right fertilizer: books and knowledge.’9 In Macron’s account, his grandmother was at once his inspiration, his guide and his refuge, during holidays as well as while he was at school. This was not that unusual in France. With long summer holidays and no school on Wednesdays, French children often spend much time with their grandparents. Manette lived in an apartment near the family home in Amiens, and during term time Macron would go there after class, to ‘drink hot chocolate, while listening to Chopin’. At one point, as a young child, he asked his parents whether he could move in to live with her. Renaud Dartevelle remembers meeting Manette for the first time. ‘When I rang to see Emmanuel, who was at her place, she said “Oh you must be Renaud.” She was a very kind old lady, very well mannered, smiling. I had this feeling of being special because I was Emmanuel’s friend, of course … That gave me an insight of how strong their relationship was.’
Macron’s parents seem to have taken offence at the overwhelming place that his grandmother occupies in his own version of those early years. Reluctant to dwell on his childhood, Macron wrote little about his parents in his book, which in itself seemed to make a point. Yet he devoted pages to Manette. ‘Did he not have a family?!’ his mother told Macron’s biographer Anne Fulda, evidently hurt. She did not dispute the pair’s closeness, but insisted on presenting a more balanced account: ‘We still contributed something.’10 His father put this one-sided version down to the media’s urge to romanticize and promote a story: ‘It sells well.’ Dartevelle, though, told me that he did detect ‘a sense of distance’ between Macron and his parents. He disputed the portrayal of Françoise Noguès as remote, or distant. ‘She was kind. She was caring,’ he told me. ‘She was not an absent mother, by any means.’ But there was a sense that the young Emmanuel did not fit in, and that he found with his grandmother the space to be himself that he lacked at home. His father, Jean-Michel Macron, was a discreet figure, ‘more withdrawn’ than his mother and ‘not at all interested in talking to an unknown teenager who came over’, Dartevelle said of his visits to the family home. When they were teenagers, Macron spoke little of his father, Dartevelle said, and when he did, it was more often in the context of the books that he had read, not the medical research he conducted, or the hospital work he carried out. ‘I remember him once telling me that his father had read, over the summer, all of Les Essais by Montaigne,’ Dartevelle told me, referring to the thick volume of collected essays by the Renaissance philosopher. ‘He didn’t used to talk about him as a surgeon, which he is, but as a reader of literature.’ Their bond, such as it existed, was through books.
What nobody disputes is that the link between Macron and his grandmother was unusually intense, both emotionally and intellectually. She was a demanding tutor, a benevolent guide and an unconditional supporter of the choices he made long into his adult life. Manette died in 2013, when Macron was working as an adviser to President François Hollande at the Elysée Palace. He was devastated. ‘No day goes by without my thinking of her,’ Macron wrote. During the 2017 campaign a French reporter travelling with him in the rural department of Mayenne, asked Macron whether ‘in the end, you’re doing all this for her?’ The young candidate, wiping the farmyard mud off his city suit and leather shoes, turned his head to look out of the window of the car. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘perhaps.’11 ‘She never brought me up with the idea that I had a destiny, but she undoubtedly armed me to have one ... I was unbelievably lucky. It gives you an immense self-confidence, an incredible liberty, but in the same way an obligation. I’ve always had the deeply rooted idea that the liberty that I secured for myself obliged me to do well. Because she was like that, my grandmother ... I headed into this battle when she was no longer there, she would have doubtless thought that it was mad.’ But, he said, his voice trembling, ‘she would have let me do it’.
Liberty, the sense of possibility, and the freedom to be different. This sense emerged from so many of the conversations I had over a period of months during 2017 with those who knew Macron as a child, teenager or student. Renaud Dartevelle told me that Macron ‘always knew he had a special destiny’. He plainly outshone all his classmates, in almost everything. ‘On the academic side, he excelled in all subjects, with a disconcerting facility,’ said Father Philippe Robert, his physics and chemistry teacher in the lycée: ‘In physics and chemistry, during written tests, I had to add extra exercises to keep him busy until the end of the exam.’12 Dartevelle made the pupil sound like every classmate’s nightmare: ‘He was very bright. A very high achiever, from day one, always, in any subject, any year. Top grades. Between 18/20 and 20/20. He’s the kind of student you have in your class once in a lifetime. I think the question for him from day one was: what am I going to do with all the gifts I have?’
