Dans la vie il n’y a pas de solutions. Il y a des forces en marche: il faut les créer et les solutions suivent.
(‘In life, there are no solutions. There are forces on the move: create them, and solutions follow.’)
On successive Saturday mornings in the autumn of 2015, the lift to the young government minister’s apartment was in constant use. In a series of secret meetings, plans were hatched to launch something, although none of the participants knew at the time quite what it would turn out to be. ‘A club for reflection, or a think tank’ was one idea, recalls a member of the group. ‘An appeal for action’, says another. The exact shape of the venture to come was a matter of debate. But what all members of the group shared with Emmanuel Macron, the minister in question, was a frustrated sense that there was a hidden majority in France in favour of reforming the country, but no way to unlock it.
Over a period of months, in clandestine gatherings at cafés in Paris, and via email threads and coded Telegram chat groups, a tiny band of metro-chic advisers in well-cut suits set to work on what finally emerged as En Marche. It was a tight-knit group, of young (and predominantly male) loyalists – later dubbed mockingly by the press les Macron boys – most of whom followed Macron from the ministry to the movement they created, and on into government or the Elysée Palace. At the operational nerve centre were two figures. One was Ismaël Emelien, then 28 years old and a figure who shies away from the public eye, recognizable by his big-framed glasses, five o’clock shadow, and taste for sleeveless puffer jackets. Originally from Grenoble, Emelien gravitated to the moderate centre-left of the Socialist Party while a student at Sciences Po, and helped out while still a teenager on Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s campaign for the 2006 Socialist primary. He joined Macron’s staff at the ministry in 2014, and became a close adviser. ‘Emmanuel had the vision; Ismaël saw how to achieve it,’ said Laurent Bigorgne, the director of the Institut Montaigne, and a participant in those early gatherings.1
The other was Julien Denormandie, a 35-year-old engineering graduate with the clean-cut, well-coiffed look of a member of the Parisian bourgeoisie. A former civil servant, he was an adviser to Pierre Moscovici at the Finance Ministry while Macron was working for Hollande at the presidency, and the pair were in regular contact. When Macron decided to quit the Elysée Palace, both Denormandie and Emelien were due to join him in developing a digital-learning start-up. Instead, Macron became a minister, while Denormandie became his deputy chief of staff, and later took over the organization of En Marche. Like the team they later recruited, both Denormandie and Emelien had the hyper-connected habits and informal codes of the social-media generation, zapping off messages to colleagues sprinkled with emoticons and irritating franglais – ‘le pricing’ or ‘le nudge’. If Emelien was the strategic mind, Denormandie was the details man.
During the summer of 2015, the mood in the minister’s office was one of frustration. Macron felt increasingly humiliated, and marginalized within government. He had lost his parliamentary battle with Manuel Valls, over the bill to deregulate Sunday trading. He was considered an agent of ultra-liberal capitalism by the left wing of the Socialist Party. But was he so out of touch with public opinion? In July the team organized a town-hall debate, open to the public and publicized on Macron’s Facebook page. ‘We had no idea whether we would have just 50 people, or more than that,’ recalls one of the coordinators. After six hours, they had to close online registration. On a warm July mid-week evening during the school holidays, when many of the metropolitan types likely to be drawn to Macron had left Paris, more than 500 people turned up to ask questions about the future of France, and Europe. Microphone in hand, Macron told the audience that he was looking for ideas that could help to ‘liberate’ the country’s energies. ‘How do we invent a new model? How do we regain the initiative?’ What the team took away from the town-hall meeting was not only that Macron had the power to draw a crowd, but that there was a divorce between the interests of the general public and those of the Paris elite. If France was to debate the underlying issues during the election campaign in 2017, the stale political establishment had to change.
