‘There are moments of great acceleration of history and I think that we are living through one of them.’
Emmanuel Macron, March 2017
In the summer of 2015, while Macron was pondering his political options, Courtney Love, widow of Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain, arrived at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris, and posted a message on Twitter: ‘they’ve ambushed our car and are holding our driver hostage. they’re beating the cars with metal bats. this is France?? I’m safer in Baghdad.’ The singer was one of the many passengers caught up in violent anti-Uber protests at the capital’s main international airport, and couldn’t believe her eyes. The previous year, the American ride-sharing firm had launched UberPop, a service that matched unregistered car drivers with passengers and which was ultimately ruled illegal in Paris. The capital’s taxi drivers, already exasperated by the arrival of ordinary Uber cars, did what protesters do. Roads were blocked, passengers intimidated, drivers threatened and tyres slashed.
It was a familiar, theatrical defence of producer interests in France. Incumbent operators defend their markets against newcomers. Lobbies intervene. Farmers dump rotting cabbages or bleating sheep on the streets. Protesters hold manifs (demonstrations). France had earned a reputation as a tough market to break into, and the taxi industry was no exception. It may have been all but impossible to find a cab on the streets in Paris. Yet each time there was talk of expanding the number of licences, taxi drivers responded with paralyzing blockages. A favoured technique was the opération escargot, by which taxis crawled three abreast in convoy around the capital’s périphérique ring road, disrupting rush-hour traffic. The Paris town hall issued taxi licences at no cost. But because existing drivers resisted any planned increase to the number of licences, their value on the informal market soared. By 2015 they were worth €200,000, turning a taxi licence, in effect, into a retirement policy for a taxi driver. No owner of this precious resource was going to give it up without a fight.
The upshot was gridlock. Back in 2008, the bipartisan Attali Commission, for which Emmanuel Macron was a rapporteur, had argued for a deregulation of the taxi industry. But, thanks to its mighty lobby, the advice came to nothing. Such was the scarcity of taxis on the streets of Paris that the concept of Uber was actually dreamt up in the French capital, one wintry evening in 2008, when Travis Kalanick and Garrett Camp were in town for a tech conference, known as Le Web, and couldn’t find a cab. They hit upon the idea of a ride-hailing app, and a year later launched Uber in America. When the French government finally deregulated the chauffeur-driven car sector, it initially put in place a raft of restrictions, which Uber proceeded to breach. Exasperated, the police raided Uber’s premises. Two Uber executives were detained. Only one French minister at the time dissented. The law concerning UberPop had to be respected, Emmanuel Macron declared, but he went on to defend the principle of allowing Uber to operate its regular service. ‘There’s potential here to create thousands of jobs,’ he said. ‘What should we do? Should we only defend those who have a job? Or try to open up this economy to give a place to other people who also want work?’1 ‘Uber’, he concluded, ‘has its place in France.’
What Macron saw up close in the digital economy he went on to apply to his political ambitions. Disruption was throwing economic certainties sideways, and at an increasing pace. This created unexpected chances for sudden, dislocating change. As economy minister, he spent a large amount of time with the tech world, watching the way that start-ups were challenging incumbent firms and taking risks, travelling to San Francisco, Las Vegas, London and Tel Aviv. ‘Young people in France will take risks, but sometimes French society doesn’t back them enough,’ he said on a visit to Israel in 2015 to support French tech.2 ‘We need, collectively, to be able not to be jealous or to sneer at success, but to say: it’s great, this person, this young person, has succeeded and is transforming things in the world.’ Through conversations at tech fairs, start-up events and investor meetings, Macron saw how fast digital was transforming the economy and how quickly social expectations, behaviour and communication were being upturned. He was not the only one thinking that this could also disrupt politics. Guillaume Liegey was a young McKinsey consultant who had been seconded to the Attali Commission when he met Macron. In an article in July 2015 entitled ‘If Political Parties Were Start-Ups’, Liegey argued that tech firms could show parties how to reinvent themselves, and that start-up tools could be used to build a political movement. New technology made change possible, and fast change more possible still. ‘There are moments of great acceleration of history,’ Macron said in early 2017, ‘and I think that we are living through one of them.’3
In some ways, France looked like one of the least likely countries in Europe to witness massive political upset. All Western democracies were living through the same sense of technological disorientation. Political parties elsewhere too, including in Britain, were split internally over Europe, globalization and immigration, between metropolitan liberals and Eurosceptic nationalists. British centrist politicians dreamed in vain of establishing a radical political middle that could forge a post-partisan consensus. Party politics in other Western European countries, including Italy, Spain and Greece, had long been far more turbulent. Italy had seen parties – Forza Italia, the Five Star Movement – emerge from nowhere, sometimes to seize power and then fade away again. Greece, under military rule between 1967 and 1974, was taken to the brink of ejection from the eurozone over the sovereign-debt crisis, which saw the virtual annihilation of its Socialist Party and the ascent of the radical-left party, Syriza. Belgium was regularly without a government at all. In June 2016 it was Britain’s turn to perplex fellow Europeans with its vote for Brexit, followed by uninterrupted political melodrama. The following year, Spain was thrown into turmoil over the illegal Catalonian independence referendum. Next to such convulsions, France in the run-up to 2017 looked like a model of institutional and party-political stability. After the chronic weaknesses of the Fourth Republic, de Gaulle’s constitution for the new republic in 1958 guaranteed a strong central executive. Governments came and went at the ballot box. If anything, political culture in the preceding decades seemed to be characterized by immobilisme: a state of cautious conservatism, shaped by self-serving political parties and entrenched interests.