During the parliamentary election campaign of 2017, I travelled up to the department of the Pas-de-Calais to report on the campaign for a constituency there. On a blustery afternoon in the inland village of Rang-du-Fliers, beside her yellow campaign bus, I found Tiphaine Auzière, Macron’s stepdaughter. She was running for parliamentary elections as the deputy to the local En Marche candidate, having caught the political bug and become an enthusiastic advocate for the movement. A lawyer in the nearby town of Etaples, she turned up on a bicycle, dressed in jeans and trainers, her hair tied back in a ponytail. Improbable as it sounds, as a teenager her older sister Laurence was in the same class at La Providence as Macron. She was the one who first came home with stories about her unusual classmate. ‘She said he was unbearable,’ Tiphaine told me, ‘because he knew everything about everything.’ Antoine Marguet, the fellow pupil from the time, said that he had heard about ‘this extraordinary guy’ at school before he came across him. ‘I wasn’t in his class. But all the people I knew who were with Emmanuel told me that there was the grade he got, and then that of the others,’ Marguet told me. ‘He has always been different. He knows that he isn’t like other people, and so sometimes he adopts a certain tone. People say he is arrogant, full of himself, a pain. But he has always had this intimate conviction that he is different ... I think this is very important. His intelligence, his knowledge, his culture: these put him somewhat on the sidelines.’
Out of the ordinary. On the sidelines. Different. A picture emerges of a young teenager who was set apart. He does not seem to have suffered as a school child from it. It is perhaps a reflection of his capacity for empathy that Macron does not appear to have drawn resentment from others for being clever. Father Robert said: ‘He had absolutely natural relationships with his classmates. In his eyes, to be brilliant in all fields seemed normal.’ Dartevelle recalled the same. ‘He never showed off, never bragged, never made people feel sorry for themselves ... He was very careful. As far as I know, he was never resented for being so smart.’ From the age of ten or eleven, Dartevelle remembered, Macron seemed to grasp how he was perceived by others. All the same, he was eager to see his gifts recognized. ‘He’s very talented, he’s very bright,’ Dartevelle told me. ‘But what he’s even better at is making people think he’s a genius.’
This sense of difference was accompanied by an unusual degree of self-sufficiency. Everybody who has met Macron is struck by his ability to leave you with the impression that the meeting mattered to him. He is, as the French say, dans la séduction, and this trait was evident from an early age. Rare is the photograph from the time that does not show Macron with a broad sunny smile. Yet as a teenager he was at the same time not socially needy. ‘He had a lot of friends. But not a group of friends,’ Dartevelle told me. ‘He was always very friendly, easy to connect with, but also, very private. Things were very cloistered between the various aspects of his life. He could connect easily with a lot of different pupils, but was never in a very exclusive relationship.’ It was a pattern that continued into adulthood.
Perhaps the most startling way in which his singularity played out was Macron’s quest to bypass the usual distractions and agonies of teenagerhood and step briskly into the adult world. His was not a rebellious adolescence. Not for the young Macron a heady embrace of counter-culture, nor the rejection of adult norms. Nor even much in the way of partying. Raised in a secular, agnostic family, he chose at the age of 12 to be baptized into the Catholic faith (although he later described his subsequent ‘return to a certain agnosticism’). An adult before he had finished being a teenager, and serious beyond his years, Macron early on sought out the company and conversation of those older than himself, a habit he took with him into his later professional, and private, life. ‘He was very conventional. He was only unconventional in the sense that he was reading adult literature when we were teenagers,’ Dartevelle told me. ‘But his were very classical choices. Gide’s Les Nourritures Terrestres was his favourite book when we were teenagers. He wasn’t even reading The Catcher in the Rye!’ To this day, Macron has decidedly old-fashioned cultural tastes. A classically trained pianist, he favours French variety – Jacques Brel, Johnny Hallyday, Léo Ferré, Charles Aznavour – over anything released since the invention of the synthesizer. His vocabulary too, like the curses of Tintin’s Captain Haddock, sometimes seems to belong to another era. Macron likes to dismiss nonsense with disparaging words such as poudre de perlimpinpin (snake oil), galimatias (gibberish) or croquignolesque (ridiculous). He addresses his friends as ‘ma poule’, which translates as something between ‘baby’ and ‘dude’. ‘Emmanuel wasn’t cool,’ Dartevelle told me. ‘He wasn’t a partygoer. But I wasn’t either. Maybe we were friends because I was a boring teenager too.’