But how? The young minister consulted widely. A number of different circles gravitated around him, their members sharing ideas over dinners at the ministry, or in his apartment. The flow of visitors included economists, Socialist-linked think-tankers, social democrats close to Michel Rocard, the former centre-left prime minister, as well as liberal policymakers and intellectuals. Views differed. Some suggested that Macron should stand for parliament in 2017. Others urged him to think of a presidential bid. ‘He needed to give himself the means to have the possibility to run,’ was how Bernard Spitz put it to me.2 Macron listened, noted, all the while divulging nothing. In September 2015, I interviewed him for a column on progressive politics and digital disruption. With hindsight it is clear that Macron was already thinking then about how to transform his ideas into a new form of political action. ‘The left has built its history around the extension of collective rights,’ he told me. But ‘the transformation of the economy risks bringing to an end this adventure of collective progress’. The challenge now, he said, is to ‘build a form of neo-progressivism, structured around the idea of individual progress for all, in a way that combines agility with security ... We have to rethink the framework, and undertake an ideological renovation. It will happen. We need to show the way.’3
That month, he started to discuss the options with Emelien and Denormandie. One, pushed by his 91-year-old mentor, Henry Hermand, who had first met Macron when he was doing a civil-service internship at a préfecture outside Paris and sat at the top table at his wedding, was to create an association or publish a letter ‘in defence’ of the minister. Macron at the time was the object of irritation inside the Socialist Party, for declaring that young French people should ‘want to become billionaires’, or that the time when ‘France could get better by working less’ was over. Martine Aubry, the wily Socialist mayor of Lille, who had designed the 35-hour working week when labour minister, snapped that she was ‘sick and tired’ of Macron and his ‘arrogance’. A member of the party’s national bureau launched a petition calling for the minister to resign. Adept at charming an older generation, Macron held Hermand in high esteem, as well as affection. A prominent backer of moderate centre-left politics, and close to Michel Rocard, the elderly businessman had lent Macron money to buy his first flat in Paris. He also co-founded a newspaper, Le 1, which interviewed Macron on several occasions. That autumn, Hermand ‘kept telling Macron that he had to start preparing to run for president in 2017’, said Eric Fottorino, the editor of Le 1.4 But the team was unpersuaded by Hermand’s scheme. Alternative projects included a plan to set up a foundation, which Macron would leave the ministry to run. During the summer a proposal along these lines designed to help social entrepreneurs in fields such as digital learning was thrashed out with Bigorgne, a specialist in education. Another idea was for Macron to quit government to run, or set up, a think tank.
Emelien and Denormandie began to recruit various small groups to work on such ideas, under the radar. There were meetings in cafés near the ministry, or in each other’s homes. Very few members of Macron’s staff at the ministry knew what was going on. One who most certainly did was Alexis Kohler, a discreet fellow énarque with the look of an austere pastor, who ran Macron’s staff and enjoys his trust, a privilege he went on to keep as the president’s right-hand man at the Elysée. Outsiders were progressively brought into the loop. ‘I got a call in October 2015 from Ismaël Emelien saying that Emmanuel Macron wants us to meet, but he didn’t say why,’ recalls Benjamin Griveaux, another former member of Strauss-Kahn’s campaign team who was then working for a commercial-property firm, and went on to become the En Marche spokesman and then a junior government minister.5 The discussion Griveaux attended, on a Saturday afternoon in Macron’s office overlooking the Seine, was studious. If the country continued to tinker with the model that had served it well during the trente glorieuses, but which was ill adapted to the new economy, the group concluded, France was condemned to decline. ‘Never did he say at that point “I’m going to be a candidate at the presidential election in 2017”,’ Griveaux told me. On another Saturday morning that month, a different group met over coffee in Macron’s apartment to analyse how politics had become a lifelong profession and how this undermined public trust. Macron did what he always does: he listened to everybody, and made up his own mind. A think tank or a foundation, he concluded, would not be enough. ‘We said to ourselves that we couldn’t just be observers, and just have ideas, because the only thing that the political world understands is relations of power,’ Emelien told me. ‘We needed to give ourselves the means to really weigh in on the debate, to impose subjects. And for that we needed people behind us. That’s how the idea emerged to create a political movement.’6
As detailed work into legal statutes and financing arrangements began, a few others were taken into their confidence. Among them was a trio of young friends who had been at business school near Paris together, Emmanuel Miquel, Cédric O and Stanislas Guerini, a couple of members of his ministerial staff, including Stéphane Séjourné, as well as others with specific expertise. Christian Dargnat, then director of BNP Paribas Asset Management, joined to work on fundraising. Adrien Taquet, who co-ran a communications company called Jésus et Gabriel, was tasked with branding and a name. Guillaume Liegey, the political consultant, worked on grass-roots participation. The team consisted of a dozen people, almost all of them men, many occupying full-time jobs and working for Macron after hours. There was no éminence grise, no heavyweight political veteran, no member much over the age of 40. Miquel had even been a student at Sciences Po in a class on ‘general culture’ taught part-time by Macron. The tight-knit nature of the group made sure that nothing leaked. Communication was transferred to Telegram’s encrypted service. ‘We were very careful,’ recalled Bigorgne, ‘because we didn’t know if we were being listened to.’