Despite such appearances, however, by the second decade of the twenty-first century, France was in reality in the midst of a cycle of deep political stagnation, disillusion and collective malaise. It was precisely the exhaustion of French society towards the end of this cycle, and the national depression that had by then taken hold, that left the country yearning to evict the old guard. In some ways, this disillusion reached back to the end of the trente glorieuses, the decades of rapid industrial expansion and shared prosperity that followed the post-war reconstruction and turned France into the world’s fourth-biggest industrial power. But the origins of the more recent cycle can arguably be traced back more recently, to 1995, and the decision by Jacques Chirac and his prime minister, Alain Juppé, to abandon reform after paralyzing street protests. Over the following decade a number of signature events marked this malaise. After refusing economic reform (under Chirac that year), the French rejected immigration and the establishment in 2002 (by voting the far-right Jean-Marie Le Pen into the second round of the presidential election), and then Europe in 2005 (by voting against the draft European constitution in a referendum). It was the spreading sense of disillusion over this period that, in the end, made Macron’s political siege possible.
Former mayor of Paris, and prime minister under the wily François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac campaigned for his third attempt at the presidency, in 1995, on a promise to ‘mend the social fracture’, and put France back on track towards a future of collective prosperity. On entering the Elysée Palace, he inherited a restive country, with high unemployment, mounting debt, a disoriented electorate and a sense of political stagnation. Twelve years later, having decided not to run again for the presidency, the 74-year-old Chirac bequeathed to his successor Nicolas Sarkozy almost exactly what he found upon taking office: a restive country with high unemployment, mounting debt, a disoriented electorate and entrenched political stagnation. During Chirac’s two terms (1995–2007) French unemployment averaged 10 per cent, GDP per head was overtaken by that of both Britain and Ireland, and public debt, at 66 per cent of GDP, grew faster than in any other European Union country.
Chirac was a professional schemer, old-school charmer and political chameleon, who had served in every government after that of Charles de Gaulle until he was elected president and formed his own. He was a master of political opportunism. At the presidential election in 1974, he ditched a Gaullist resistance hero, Jacques Chaban-Delmas, to back the rising star of the centre-right, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, who went on to win. Seven years later, according to Giscard d’Estaing’s memoirs, Chirac then swung against him and secretly backed François Mitterrand, whom he wrongly imagined would not last long in the presidency. Tall, imposing and gregarious, Chirac loved company. The first time I met him, at a champagne-filled New Year’s reception for journalists beneath the chandeliers at the Elysée Palace in 2004, he was genial, relaxed and chatted contentedly for nearly an hour with his guests. At a later meeting with a small group of the foreign press, held around a table in a first-floor salon, he winked at the female correspondents. Out of favour with the Americans after his stand against the invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003, the president exposed his vision of the changing world order. He was in some ways prescient about shifting geo-strategic power. Fashionable French discussion at the time of a future multi-polar world, which the United States took as a provocative strategic attempt to undermine the transatlantic alliance and challenge the pre-eminence of post-Soviet American power, was merely a ‘self-evident’ fact, Chirac said, in the face of rising China and India. America’s ‘uni-polar’ moment, he declared, was over.