This precocious maturity, and his uncommon teenaged ease with adult conversation, was to have unforeseen repercussions. ‘What was most striking was his relationship with adults. He spoke to his teachers as equals,’ Father Philippe Robert told Paris Match. One prof in particular caught his attention: a French and Latin teacher, with honey-blonde hair and an infectious smile, who ran an after-school theatre club: Brigitte Auzière. She was never Macron’s class teacher. But the two school friends, Dartevelle and Macron, joined her drama club, having first acted together in a play, Jacques et son Maître, by Milan Kundera, when they were in their fourth year of secondary school. The following year, when Macron was 15, they signed up for Madame Auzière’s theatre group. Macron got the part of a scarecrow, in the school’s adaptation of La Comédie du Langage, an absurdist work by Jean Tardieu. A home video from the time shows the teenager, in patched baggy trousers and a straw hat, his arms outstretched, pacing about slowly onstage. Already then, as he lifts his head to look out and pauses before reciting his lines, he comes across as an unusually self-assured youngster, in control, unafraid of holding his audience with a long silence.
But it was the play that the drama teacher put on the next year, Macron’s penultimate at school, that brought the teenager and the teacher 24 years his elder together. L’Art de la Comédie, written in 1964 by Eduardo de Filippo, was an intriguing, and with hindsight uncanny, choice. A play that explores the boundaries between art, theatre and politics, it sets a theatre director against a local prefect, and treats the audience to a procession of characters who may be local notables, or actors playing the part. It is both funny, and an exploration of the line between illusion and reality in public life. As the play lacked parts for all members of Madame Auzière’s drama club, the young Macron suggested to his theatre teacher that they write in some new roles and adapt the play together. ‘He was very good at making absolutely self-evident his leadership when it came to writing, and being good at school, or being the brightest in the group,’ Dartevelle told me. ‘I mean, nobody discussed the fact that he was writing the play for the whole group.’
A popular teacher known for her passion for literature, nurturing approach to teaching, as well as exacting demands of her pupils, Brigitte Auzière later gave her own version of their blossoming relationship. ‘The writing brought us together every Friday, and created an incredible proximity,’ she told Paris Match. ‘I felt myself sliding; he did too.’13 Dartevelle, with a lead role in the play, was well placed to watch this unfold. His discomfort was clear. ‘When the thing became obvious, I was willing not to know, and I did my best not to know,’ he told me. A teacher himself in adult life, Dartevelle subsequently saw members of his profession punished for less. Brigitte Auzière, the sixth and last child from the Trogneux family, a grand established Amiens name and brand of local chocolates, was married to a banker, André-Louis Auzière. They had three children. Macron was 16 years old.
The emerging liaison prompted consternation in the Macron family home, and gossip after Mass on Sunday in Henriville. Macron’s parents implored Brigitte Auzière to keep away from their son until he was 18. Their reaction seems to have exacerbated the distance between him and his parents. At first, Brigitte’s older brother, Jean Trogneux, tried to step in to put an end to it too. ‘But Emmanuel insisted,’ a family member told me. ‘He never gave up.’ Years later, when Macron had become president, Brigitte Macron reflected on the episode in an interview with ELLE magazine, suggesting that it was her idea for him to leave Amiens and finish high school in Paris. ‘There was nothing between us at the time,’ she insisted, presumably keen to dispel concerns about the legality of their relationship, ‘but the gossip was already well underway.’14
Macron’s determination to win Brigitte Auzière over – declaring to her, at the age of nearly 17, as he left for Paris, that ‘Whatever happens, I will marry you’ – was a breathtaking display of self-confidence for a teenager towards a woman more than twice his age. That he tried was audacious enough. That he succeeded, astounding. Brigitte Auzière’s own three children, Sébastien, Laurence and Tiphaine, were all of the same generation as Macron. Laurence had been in his class at school. Like in any marital break-up, the children suffered. André-Louis Auzière, her first husband, steers clear of the public eye and has never given an interview nor spoken about it. ‘But I couldn’t not do it,’ Brigitte Macron later said. ‘There are moments in your life when you make vital choices. And for me that was one of them.’15
In his wedding speech, Macron thanked her children, acknowledging that it was ‘not very simple’ for them. Their future stepfather was their own age, and took on a precociously paternal role with them, advising them to take care when out partying. ‘Nothing is normal in his life,’ said Antoine Marguet, the fellow school pupil from Amiens. The way Tiphaine Auzière talks today about her stepfather, a mere five years older than her, suggests that such difficulties are long behind them. Macron refers to her and her siblings’ children as his grandchildren; they call him ‘Daddy’. ‘He’s really a stepfather who took on the role naturally,’ she told me, ‘by all the attention that he paid to all the members of the family. He is the head of the family. We have a father whom we adore, and who carries out his role as a father. But we are also lucky enough to have a stepfather who is always there to help us.’