From December 2015 onwards, things moved fast. The team needed to register the organization, which they hid behind an anodyne title – The Association for the Renewal of Political Life – and chose an address that would not raise eyebrows. Bigorgne, who lived in a suburb south of Paris, volunteered his address, and Véronique Bolhuis, his partner, was for a time made president of the association to bury the link deeper still. They also needed money. Dargnat quit his job in finance in December in order to take charge of fundraising full-time, along with Miquel, who worked in his spare time and weekends. Finally, and crucially, they also needed a name.
At a corner table at the bohemian-hip Hotel Amour, just south of the capital’s once-sleazy Pigalle district, Emelien met up with Adrien Taquet, the brand consultant. Macron was keen to convey the ‘élan of movement’, ‘the idea of progress’ and a ‘sense of disruption’, Taquet told me.7 Starting with Macron’s initials, and handwriting, Taquet came up with a few options, as well as that irritating exclamation mark the movement originally used. ‘He’s very decisive,’ he said of Macron. ‘Straight away, he wanted En Marche!’ For Taquet, the name was an echo of the line from La Marseillaise, ‘Marchons, marchons’, as well as a nod to the Marche des Beurs, a long anti-racism walk that took place across France in 1983. Unbeknown to him at the time, En Marche also drew on a line from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novel Vol de nuit: Dans la vie il n’y a pas de solutions. Il y a des forces en marche: il faut les créer et les solutions suivent (‘In life, there are no solutions. There are forces on the move: create them, and solutions follow.’)8 The reference was unintended, but captured perhaps best of all the spirit of what Macron was trying to do.
Four months of clandestine preparations followed. It was a hard slog involving late nights, low budgets and paranoid organization, sustained by the adrenalin of taking part in a project that many judged far-fetched, or downright delusional. Macron’s gamble to go it alone was ‘either lucid or mad’, said Dargnat. All the while, the minister was at his job at the Finance Ministry, trying to get things moving again with a second loi Macron, designed to free up opportunities in the new economy, encourage start-ups and loosen the labour market. But it went nowhere. Increasingly exasperated by Macron, Manuel Valls emptied the economy minister’s draft bill of all elements relating to labour reform, and then relegated Macron in a government reshuffle. Humiliated again, Macron realized that his space in government was shrinking fast. The timing was right for the launch.
When Emelien originally contacted Liegey in the autumn of 2015 to ask whether he wanted to help, the political consultant’s first piece of advice was: ‘get out of the office’.9 This was the thrust of an article he had written in July that year, arguing that the modern political party had to behave like a start-up: respond to real problems, serve ‘customers’ meaningfully, search for new talent, and spend time getting to know what ‘the market’ wanted. It turned into a sort of checklist for the design of En Marche. Macron was a banker. He could not launch a credible party if it was perceived as merely a product of the Paris elite. They needed, rather, a grass-roots movement to give him popular legitimacy. To build one up, Liegey’s agency came up with the idea of a ‘Grande Marche’, a giant information-gathering exercise across France, which was organized during the summer of 2016, to find out what people wanted from politics. The volunteers who emerged to run it, who liked to call themselves marcheurs, turned into the network that formed En Marche, and, ultimately, supplied it with candidates for parliament.