Genuine warmth and a flair for pressing the flesh made Chirac a formidable campaigner. For 30 consecutive years, after his first election as mayor of Paris, he lived in state palaces, swapping periods in the prime minister’s mansion for spells across the Seine in the town hall. It was during his time as mayor of Paris that the party-financing scandals took place that led in 2004 to the conviction for political corruption of Alain Juppé, Chirac’s right-hand man, who took the fall for his boss. Chirac’s departure from the Elysée brought to an end his presidential immunity. He was subsequently convicted of the misuse of public funds when mayor of Paris in the 1990s and given a two-year suspended prison sentence.
Over a 40-year career in national politics, Chirac defied political classification. A descendant of Gaullism, he was the dynamic two-time prime minister (1974–6 and 1986–8) who, in his liberal second spell, demolished the Socialist nationalization programme of the early 1980s, carried out extensive privatization and – briefly – abolished the wealth tax, a charge on assets, including property, that was levied on top of income tax. Yet, as president, Chirac metamorphosed into an ardent defender of the status quo. Although he took courageous stands both at home and abroad, becoming the first French president to recognize the official responsibility of the French state for the deportation of Jews from Vichy France under Nazi occupation, and defying America over the war in Iraq, his domestic agenda shrank as the years went by. Chirac compared the dangers of liberalism to those of communism, increased the state’s overall tax take and insisted that the strained French social system, which was piling up public debt, was ‘perfectly adapted’ to the modern era. The events that turned him into a cautious domestic leader began only shortly after his election as president.
Chirac had appointed the stiff and technocratic Juppé as prime minister, and by the autumn of 1995 the government was under growing pressure to tighten spending in order to meet the convergence targets of the Maastricht Treaty. The prime minister came up with what was known as the plan Juppé, designed to curb public spending, overhaul the social-security budget and stabilize public finances. It included planned cuts to family benefits and the health system, and a tightening up of public-sector pension rights. ‘The time of real reform for France has come,’ declared a crusading Juppé. But the French were to decide otherwise. An initial one-day strike by railwaymen, teachers, post office, electricity and other public-sector workers on 10 October swelled by the end of November into an all-out paralysis of public services. For three weeks, trains, buses and the Paris metro came to a virtual standstill. By December, despite an icy cold snap, as many as two million people had taken to the streets. It was the most sweeping public protest that France had witnessed since the student uprising of May 1968, and taught a generation of politicians to fear reform – or at least to acknowledge, as Macron did once in office, that ‘The French don’t like reform.’ The mood was sinister, the scale of the strikes menacing. ‘This is the end of the social-security system, the greatest act of pillage in the history of the republic,’ declared Marc Blondel, a union leader.4 In the end, as the revolt hardened, Chirac and Juppé backed down, shelving their planned reform of pensions altogether.
The lesson that the Gaullist president drew from the affair was that France was too fragile to be pushed out of its comfort zone. ‘The truth is,’ Chirac concluded, ‘that we live in a profoundly conservative country and it is very difficult to change things.’5 Franz-Olivier Giesbert, a writer who knew Chirac well, judged that the Gaullist leader, traumatized by street revolts, ‘ended up convinced that France is not able to tolerate any major reform’.6 After that crippling winter, Chirac’s domestic ambitions shrivelled. A verb was born to capture the way in which a politician retreated into excessive caution: se chiraquiser. By 1997, amid ongoing economic and budgetary difficulties, Chirac made a disastrous decision to dissolve parliament in a bid to seek a clearer mandate. He lost his majority, Juppé lost his job, and the president spent five years ‘cohabiting’ with a Socialist-led government, which brought in the 35-hour working week. By 2005, Chirac seemed to have lost touch with the national mood. During a two-hour televised debate held at the presidential palace ahead of the European referendum, the French head of state sat on a stool, surrounded by some 80 young people. As the fearful outpourings from the audience multiplied, his brow creased. ‘This is a feeling, I won’t hide it from you,’ he said, ‘that I don’t understand.’7
Although Chirac decided in his first year in office that the French were too conservative to tolerate change, he was persuaded 11 years later by his debonair new prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, to give it another go. The former foreign minister, with a mane of greying hair, who had earned worldwide renown for the stirring speech he made against the invasion of Iraq at the United Nations Security Council in New York in 2003, saw himself as on a domestic mission to tread boldly into hostile territory. He kept a bust of Napoleon in his office, wrote poetry in his spare time, and was a man more at home with discussions of destiny and grandeur than the management of labour-market policy. Eight months after being appointed to the job, De Villepin introduced a contentious flexible labour contract for the young, the contrat première embauche (CPE). Controversially, it carried a two-year trial period during which an employer could get rid of a new employee, far longer than that of a standard permanent French work contract. Students, and their families, were irate. In the face of massive demonstrations that drew at one point between one and three million people onto the streets of cities across France, De Villepin forced the bill through parliament, only for Chirac to then repeal it, even after it had been signed into law. A pattern seemed to have been set: the street objects; government backs down; immobilisme digs in. The resistance of French society to change seemed confirmed.