So Macron left Amiens, his home town, behind him, allowing the school to hush up the affair. He was taken on, unusually, for the last year of school at Henri IV, one of the most selective and prestigious state lycées in France. Situated in the heart of the Latin Quarter of Paris, and originally founded in 1796, it counts among its alumni a former prime minister, government ministers, diplomats, ambassadors, novelists and philosophers. A more solid stepping stone into the Paris elite is hard to find. The distance Macron travelled from the battlefields of the Somme to the heart of the intellectual and power circles of the French capital was cultural as well as geographical. Like Julien Sorel, the protagonist in Stendhal’s Le rouge et le noir, one of Macron’s favourite novels, who arrived from the provinces to try to make it in Paris society, the teenager from Amiens found himself in a different world. The bookish student was at first in awe at the brilliance of the capital’s brightest, struggled in maths, and was later wounded by his failure twice to win a place at the country’s high-flying literary college, the Ecole Normale Supérieure.16 He had stayed on at Henri IV for classe prépa, a post-bac preparation course, in order to take the entrance exam for Normale, but was by his own account too preoccupied by his relationship with Brigitte to put in the requisite revision. Despite his constant train trips back to Amiens to see her, Macron quickly learned the social codes of the French elite, winning instead a place at Sciences Po, an elite university focused on political science and public affairs, and taking in parallel a philosophy degree at the University of Nanterre. He went on to secure a place as one of fewer than a hundred French students in his year at the highly selective Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) – whose alumni include three of the five past presidents – and with it access to the power-brokers of Paris.
The key to understanding Macron’s departure from Amiens, his friend and best man Marc Ferracci told me, is ‘a quest for liberty’: ‘In his speeches, in his policies and in the choices he has made during his life, there has always been this logic.’17 If Macron outgrew Amiens, it was through a desire, as he put it in his book, ‘to choose my own life’. The determination to do his own thing, to win for himself freedom, space and independence, marked both his escape from Amiens and the decisions he went on to take. Macron defied convention, family disapproval and the wagging tongues of the Amiens bourgeoisie with his relationship with Brigitte Auzière. He went on to win political independence by launching En Marche, securing himself the freedom he needed to flout the rules. ‘I think he is somebody who puts his own liberty above everything,’ Christian Dargnat, who became head of fundraising at En Marche, told me.18 ‘His decision to make a life with a woman 24 years older, breaking with his family, even if it wasn’t a violent or definitive break; his choice to go to work for an investment bank, in order to give himself financial freedom: these are choices that fit the same logic, liberty,’ said Ferracci. Each time, the gamble was immense; so was the freedom he procured.
Those early years revealed a rock-solid single-mindedness about Macron, mixed with extraordinary self-belief. This quest for freedom seems to have been partly about pursuing choices, but also about securing independence from others. Dartevelle made this point to me early on in our conversation. ‘He doesn’t like to owe people. Not the students, not the teachers. I think it has shaped his real self,’ he said. ‘He doesn’t want to be owned.’ The years between Macron’s arrival in Paris and his marriage 13 years later were a time of stolen weekends in Amiens and Le Touquet and endless train journeys in and out of Paris from the Gare du Nord, of discovery and disappointment, and determination in the face of disapproval. Macron, presumably still wounded beneath that polished veneer, refers little to this period. But he told Anne Fulda, his biographer: ‘It required the force of conviction.’ His parents, he said, ‘thought several times that it was going to stop. And did everything to make it do so.’ The struggle ‘was very hard’, he said. ‘There were family constraints on both sides ... That’s what we lived through.’19 The couple married on 20 October 2007 at the town hall in Le Touquet, a seaside resort of villas among pine trees and nautical-themed boutiques that lies on the northern French coast. His parents attended. But it was an elderly businessman named Henry Hermand, who had become a mentor to Macron in Paris, who sat at the top table and ‘behaved like a father to him’, noted his friend from ENA and fellow guest, Gaspard Gantzer.20 In the speech Macron made at their wedding reception, held at the town’s grand Westminster Hotel, he acknowledged the difficulties that he and Brigitte had gone through to get to this point. ‘Every one of you has been witness over the past 13 years to what we have lived, and you have accepted it. You have made us what we are today.’