To see how it worked on the ground, I took the TGV high-speed train to Strasbourg in eastern France. The fine Alsatian city, with its half-timbered houses and tea salons, lies just on the French side of the Rhine, in the Franco-German borderlands. On a tree-lined square near the University of Strasbourg, the local coordinator for En Marche turned up for a session of door-to-door campaigning on a bicycle, his basket stuffed full of leaflets. Aged 38, and with an earnest demeanour, Bruno Studer was a high-school history and geography teacher in one of the city’s tougher neighbourhoods. When Macron launched En Marche, Studer straight away set up a local support committee. At his lycée, he taught his pupils about the great speeches of history made in the National Assembly – one by Robert Badinter in favour of the abolition of the death penalty, another by Simone Veil pleading for the legalization of abortion – but he had never set foot in the building. In June 2017 he was elected to parliament as a deputy for En Marche.
Studer’s story was repeated across France. Scores of political outsiders with no experience of campaigning, in all corners of the country, turned out to knock on doors for En Marche; and hundreds then went on to stand for parliament for the movement. At the start of 2017, Sandrine Le Feur was growing leeks and raising Highland sheep on her farm in northern Brittany. Bruno Bonnell, a jovial entrepreneur, was running a successful international robotics business in Lyon. The tall, gangly Hervé Berville was a Rwandan-born development economist. Jean-Marie Fiévet was working as a fireman in western France, a job he had held for 25 years. Six months later, all of them were elected to parliament. En Marche, in other words, was not just a vehicle for the election of Emmanuel Macron. It propelled political newcomers into the highest corridors of legislative power. Fully 45 per cent of the new deputies were women; 28 out of 577 were aged under 30. No fewer than 96 deputies aged over 70 sat in the outgoing parliament; in the new one there were only 13. In June 2017, at a shaded terrace café on the Place du Palais Bourbon, outside the National Assembly, such first-time deputies were to be found huddling over their welcome packs. Included among the helpful documents was a map of Paris.
The path from a high school in Strasbourg or a farm in Brittany to the National Assembly was no less improbable than that of an electoral debutant to the Elysée Palace. Neither would have been possible without the other. En Marche was primarily a vehicle for the ambitions of one man, and operated under his impulsion. This is why it managed to get national traction on the ground, where other citizens’ movements failed. That Macron was able to win the presidency came down to the unusual articulation between an open grass-roots organization, whose members at least felt they had influence, and a tight-knit central team of 30-somethings who were really calling the shots, under the leadership of the man they called le chef. En Marche was a political start-up built as a hybrid: a forceful personality at the top, around whom all decisions ultimately turned, and a decentralized citizens’ movement, trusted to devise events and mobilize support on the ground. Along the way, En Marche turned into a nationwide talent filter that netted its own future deputies. Within days of its launch, the movement had signed up 13,000 members. Within four months, the number reached 100,000, and it had overtaken the Socialist Party. By 2017 it had 310 deputies, or 54 per cent of the National Assembly.
On that warm spring day in Strasbourg in 2016, Bruno Studer explained how the movement took off locally. He created a Facebook page, became the movement’s local representative, and took part with fellow volunteers in the ‘Grande Marche’, knocking on doors and gathering answers to the survey questions devised in Paris, their data sent directly from tablet computer to En Marche headquarters. That autumn, the history teacher organized a meeting in Strasbourg, and Macron arrived by train to present the first results of those surveys. By April 2017, with a limited budget and low-cost campaign, the movement had signed up 3,200 members in Bas-Rhin, the département surrounding Strasbourg, distributed 100,000 flyers and held 50 public meetings. In June, Studer beat his Republican opponent, and secured 60 per cent of the vote in a constituency held by the centre-right for 20 years.
‘The most important factor was that they trusted us,’ Studer said.10 The message, and the programme, of En Marche was drawn up in Paris. But the local committees that sprang up in different neighbourhoods and villages used the internet platform built by the team at headquarters to plan and communicate themselves. The pro-European message Studer conveyed at public meetings carried particular symbolism in Alsace, land of conquest and bloodshed during two world wars between Germany and France. Studer’s grandfathers, one a member of the French Resistance, the other forcibly enrolled by the Germans to fight for the Reich, ended up at war on opposite sides. Pro-European feeling in the city had deep roots, but remained fragile. Shortly before I visited, in the village of Monswiller just 50 kilometres away, over 1,000 locals had turned out to hear Marine Le Pen. They chanted what became her supporters’ xenophobic battle cry, ‘On est chez nous’ (‘This is our home’). It mobilized Studer’s En Marche volunteers all the more.