A different conclusion might have been drawn: that reforms which a candidate does not come clean about during an election campaign have little chance of going through once in office. Chirac’s electoral promise in 1995 to heal social wounds collided directly with Juppé’s rigid determination to force through his cuts just a few months later. Or it could be argued that both Juppé and De Villepin failed because each did not in his time prepare the ground, and consult enough up front, in order to build a political consensus. But this was not the version that took hold in the collective imagination. It was, rather, that the French, with their romantic affection for revolutionary rhetoric and theatrical protest, were resistant to reform. For politicians, it became received wisdom that governments that pushed too hard would be punished on the streets or at the ballot box. For voters, it seemed that politicians were not to be trusted; they were elected on one programme, only to put into place another, much harsher, once in office. In 2003, a year after Chirac was re-elected, in a second-round vote that was as much against Jean-Marie Le Pen as it was for the Gaullist, Nicolas Baverez, a lawyer and commentator, wrote in a landmark book that ‘the government does not run the nation’s politics but acts like a psychological support unit, as ready to display empathy with victims as it is reticent to remedy their situation’.8
Of course, France’s trajectory between 1995 and 2017 was not a linear slide towards political disillusion and economic stagnation. Growth in the years under the Socialist government of Lionel Jospin (1997–2002) was remarkably healthy, and unemployment dipped from over 10 per cent to below 8 per cent. The government credited its introduction of the 35-hour working week, which it considered to be a means of sharing out jobs more fairly, although job creation was generated more by the rapid expansion of the global economy at the time. ‘Frankly, it will have brought a lot of disorder to create relatively few jobs,’ one Socialist minister in the Jospin government told me in 1999, even as the policy was being drawn up. Above all, the presidential election of 2007 offered a fleeting moment of hope for renewal, as two younger politicians – Nicolas Sarkozy on the right, and Ségolène Royal on the left – promised alternative visions of a more modernized France. The victory of Sarkozy, at the age of 52, marked the election of the first president who had been born after the Second World War; the first Gaullist president never to have served in government under Charles de Gaulle himself; the first centre-right president since Pompidou not to have graduated from ENA; and the first president whose father (a Hungarian immigrant) was not French. He also seemed to have the outsider’s drive to succeed. An aristocrat who fled communism to settle in France in the late 1940s, his father once told the young Sarkozy: ‘With your surname, and the marks you get at school, you will never succeed in France.’9 President Sarkozy promised a ‘rupture’ with past ways of governing, urged the French to ‘work more to earn more’, and set about a vigorous effort to energize the country.
Sarkozy certainly brought a new tone to the presidency, which shocked the purists and impressed his supporters in equal measure. After the staid Chirac years, he would set off in running gear from the Elysée Palace, an NYPD T-shirt on his chest and headphones in his ears. ‘Is jogging a right-wing activity?’ asked Libération. It was, at any rate, an ‘undignified’ one, replied Alain Finkielkraut, who argued that strolling was a more appropriate presidential pace. Sarkozy brought dynamism to policymaking too. In the autumn of 2007 he had what some observers called his ‘Thatcher moment’: a showdown with the unions, after he put an end to special pension privileges for train drivers, gas and electricity workers and others, which enabled them to retire early. For once, a French president stood firm in the face of a crippling nine-day strike, which brought Paris to a halt, and refused to cede ground. Sarkozy introduced a degree of autonomy for the country’s universities, which were then governed centrally by the ministry in Paris. He succeeded in pushing up the legal retirement age from 60 to 62, no mean feat, even if it was not enough to balance the pension regime. He also introduced rules that made it easier to organize minimum services on the metro and railways during strikes, bringing an end to periodic paralysis. And, from 2008, Sarkozy was an energetic partner for Britain’s Gordon Brown in dealing with the financial crisis. In a carefully pitched speech in Toulon, in September that year, he promised that ‘whatever happens, the state will guarantee the continuity and the stability of the French banking and financial system’. It was a crucial moment, helping to contain the mounting sense of panic in France and buy his government negotiation time. For the next two years, Sarkozy’s energies were diverted into helping manage the crisis and its after-effects in Europe.