For a young man in a hurry, it took Macron more time than he had perhaps anticipated to settle on a professional track. Those who knew him when he first arrived in Paris expected the literary student to make a career as a writer, a playwright, or perhaps an actor. Something literary or cultural. To this day, Macron likes to keep a collection of poetry to hand, and can recite long passages from works of French literature, as he demonstrated to a surprised television reporter from Canal Plus when he was in government. Cornered after an event at the Finance Ministry, Macron was challenged to recite the part of the lovesick Alceste in the opening dialogue from Molière’s Le Misanthrope – ‘Leave me alone, I say, out of my sight!/I will be angry and I will not listen!’ – and he did so on the spot. At the age of 17, living in a tiny chambre de bonne rented by his parents on the Paris left bank, Macron wrote an (unpublished) novel, Babylone Babylone, an epic set in Mexico in the sixteenth century at the time of the Spanish conquest that few have read besides his wife.21
Had Macron been accepted at the highly selective Ecole Normale Supérieure, his path might well have led in a more literary direction, as many of those who knew him at the time assumed it would. It was not until he arrived at Sciences Po that Macron was properly lined up for public life. By his third year, he had switched from international affairs to concentrate on public service, all the while studying in parallel for a philosophy degree at Nanterre. ‘I wouldn’t say then that he had the intention of pursuing a political career,’ said Ferracci, his closest friend from Sciences Po days, whose first impression of Macron was of ‘a Czech exchange student who hadn’t seen a hairdresser in decades’.22 Yet Macron was beginning to ‘prepare for an engagement in public service’, Ferracci told me, reading widely, and talking politics late into the night. As part of his philosophy degree, Macron wrote a dissertation on Hegel and the public interest and another on Machiavelli. His teacher on a course on ‘the French state and its reform’ at Sciences Po wrote in his report at the time: ‘exceptional student from all points of view’ and ‘intellectual qualities out of the ordinary’. Not all of his friends were aware then quite what an encyclopaedic political knowledge he had also accumulated. A fellow student at the time was astonished to discover, on a visit to the National Assembly, that Macron knew the names of all the deputies and their constituencies.23 Ferracci and Macron studied together for the entrance exam to ENA, staying up late discussing poetry, politics and their shared belief in a moderate social democratic centre-left. The bond lasted. Ferracci became a labour economist, policy adviser to En Marche and key architect of Macron’s first labour reform as president.
By the time Macron left ENA, in 2004, the French machine for manufacturing its elite had taken over. Graduating fifth in his class, he was entitled to join the elite Inspection Générale des Finances, an inner corps of top énarques (ENA graduates) based at the Finance Ministry. This is both the core of the French techno-structure, the like-minded technical brains who run the country’s administration, and a stable for a future high-flying career in politics, industry and finance. The list of inspecteurs des finances who have gone on to top posts includes Henri de Castries (former CEO of AXA), Frédéric Oudéa (CEO of Société Générale), Michel Rocard and Alain Juppé (former prime ministers), and Pascal Lamy (former head of the World Trade Organization). Alain Minc, yet another inspecteur and eminence grise of corporate Paris, told me that he first met Macron when the young inspecteur des finances sought his advice. ‘I asked him where he would be in 30 years,’ Minc told me. ‘He said: president of the French Republic.’24
Some of Macron’s friends at the time would have been surprised by such a boast. He has a way of compartmentalizing his interests and acquaintances. Some know little of the ambitions he confides to others. Whether or not Macron really believed it, or sought it, he spent the next decade building up a formidable network of contacts and mentors in Paris that would give him political options. ‘It’s extremely disagreeable to be with him in a crowded room,’ another friend of his told me, ‘because it’s as if you don’t exist.’ Years later, in 2014, at a leaving party at the Elysée Palace for Macron after he had decided to quit his job as economic adviser to the president, François Hollande, who is disarmingly witty and self-deprecating in private, began his speech with the line: ‘I am often introduced abroad as the man who works with Emmanuel Macron.’25
As is Macron’s habit, the young inspecteur des finances charmed his elders, and this opened doors. Jean-Pierre Jouyet, whom President Macron later appointed French ambassador in London, was head of the inspection when the ENA graduate first turned up in the Finance Ministry, and told me that Macron was the one who stood out in what was a brilliant crop that year. He had as ‘quick a mind’ as the others, a ‘better sense of empathy’ and was ‘the best all-rounder, with a knowledge of politics, literature and sport’, Jouyet told me.26 The pair soon developed what Jouyet fondly called a ‘special relationship’, sipping whisky together in the evening after work, and working out how to right France. The studied poise of the president belies an individual who is, in Jouyet’s words, ‘a real bon vivant’. What he avoided as a teenager he seems to have partly made up for as a student, or at least on certain mid-week evenings before he took off to see Brigitte. A friend from his time at ENA recalls evenings that began at a seedy bar near the campus, washed down with beer, cheap red wine and vodka.27 Macron was known as ‘the king of karaoke’, said another student friend, and had a taste for French crooners and delivering heartfelt renditions of Johnny Hallyday’s ‘Que je t’aime’. He enjoyed lewd plays on words, and had no fear of acting like an idiot during karaoke sessions at Bunny’s Bar in Strasbourg. Jouyet, the professional diplomat, put it to me this way: ‘Emmanuel, he’s not the sort to drink Coca-Cola.’ When he joined the civil service, Macron was already toying, tentatively, with conventional politics. He raised with friends the possibility of standing for election to parliament as a Socialist, perhaps in Le Touquet, or alternatively in the Pyrenees, where his grandmother grew up. But, with candidate selection locked up by the barons of the Socialist Party, neither prospect came to anything.Jouyet proved to be a powerful mentor for an ambitious networker who was learning fast how to operate the system. Before he turned 30, and on Jouyet’s recommendation, Macron was appointed to be a rapporteur for a commission on economic growth set up by the newly elected President Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007. Run by Jacques Attali, one-time special adviser to President François Mitterrand, it was a golden opportunity to impress the capital’s corporate and financial elite, from whose ranks its members were drawn. Serge Weinberg, a financier who sat on the commission, was among those who whispered Macron’s name to David de Rothschild, who recruited him the following year to join Rothschild & Cie. The Attali Commission served at once as an incubator of policy ideas and an invaluable address book. ‘It was obvious that he was bright, very cultured, had a deep mind, and that he would go far,’ said Jacques Delpla, an economist at the Toulouse School of Economics, who first met Macron when they sat together on the commission: ‘But it didn’t cross my mind that he would go into politics. I saw him more as a future director of the Treasury.’28 Mathieu Laine, a liberal intellectual and friend of Macron’s who met him after he joined Rothschild’s, had the same impression. ‘He was smart and charming and we got on immediately,’ he told me. ‘But at the time I never thought for a moment that he’d become president!’29
In the four years that Macron spent at Rothschild’s, on the Avenue de Messine in the 8th arrondissement of Paris, a neighbourhood of wide tree-lined avenues and Hausmannian corporate offices, Macron acquired the codes and applied the practices of the unforgiving world of corporate finance. He wore cufflinks, carried a Blackberry, and learned the hard way how to craft a deal. What did he take away from those years at Rothschild, besides a fat pay packet and the future political burden of having to defend his earnings? In an interview in 2010 with the Sciences Po alumni magazine, Macron said that he had been drawn to investment banking because it required ‘analytical capacities, judgement and reactivity’, and was ‘more free and entrepreneurial’ than a career industry would have been. Money, he claimed, ‘isn’t the alpha and omega of everything. I don’t make a fetish out of money nor have a hypocritical relationship with it. I don’t consider it scandalous to earn it.’30 Rothschild & Cie Paris is an influential bank, with tight links to the French establishment. Georges Pompidou worked there for the better part of a decade before becoming Charles de Gaulle’s prime minister and then successor as president. Run by the patrician David de Rothschild, who built it up after Mitterrand nationalized the original family banking group in 1981, it blends a cultural discretion with a corporate ruthlessness. François Henrot, the bank’s managing partner, who said that he had been impressed by Macron’s ‘extraordinary’ intellectual capacities when he interviewed him for the job, was less flattering about the nature of the work. At Rothschild’s, he told a French documentary, ‘you learn the art of negotiation’ as well as how to ‘communicate, that’s to say, tell a story. So one learns here, in a way, the techniques of, how should I put it, not the manipulation of opinion but, well, sort of.’31 Macron himself put it more bluntly in an interview when he was economy minister: ‘You’re a sort of prostitute. Seduction is the job.’32
The timing of Macron’s arrival at Rothschild’s, in September 2008, was awkward. Ten days later, Lehman Brothers collapsed. The banking world was in turmoil. Work in mergers and acquisitions dried up as finance went into crisis mode. The debutant banker spent months working on ideas that went nowhere. Macron was ‘bullied’ by some of the partners, one fellow banker from the time told me, because of their misgivings about the know-it-all technocrats they would see turning up from the Finance Ministry. He was also thoroughly ignorant about corporate financial analysis. ‘He knew nothing about financial modelling, or accounting, and had a hard time from many of the partners who distrusted the bright young things from the Finance Ministry,’ the same banker told me. A former colleague recalled that ‘He didn’t know what EBITDA [earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortization] was. He didn’t try to hide it. And instead of looking it up in a corporate finance book, he asked around, which was disarming.’33
Yet Macron, it turned out, was good at the job. He employed his charm, leveraged his contacts, and revelled in the liberty that Rothschild’s gave its young associates. Colleagues from the time recall, among other things, his courteous and friendly manner towards staff, whether on the front desk or in the boardroom. He was also quite capable of playing the cynical game, to the consternation of journalists from Le Monde, whom he had promised to help find a financial backer for the paper.34 Believing him to be on their side, they were persuaded by Macron to delay a decent takeover option, at a time when he was also close to those preparing a rival bid. By the time Macron decided to leave Rothschild’s, in 2012, he had a mega deal under his belt, having helped to negotiate Nestlé’s purchase for $11.8 billion of Pfizer’s baby-food business, using a connection with Nestlé’s boss, Peter Brabeck, that he had made on the Attali Commission, and pocketing around €1 million that year for himself in the process.