Perhaps the most surprising hallmark of En Marche local campaigns was the old-fashioned emphasis on knocking on doors, a technique almost never used in French election campaigns. The French consider their voting preferences to be private. Campaign posters are restricted to an official municipal billboard that mysteriously emerges from the town hall ahead of every election. Activists hand out leaflets to commuters at train stations or shoppers at weekend food markets. But in France, the forest of American-style lawn signs that spring up in election periods, or the British window posters, would be regarded as inappropriate, dangerous or vulgar. So when Macron announced that he was going on a Grande Marche to knock on doors, he was much mocked in Parisian political circles. Unlike in America or Britain, doorstep canvassing in France appeared to be borrowed from another era. ‘Knocking on doors, how modern!’ sneered Jean-Christophe Cambadélis, the first secretary of the Socialist Party, on French breakfast radio. A government minister and then colleague of Macron’s posted a link on her Twitter account to a song by Jean-Jacques Goldman: ‘Je marche seul’ (‘I walk alone’).
Yet Liegey, along with his two partners, Arthur Muller and Vincent Pons, borrowed heavily from insights garnered from their time as volunteers on Obama’s 2008 Democratic campaign. All three were students at the time in Cambridge, Massachusetts – Liegey and Muller at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and Pons at MIT – and observed up close the way the campaign used algorithms to micro-target voters, whom volunteers then bombarded with personal doorstep visits or phone calls. The winning blend, Liegey told me, was ‘tailored technology and human contact’.11 Back in Paris, and within the constraints on data-gathering imposed by French data-privacy laws, the trio built their own predictive software, and tried it out on Socialist Party campaigns, first in the Paris region in 2010 and then for François Hollande in 2012. Similar to NationBuilder, the American electoral software package, the French model, built by Pons, crossed data from 67,000 polling stations in France with publicly available metadata on socio-economic background. Although privacy laws meant that they could not target individuals, they were able to use aggregated data to identify blocks of streets, according to an index measuring the likelihood that voters living there could be persuaded or mobilized to vote.
On the ground, En Marche door-knocking did feel laborious and thankless. ‘Lots of people just tell us all politicians are rotten,’ Sophie Zeugin, the local En Marche representative in Châteaudun told me with a sigh when I went to the town to watch her canvassing. Perched on a river bend in an unfashionable expanse of central France, Châteaudun is in many ways a typical French town. It boasts a fifteenth-century château, an unemployment rate of 10 per cent, a fine main square shaded by plane trees and a Turkish kebab restaurant. The town of 13,000 inhabitants also happened to have a record of voting in line with the rest of the country. In 2007 locals backed the winner, Nicolas Sarkozy, on the right. In 2012 they voted for the victor, François Hollande, on the left. But in 2017 the campaign felt too close to call. A local entrepreneur, Zeugin went out knocking on doors with a basket of leaflets hanging off her arm and multi-coloured En Marche balloons in her hand, in an attempt to bring a festive note to her doorstep intrusions. The good folk of Châteaudun were scarcely more welcoming on the doorstep than those I had seen in Strasbourg. Yet what was striking was the movement’s ability to harness local goodwill. Zeugin told me that it had been simple to set up her local committee with just a few clicks on the En Marche website, and she was busy organizing local meetings, even when no more than 25 people on average turned up. In cafés and meeting rooms across France, their T-shirts emblazoned with the En Marche logo, local volunteers became Macron’s unpaid army. They were the cheerful faces manning the doors and managing the queues when Macron turned up to speak. This campaign, after all, had an exclamation mark! In the town of Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, which lies on a wooded bend of the Seine to the west of Paris, Mickaël Littiere told me that when he first held a meeting for his local En Marche committee in a bar near the river, only one person bothered to come along. In the run-up to the presidential election, there were three different En Marche committees in Conflans alone.