Yet in the end the Sarkozy presidency did not manage to restore France’s wilting faith in politics. This had a lot to do with presidential style. His touch may have been modern, but it was also seen as self-promoting and vulgar. From the start, when the newly elected president celebrated his victory at Fouquet’s, a flashy restaurant on the Champs-Elysées, and then jetted off to the Mediterranean for a three-day holiday on a yacht belonging to the billionaire Vincent Bolloré, the tag ‘bling’ stuck to him. The French like their wealth to be discreet, tied up in elegant apartments or works of art. Their literature, from Molière and Balzac to Sartre, denounces the corrupting power of money, and ridicules the grasping nouveau riche. ‘Elsewhere, material success is readily admired ... billionaires are applauded (and envied), bosses are acclaimed, self-made men celebrated,’ wrote Alain Duhamel, a French political commentator. ‘In France, not at all. Wealth embodies evil, money represents the devil.’10 Sarkozy’s taste for expensive watches, designer sunglasses and show-business friends spoke of vanity, ostentation and a crude materialism that sat uneasily with deep French ambivalence about money. By December of his first year in office, Libération ran a cover entitled ‘Président bling-bling’. The label stuck.
Sarkozy had hoped to show the French that he was a young, contemporary president in touch with the lives of ordinary people and the modern family. He turned up to his inauguration in 2007 with his wife, Cécilia, and the five children they had from various marriages. Little did people know then how intimately they would soon be in touch with his domestic affairs. The couple’s divorce five months later, the first for a sitting French head of state since Napoleon divorced Josephine in 1809, was splashed across magazine covers and chewed over on broadcast talk shows. ‘Desperate housewife’, was Libération’s verdict. Paris Match magazine devoted a 16-page cover story to the subject. Cécilia Sarkozy joined in, giving Hello-like interviews – ‘I met someone else, I fell in love’ – to the press. Next to the quiet discretion, and even quieter indiscretions, of the Chiracs, this American level of exhibition of a president’s private life came as a shock to the French. All the more so when Sarkozy courted, and married, Carla Bruni, the Italian folk singer and former supermodel, in a very public romance shortly afterwards. ‘Between Carla and me, it’s serious,’ he grinned, like a lovesick teenager, at a formal press conference in the salle des fêtes at the Elysée Palace. The coarse Sarkozy exterior masked an emotionally charged individual who had trouble keeping his feelings, whether anger or passion, to himself. In private, he could be hectoring and rude. It was in many ways his fatal flaw.
By the time Sarkozy came to the end of his term in office, the words that sprang to mind were: what a waste. He was by then regarded as a divisive figure, who set the French against each other, used abrasive language – racaille (yobs) to refer to troublemakers in the banlieues, or his cursing at a passer-by at an agricultural fair – and whose behaviour dismayed even his natural supporters. He had become such an object of dislike that the French seemed to have forgotten why they voted for him in the first place. A whirlwind in perpetual motion, he left the country irritated and exhausted. After he departed from office, a number of judicial investigations into his, and his ministers’, behaviour in government were opened, which left a murky trail behind him. The tragedy of the Sarkozy presidency was that he seemed in the end to have been his own worst enemy. He fired off in so many directions that it left the French confused, dizzy and worn out. Sarkozy had many virtues, but channelling his energy was not one of them. A tax-cutting candidate, he ended up increasing the overall tax take in the economy. A politician who criticized the 35-hour week, he left it on the statute books. A president who wanted to free the French from their complex about wealth and success was ultimately regarded as a cliquey ‘president of the rich’. A leader who promised to promote a French Condoleezza Rice finished his term with no ethnic-minority ministers in senior government positions, and turned to toxic identitarian talk about ‘too many immigrants’ in a chase for the far-right vote during his campaign for re-election in 2012. Through all of this, Sarkozy seemed too often unable to control his own impulses. If his political results had been more impressive, the French might have forgiven him these foibles. But his was a tale of showmanship over application, of haste over deliberation, of transparency over reserve. Yasmina Reza, the French playwright, put it well when she wrote of Sarkozy’s restless desire to ‘combat the slippage of time’.11 In the end, he could not stop the clock. At the presidential election of 2012, the French did not so much vote for Hollande as against Sarkozy. He ended up defeating himself.