Those four years revealed qualities that Macron went on later to employ in public life: an ability to think ahead and see the big picture; a capacity to create and exploit opportunities, and take risks; and a determination, bordering on ruthlessness. While at Rothschild’s, Macron was also beginning to engineer a move into political life. He had acquired a priceless Paris address book, and was proving deft at using it. His friend Jouyet, who had graduated from ENA in the same year as François Hollande, a long-time Socialist Party hack with the look of a provincial accountant, encouraged the young banker to consider Hollande’s chances of winning the presidency. Macron took the tip, made himself indispensable to Hollande and, in 2012, stepped into his top-floor corner office at the Elysée Palace as deputy secretary-general to the newly elected Socialist president.
Number 55 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, the seat of the French presidency, was a long way from Henriville, Amiens. The two years that Macron spent as presidential adviser under Hollande, during which I first met him, followed by another two as his economy minister, served as confirmation that the provincial outsider had become the ultimate insider. In his professional life, Macron had put himself at the heart of the French establishment. In his private life, he divided his time between Paris and the seaside villa at Le Touquet. Most members of his family no longer lived in Amiens. His mother had moved to Paris after her divorce from Jean-Michel Macron, long after their children had grown up. His father, who remarried, was the only one of his immediate family to still reside in Amiens, in the house at Henriville where Macron grew up. Various members of Brigitte Macron’s family remained in Amiens, and indeed still run the Trogneux chocolate business, which has a boutique in the city centre selling ribbon-wrapped boxes of homemade truffles and macaroons. But her adult children also left to settle elsewhere, and family reunions usually took place in Le Touquet. Macron, said one acquaintance from Amiens days, ‘became more of an Auzière than a Macron’. Amiens belonged to the past. ‘Macron rarely comes back. He launched his campaign here, but it was just publicity,’ Brigitte Fouré, the centre-right mayor of Amiens, declared during the 2017 election campaign. Macron had left too young to have had any involvement in local politics. He seldom visited. The connection to the town was remote.
It was politics, in the end, that brought Macron back to Amiens. On 6 April 2016 he launched En Marche in this Picardy city, a place it suited him to reclaim. A year later, Amiens was again the backdrop for Macron’s political ambitions, during a visit between the two rounds of the presidential election that became a turning point in the campaign. I went up to cover the visit; what happened that day felt then like the moment that finally revealed the full measure of the candidate.
Macron was in a duel against Marine Le Pen, the gravelly-voiced far-right leader. Champion of working-class voters, she promised to stop factories from closing, and jobs from disappearing, by shutting France’s borders. The city’s gritty industrial vulnerability made it an awkward home turf for Macron. Le Pen pilloried him as the agent of ‘savage globalization’, ‘arrogant finance’ and the rootless metropolitan elite, ill-placed to understand the working man’s troubles. Amiens was fast becoming part of left-behind France, a reminder of a once-muscular industrial past. Its unemployment rate, at 12 per cent, was above the national average. The city had lost a mattress factory and a tyre plant. The Whirlpool factory, where 286 workers manufactured tumble dryers, was threatened with closure too. Over the previous 15 years, the plant had already shed three-quarters of its workers. Now it planned to shift production to lower-cost Poland, leaving workers angry and betrayed. The city’s troubles, in short, put Macron’s pro-European creed of open borders and corporate freedom sorely to the test.
Earlier in the campaign, Macron had said that he was not in the business of making false promises about keeping factories from closing: ‘we need to protect individuals,’ he said, ‘we shouldn’t protect jobs’. But pressure was building on the candidate to show that he nonetheless cared about the plight of ‘les Whirlpool’, as the workers at the plant in his home town were known. So Macron scheduled a campaign stop in Amiens on 26 April, and I went along. The day began dismally. As he sat down with union leaders in a meeting room at the Chamber of Commerce in the city centre, Le Pen staged an ambush. Turning up unannounced at the Whirlpool factory gates on the outskirts of the town, she claimed to be fighting for ‘the workers’ while Macron was defending ‘the oligarchy’. Triumphant images of her on the picket line with delighted unionists began to fill the 24-hour news channels, and selfies of her with Whirlpool employees spread on Twitter.