‘Anybody could create a local committee, which was the base unit of the movement. And anybody could leave one and join another with just one click. This meant that we had 4,000 local committees, but no problems with them. We lost zero time and spent zero energy managing internal problems,’ Emelien told me.12 The key, he said, was to ‘make them feel useful, and trusted. And we gave them responsibility, territorial autonomy and the freedom to organize.’ At the same time, this was a political movement built by business-school graduates who knew the value of ‘growth-hacking’, using free membership (En Marche charged no fee to join) to secure a valuable database, for crowd-funding and campaigning. The starting point, Emelien said, was to ‘give our members useful tasks. That is to say, to give them responsibility, to treat them as our only resource, our only asset, our only chance. So we completely turned the pyramid upside down. Everywhere else, party members are at the service of the level above. They serve their elected representative, who serves the local political baron, who serves the presidential candidate, who serves those who organize elections. For us, it was the other way round. We spent days and nights making ourselves useful to our members.’ The message was: the members were the movement, the organizational force, the canvassers, the fundraisers.
Of course, this was not entirely true. En Marche was built in two distinct phases, each tightly managed by Macron and his team at headquarters in Paris. The Grande Marche of the summer of 2016 was, in effect, a pilot experiment. Volunteers used the giant survey to identify issues that voters in districts potentially sympathetic to Macron cared about. Questions included: If you had one thing to ask from politics what would it be? What do you think works well in France? What doesn’t work? What worries you the most? What’s your greatest hope? Answers were recorded on a customized smartphone app, connected to a digital platform, and analysed in Paris using third-party software. ‘We really made an effort to make sure the app experience was both pleasant and efficient,’ said Emelien. By the time it was over, 600 coordinators and 5,000 volunteers across France had knocked on 300,000 doors and gathered answers from 25,000 people. Over 1.5 million words were stored in a searchable database, organized thematically. The results confirmed what Macron’s team had sensed: an exasperation with politics, disillusion with politicians and, said Griveaux, ‘above all, a perception that the system was holding people back’. The second phase began after Macron declared his candidacy in November 2016, and turned into the election campaign proper. In each case, what made En Marche work was a form of local semi-autonomy combined with the tight grip of Macron and his team at the top. Above all, the exercise provided the former banker, seen as remote from ordinary people, with a locally rooted network, enabling Macron to claim to be at the forefront of an emerging citizens’ movement.
So there was a cynical element to the design of En Marche, one that may store up some trouble for the future as grass-roots idealism collides with the hierarchical reality of government. But it was also a genuine attempt to draw people back into politics and repair disillusion. Plenty of French people volunteer to run associations, local football clubs and the like. But this civic enthusiasm is more usually matched by political apathy, or hostility. Politics in France had become a lifetime profession, and lost credibility as a result. By 2017 confidence in political parties had dropped to 11 per cent, according to a poll by CEVIPOF, a research institute at Sciences Po, lower even than that in the media, trade unions or banks. People trusted their local mayor, but not their lawmakers or their president. Over the decades, France seemed to have created a particularly problematic form of political gerontocracy, which failed to bring in fresh blood, and obliged the younger generation to wait its turn. ‘We started from the observation that in France, politics had become a career,’ Dargnat said.13 ‘You start at the age of 18 years as a member of a political party, then become a parliamentary assistant. If you become a senator, you keep going until you are 80. You can be in politics for 40 or 50 years. This was abnormal.’