After Chirac’s caution, and Sarkozy’s excess, the French sought a compromise and opted in 2012 for a ‘normal’ president. This sounded fair enough. Hollande chose the term to define the sort of president he promised to be. To the French ear, it meant more than ordinary: it suggested something that conforms to the rule, the way things should be. After the ‘look-at-me’ term of Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, the word ‘normal’ met a yearning for more modest government and a simpler form of politics. Yet Hollande soon discovered that he had cast himself as a normal president for what turned out to be highly abnormal times. The economy slid back into recession. His budget minister, Jérôme Cahuzac, who was appointed to crack down on tax evasion, resigned after it emerged that he had a secret bank account in Switzerland. The Greek sovereign-debt crisis unfolded, testing the eurozone’s capacity for survival.
Hollande turned ambiguity into an art form. The Socialist leader was elected to bring an end to austerity in Europe, put youth first, bring down unemployment, introduce a top income-tax rate of 75 per cent, squeeze the rich and distribute purchasing power to the rest. He ended up beholden to eurozone budgetary discipline (although he managed to postpone a reduction in the deficit), presided over rising joblessness including for the young, increased taxes on a broad swathe of the middle class, and shelved the top tax rate when it was ruled unconstitutional. The heavy overall tax hikes Hollande put in place in his first year in office prompted his own finance minister, Pierre Moscovici, to declare that the country was suffering from a ras-le-bol (fed-upness) with taxes. They also helped to choke economic activity.
Two years after his election, Hollande conducted a U-turn, naming a new, more business-friendly government under the sensible centre-left Manuel Valls – who had himself run for the Socialist primary in 2011 with a brave programme of economic reform – which began to undo some of the damage. In the autumn after he was appointed prime minister, Valls declared that the government had ‘lost time’ and made ‘poor choices’ during Hollande’s first two years in office.12 Hollande had been the Socialists’ secretary-general for 11 years. Yet the party, as Valls recognized, had never settled a raging internal debate that pitted those who favoured heavy public spending and redistribution to underpin economic growth, against advocates of supporting business to create wealth first. In office, Hollande tried the former, then swung to the latter, leaving voters confused, angry and short in the pocket. The price was both his popularity, and the credibility of governing parties. The tacit social bargain accepted by the French – by which they tolerated their technocratic elite, narrowly drawn from ENA, and which shuffled painlessly from government to the great institutions of state and on into state-run industries, as long as it delivered a better life for ordinary citizens – began to crumble. Confidence in the political class collapsed.
To make matters worse, Hollande’s complicated love life crashed into the public eye, just as Sarkozy’s had done, rendering his presidency anything but normal. In January 2014 Closer, a celebrity magazine, stunned the French by publishing claims of a liaison between Hollande and Julie Gayet, a French film actress. The magazine’s seven-page report included photographs of a figure in a crash helmet on the back of a scooter, driven by a security guard, arriving at an apartment building just across the street from the Elysée Palace, and leaving the building the next morning. The president did not deny the allegations, but ‘deplored the breach of respect for his private life’. ‘If nothing else’, confided a businessman at the time, ‘it makes him look ridiculous.’ The first lady, Valérie Trierweiler, a journalist at Paris Match, was taken to hospital with exhaustion. Their separation became official, and Hollande tried to banish all talk of scooters and love-nests. But in September that year Trierweiler published a tell-all account entitled, with bitter irony, Merci pour ce moment. It was an excruciating read. She described Hollande in office as increasingly crushing and distant. ‘Does it take long to make yourself look so beautiful?’ he asked her before a state dinner. ‘Yes, a bit,’ she replied. ‘At the same time, we don’t ask anything else of you,’ he hit back. She came across as insecure and jealous; he was erratic and snobbish, mocking the ‘toothless’ poor. For the French, who traditionally considered the public interest to stop at the bedroom door, it was a political earthquake.