Macron was livid. Behind closed doors, his team thrashed out a plan. They could not let Le Pen’s visit upstage his. But security worries made it too dangerous for Macron to go to the factory, an adviser warned. Macron was having none of it. ‘It’s not the security guys we should be listening to,’ he declared furiously. ‘I will never be safe, because that’s how the country is right now. So we need to take the risk. We need to go to the heart of the beast each time.’ Then he dealt a cruel blow. ‘If you listen to the security guys you end up like Hollande. Maybe you are safe, but you are dead.’35
So a campaign stop was hastily scheduled at the factory that afternoon. It was a brave decision. The gates to the plant lie down a side road, wedged up along the railway tracks. As I and the other reporters there that day approached on foot, plumes of black smoke rose from burning tyres. Unionists in fluorescent jackets awaited Macron’s arrival in a menacing, muscular block. The acrid stink of charred rubber hung in the air. Angry workers were blowing whistles, distributed by FN activists. They had installed an effigy of a coffin. ‘We don’t expect anything of Macron, he’s just the continuation of Hollande,’ Jean Santerre, a worker at the factory for 23 years, told me angrily. ‘What’s he going to do for us? Nothing.’ He and his colleagues would vote for Le Pen, he said, because at least she had a solution: ‘shut the borders’, and stop foreigners taking French jobs.
Sure enough, when the besuited Macron stepped from his car, he was jeered and whistled. His security team slowly reversed his black official car all the way down the narrow lane leading to the picket line, just in case. ‘I was watching on my screen and I said to myself: it’s not possible, he’s going to get punched in the face,’ Christian Dargnat, En Marche’s fundraiser, told me months later. Yet what happened next surprised most of those present. For nearly an hour, and to the clear discomfort of his security guards, the candidate, still in his dark suit and tie, waded into the edgy crowd. Visibly wound up, his voice indignant, he took on the abuse, arguing his case, refusing to make empty promises. ‘I can’t tell you I’m going to save your jobs,’ Macron told them. ‘The response to what is happening to you is not to stop globalization nor to close our borders ... Don’t make this mistake. People who say that are lying ... After closing the borders, what happens? Thousands of jobs that depend on them being open are lost.’ Retraining would be improved, he said, buy-out options would be examined. By the time Macron drove off, Santerre and his friends had not changed their minds. But calm had returned, and with it a certain respect for the candidate.
That evening, Le Pen’s selfies with smiling workers did grab the news headlines. Yet the moment seemed nonetheless to offer a telling insight. Although a poll suggested that 60 per cent of voters would vote for Macron, only 37 per cent thought at the time that he had presidential stature. He had often appeared more ambiguous than decisive, more cerebral than tough. Even in France, which treats public intellectuals like national treasures, his erudite vocabulary and measured reasoning were much mocked. At rallies, Macron had a tendency to drown his audience with abstract nouns. When he finally told an anecdote onstage in Paris during a long speech just days before the Amiens visit, it had been all about a philosopher. Nobody doubted Macron’s intellectual capacities. If there were reservations about his ability to lead France, they concerned, rather, his untested political resolve. Faced with a fractured country and restless unions, would he have what it took to stave off, or withstand, revolt?
Macron’s return to Amiens that spring day in the closing stages of the campaign hinted at an answer. It revealed a steelier, more fearless leader than many had reckoned with. A fraught encounter at the Whirlpool factory in the campaign’s dying moments, between a former banker in a tailored suit and the victims of the forces of globalization, could so easily have turned to disaster. He put his physical security on the line, and did not flinch. He laid out his economic reasoning to those least likely to accept it, and stuck to it. This was a risk Macron was prepared to take, and one that turned out to his advantage.
So Macron did return to Amiens. His home town that day transformed a candidate into a president-in-waiting. Amiens was indeed too small for Macron. He outgrew the city, and its conventions. Yet in the end he needed it, a contradiction that seems apt for a scholar-president who embodies so many. Macron’s journey from the working Picardy city to the heart of the capital’s political elite was one of defiance, of tension between convention and rebellion, and a quest for total liberty. In the end, a refusal to play by the rules, and a resistance to the disapproval of others, pushed Macron out of provincial Amiens – and into the most improbable political adventure that France had witnessed for over half a century.