Not only were French politicians removed from the real life of their constituents, but political parties had become sect-like and doctrinaire. ‘The most chemically pure incarnation of what the French rejected in politics was parties,’ Emelien told me. ‘Because parties had, little by little, abandoned all the reasons for which they were invented. They no longer selected the best. They no longer trained their activists. They no longer threw up ideas. And, above all, they were exhausting themselves by focusing on the conquest of power without knowing what to do with it afterwards.’ The upshot, he judged, was a succession of internal power struggles, ritualized but empty annual party conferences, and ‘a totally disappointing customer experience’. As in many other Western democracies, party membership in France collapsed. After the Second World War, the French Communist Party was a genuinely popular movement, claiming 800,000 members, more than the British Labour Party at the time. By 2016 all France’s mainstream parties were bleeding adherents, as voters turned away from traditional politics towards single-issue groups, volunteer movements and non-governmental associations. The French, like other Western Europeans, seemed more likely to sign up to defend land from development than they were to join a political party. Movements and causes drew supporters and activists; parties tended to put them off. By 2016, France’s Republicans claimed around 230,000 paid-up members; the Socialists were down to just 85,000. ‘What doesn’t work is the system of parties, which are decision-making machines that are distant from people,’ Macron told me in July 2016.14 ‘That’s what feeds populism. We need to find far more direct forms of exchange with people.’ In particular, he wanted to use new technology to connect with voters. ‘It’s a political approach that involves talking directly to people, both via technological platforms but also physically on the ground. We need to build both a digital network and a territorial offering that brings in new people.’
En Marche became the vehicle. Some 70 per cent of its volunteers had little or no history of political activism. En Marche representatives were able to use the techniques employed during the Grande Marche to campaign during the election. The principle of local autonomy was fairly well preserved. After a day out reporting in Châteaudun during the presidential campaign, I came across Lex Paulson, an American political scientist teaching in Paris, who had also served as a volunteer on Obama’s campaign in Connecticut in 2008. He helped to train volunteers for En Marche, and had just spent a day with a team in the nearby city of Chartres. The crucial factor, he argued, was that the movement treated volunteers as ‘ambassadors not robots’. This required headquarters to trust local campaigners, and not overly dictate to them. The volunteers I met selected the bits of the En Marche campaign kit they thought would go down well. When she went knocking on doors in Châteaudun, her basket of leaflets on her arm, Sophie Zeugin said that she didn’t use a line that Macron favoured about the complexity of life. Voters didn’t relate too well to that, she said. But they were interested in his promise to clean up politics, and clear out the old political class. Over in Chartres on the same day, the En Marche representative for the département of Eure-et-Loir, Guillaume Kasbarian, told me that the best way to convince voters was to sound as revolutionary as possible. ‘There’s an edge for the candidate who sounds the most dégagiste,’ he said, referring to the promise to kick the old guard out: ‘Voters don’t want to hear about a woolly centrism.’15 Trusting local reps to tailor the message improved efficiency, and helped to mobilize volunteers.
So the old-fashioned En Marche doorstep campaign brought a useful human dimension to the movement. It was a way of contradicting in voters’ minds the idea both that politics was distant and removed from the electorate, and that Macron was just a product of the elite. ‘Even in an age of social media, a face-to-face message can be ten times as effective,’ Paulson argued. Macron’s French campaign was not an exact remake of Obama’s. Under the aforementioned French privacy laws, En Marche could collect email addresses and personal data only from those who signed up to the movement, and had to use metadata to target broad electoral districts, rather than individual voters. As a start-up, its structure was far flatter, and its headquarters smaller, than that of a traditional political party, let alone the American Democratic Party. ‘We created something that was different, not just a replica in France of another model,’ Emelien said. ‘We took bits from all over the place, then invented certain things that were new.’
As it grew, En Marche took on many young volunteers, and moved to a nondescript office building on the rue de l’Abbé Groult, a narrow street in the 15th arrondissement of southern Paris. Policy experts came on board. A respected economist, Jean Pisani-Ferry, was brought in to coordinate the drawing up of a manifesto, lending the movement intellectual credibility. Despite the expansion, En Marche managed to retain the feel of a small start-up. At the ministry, Macron had enjoyed access to a dining room, with butlers, and a chauffeured car. En Marche was run on a shoestring, and an invitation to a lunchtime event would involve sandwiches in brown bags. The movement generated its share of chaos. Working groups on diplomatic affairs were ‘a shambles’, recalled one adviser, with ‘too many bright young untutored diplomats incapable of imposing discipline’. On the whole, though, as a campaign organization, it worked.