Like those of Sarkozy and Chirac before him, Hollande’s presidency was not without achievements. The Socialist president legalized gay marriage, and took a bold decision to send French soldiers to beat back an incursion by Islamists in Mali. He was, bafflingly, funny and self-deprecating in private. After a state dinner for Queen Elizabeth at the Elysée Palace, on a warm evening on the terrace overlooking the gardens at night, the unpopular Hollande recounted his trip in the royal limousine up the Champs-Elysées before flag-waving crowds. ‘The best thing about it was that people cheered,’ he said, and then paused for effect: ‘That doesn’t happen to me often.’ But Hollande, the ‘normal’ president, singularly failed to restore faith in politics. Never one to choose clarity over ambiguity if he could avoid it, he presided over a zigzagging economic policy, first raising taxes and vowing to punish the rich and put an end to austerity, then trying to lower taxes, curb public spending and support business instead. He had declared during the 2012 campaign that ‘his real enemy’ was finance; but he pretty much left the banking system alone. Workers at a closed blast furnace in Lorraine, which Mr Hollande had promised on the campaign trail to save, erected a stone plaque marked ‘Treason’, which read ‘Here lie Mr Hollande’s promises of change’. By the time he decided not to run for re-election, in the autumn of 2016, Hollande’s poll ratings were in single figures.
This was the cycle of political disenchantment and economic under-performance that reached its peak in the run-up to the 2017 presidential election. Emmanuel Macron was a keen observer of all these events. He was still a student at ENA when Le Pen senior made it into the presidential run-off against Chirac in 2002, carrying out a six-month internship at the French Embassy in Abuja, Nigeria. ‘I absolutely didn’t want to go to Brussels or Washington like everybody else,’ Macron said, so he had asked to be sent ‘somewhere very far away’. He ended up in the capital of a former British colony, deep in the country’s interior, watching the French election results in consternation from afar. The shock outcome, he judged, ought to have heralded a period of deep introspection and political renewal. And yet ‘nothing changed’ in French politics after 2002, as politicians in Paris picked themselves up, licked their wounds, and continued as before. It was as if the political class was in denial after a trauma, ‘sleepwalking’, as he described it, refusing to see what was rising up in front of their eyes, and incapable of learning any lessons.13 The presence of Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 2002 presidential run-off should have jolted France out of complacency. Instead, parties put forward ‘the same faces’, made the same speeches and came up with the same policies as before, never daring to say or propose anything that might supply ammunition to the National Front. Macron was ‘very affected, as all our generation were, by April 21st 2002’, Adrien Taquet, a political consultant who devised the name En Marche, told me; ‘What he didn’t want for France was to find ourselves in 2017 with Sarkozy, Hollande and Le Pen.’14
One of the consequences of the 2002 vote was that reform in France increasingly proceeded by stealth, for fear of prompting a backlash, and Europe became a scapegoat for it. Governments on both the right and the left blamed the European Commission, or Germany, for policies implemented in France. Few French politicians had the courage to tell people that they needed to sort out the public finances for the sake of their own future, and sovereign independence. Such constraints were more often portrayed as the diktat of Berlin or Brussels, or financial markets. Rare was the political speech that made a positive case for Europe, or for reform at home. Little wonder that voters grew increasingly sceptical towards the EU. In 1992 the French had approved the Maastricht Treaty, which prefigured the creation of the single currency, by only the slimmest of margins. By the time of the referendum on the draft EU constitution in 2005, which the French rejected with a 55 per cent No vote, Europe was regarded as an elite liberal project that threatened ordinary workers. The ‘Polish plumber’ became the mythical emblem of the No campaign, a symbol of unfair competition from low-cost eastern members of the EU. In the referendum vote over 90 per cent of the far left and the far right voted No, as did 56 per cent of Socialist voters. In a warning sign of an emerging fracture, the industrial towns of northern France and nearly four-fifths of blue-collar workers voted No too. The referendum result was an astonishing outcome for a country that was co-founder of the European project, and whose land is scarred by the blood of battles and graveyards of the dead, the very reason the EU’s architects worked so hard to devise the union. Yet once again, the political class seemed to retreat into cautious silence. If the EU was a source of anxiety, even rejection, for the French, better to keep quiet about it.
Successive crises in the following years, over sovereign debt, austerity and refugees, served to fortify the idea fanned by French populists that Europe had turned into a rigid rule-bound project, chiefly serving German economic interests. By 2011, Arnaud Montebourg, the sender of burgundy wine, was comparing Angela Merkel to Bismarck, accusing her of profiting from the ruin of others. Jean-Luc Mélenchon published a book in 2015 entitled Le hareng de Bismarck: Le poison allemand (Bismarck’s Herring: The German Poison), arguing that ‘Germany is again a danger’, and calling the EU its ‘new empire’. On paper at least, polls suggested that the EU had become even less popular in France than in Britain. Marine Le Pen embraced the rising Euroscepticism with zeal. Rejoicing at the vote for Brexit in 2016, she called it a model of emancipation from the shackles of the ‘European Soviet Union’.
Of course, looking back, France’s No to Europe in the 2005 referendum was only partly a rejection of Europe. It was also another howl of rage at the failure of the political elite, and the hollowness of political parties. Unemployment had crept back up to 9 per cent, and was cited in exit polls as the single biggest reason for a No vote, according to TNS-Sofres. Exasperated by out-of-touch leadership in hard times, intoxicated by the chance to rebel, and encouraged by populist No campaigners, the French revolted. The vote, said Serge July, editor of Libération, was an ‘electoral riot’. The French had many reasons to reject the constitution, but their underlying defiance was simple: times are hard, jobs are scarce, nothing changes, promises go unkept, we are fed up, and you – the political class – refuse to listen.
Macron observed the fall-out over the subsequent years. Increasingly drawn to political life, he analysed this ‘divorce’ between political discourse and action in an essay he published in the review Esprit, in the spring of 2011, when he was a banker at Rothschild’s. The rise of the National Front, and the vote for the extremes, he argued, were also the symptom of this disconnection. French presidential elections, Macron suggested, had become a five-yearly ‘spasm’ in which candidates either promised everything, and then failed to deliver, or denounced the impossibility of doing anything within the system as it stood.15 At all other times, meaningful public debate, either within parties or without, was largely absent. This undermined public faith in politics, prompted disillusion and distrust, and stored up trouble for the future. France had to reform for its own sake, he argued, not under orders from afar. ‘I don’t blame Germany,’ Macron told me a month after becoming a minister. ‘Our problem is ourselves.’16 To conduct reform in disguise, to blame others for policies, or to put in place measures for which there was no electoral mandate, was to play into the hands of populists. ‘The politician’s word is exhausted,’ he told me.17
In the years leading up to the 2017 election, in other words, France was in a state of unstable equilibrium. Long-simmering anxieties, and political distrust, were rising up. Political parties were tired. Small and sudden change had the potential to topple things to the ground. ‘We have to prepare ourselves for upheavals the contours of which we cannot today apprehend,’ Macron argued in Révolution.18 A society deemed to be cripplingly conservative had worn itself out. A country that appeared immune to change in reality craved something new. ‘You mustn’t forget that the French have a revolutionary, and counter-revolutionary, temperament,’ Christophe Prochasson, a historian, once told me. ‘Belief in a better tomorrow has come to an end. There is a crisis of progress. The future no longer offers any perspective.’19 It sounded like a warning of turbulence to come. ‘Are we in 1789?’ was the title on the front cover of Le Point magazine in 2013. ‘We no longer know where we are heading,’ wrote Pierre Nora, another historian, ‘and we no longer know where we came from.’20
A country with a long disrupted history, marked by five monarchies and five constitutional republics since the Revolution, and invaded three times by its neighbour since 1870, had found constitutional stability. But the price seemed to be political inertia, and an inability to offer a credible sense of hope to a fatigued electorate, which was running out of patience.
Macron may have come late to Twitter, possess an unfashionable taste in music, and be described by friends as ‘uncool’ as a teenager. But he seemed to understand his era nonetheless. He saw that France had advanced through spasms throughout its history, and that technology was accelerating the pace of change and throwing up new possibilities for disruption. ‘Macron understood that the history of France is one of rupture,’ Sylvain Fort, his speechwriter, told me. ‘France is a revolutionary country and only advances by breaking with the past.’21 There was an arresting moment during Macron’s inauguration ceremony, in the salle des fêtes at the Elysée Palace in May 2017, which opens onto the palace gardens. It felt like an intimate occasion, with only a few hundred people present in an immense reception room, including his parents, his wife’s adult children, and other members of her family, who stood like guests at a cocktail party to watch the brief ceremony. When Laurent Fabius, the head of the constitutional council, conducted Macron’s swearing-in, he quoted Chateaubriand: ‘To be the man of his country, one must be the man of his time.’ Macron saw that the time was right, that it might not last, and went for it. What he needed, however, was to anchor his personal ambitions in a collective, popular project. This was the second factor that enabled him to win power: the construction of a political movement out of nothing, capable of detonating the two-party system.