En Marche also turned into a handy fundraising machine. It began with nothing. ‘At first we had no offices at all,’ Christian Dargnat recalled. ‘We had no money. The first place we rented was tiny, and had no air conditioning, so we struggled with the heat that summer.’ French financing rules, which base public subsidies for political parties on legislative results, keep the mainstream parties flush with cash and put newcomers at an acute disadvantage. The Socialist Party, with its headquarters in a grand nineteenth-century left-bank mansion on the rue de Solférino, just off the boulevard Saint-Germain, had a war chest to use. Macron had to raise individual donations, and take out a bank loan insured on his life. In 12 months, En Marche managed to raise over €10 million – pocket money by American standards but a record for France, where electoral-finance rules cap any individual donation at €7,500 a year, and preclude any single financier from bankrolling a presidential bid. Over 32,000 individual donors had contributed, a third of whom gave under €30 each.
In reality, though, En Marche relied heavily on contributions near the upper limit from members of the very French elite whom Macron was keen to distance himself from in public. With a fundraising team of just half a dozen – run by Dargnat and Miquel – the team leveraged every network it could, working its way through their collective address books, and holding dinners in private apartments in Paris, as well as in London and New York. ‘I started with my friends, and then friends of friends; then I realized that I didn’t have enough friends,’ said Dargnat. Each event was designed to extract as close to the maximum limit as possible. Macron went to London – home to a big French expat community of financiers – six times alone. In total, some 60 to 70 such dinners were held. It wasn’t difficult to find people to attend, but it was far harder to persuade them to part with a cheque. In the end, 70 per cent of the total funds donated to En Marche came from individuals willing to shell out sums close to the upper limit of 7,500 euros. En Marche ended up building a citizens’ movement around a former banker, and a grass-roots election campaign on finance from the moneyed French elite.
Such was Macron: the insider’s outsider, the leader of an insurgency against the establishment by one of its own. If the democratic purge of 2017 was revolutionary, it was conducted from inside the machine. En Marche was a product both of the elite and of civic participation, a mix that went on to generate its own tensions. This hybrid design helped to put both a novice in the presidency, and debutants in parliament, cleansing an entire political class. Neither would have happened without the other. A year after they set up local committees in their home towns, many En Marche representatives found themselves sitting on the benches of parliament. Shortly after the election, I found Bruno Bonnell, the 58-year-old tech entrepreneur from Lyon, admiring the view from his new office, overlooking the cobbled Place du Palais Bourbon. The first time he stepped into the National Assembly as an elected member of parliament, he shed a tear. Bruno Studer, the history teacher from Strasbourg, talked of the burden of ‘responsibility’ he felt as an elected MP. He hadn’t yet been allocated an office, so we met for coffee at a terrace café behind parliament. The 39-year-old kept teaching at his lycée until mid-June despite the campaign. Having seen on the doorstep how vehemently voters distrusted politicians, Studer felt that it was up to his generation to restore confidence. Weeks later, deputies passed a law to clean up politics, put an end to employment of family members, and tighten up expenses rules.
Hervé Berville, who had joined the parliamentary foreign-affairs commission, recalled how much people had mocked En Marche early in the campaign. Born in Rwanda shortly before the genocide against the Tutsi ethnic group, to which he belonged, Berville was orphaned and adopted in 1994 by a French couple from Pluduno, a quiet village of dark-grey granite houses in inland Brittany. Working as a development economist in Nairobi in 2016, he set up a local committee in Kenya for En Marche and then returned to France to campaign for Macron, joining En Marche in Brittany, and going on to become the party’s parliamentary candidate in his home region. ‘For outsiders, it was risky, to put a black man in Brittany,’ Berville told me: ‘But I never had trouble.’16 He knows that things could have turned out differently. In 1994 some 800,000 Tutsis were killed in Rwanda during the 100-day genocidal massacres. His mother had died at the age of 27. By the time he reached the same age, Berville was elected a member of the French National Assembly.
En Marche was in the end a curious hybrid, both flat and hierarchical, built from the bottom and run from the top. Macron’s presidential bid would not have worked had the movement not taken hold, in cafés and meeting halls on the ground. He needed the popular legitimacy this conferred. At the same time, the reason it worked on the ground, and that activists believed that they were shaping the campaign themselves, was because of the self-belief, tight grip and charisma of the candidate. If Emmanuel Macron had not been present at the fundraising dinners, people would not have been persuaded to write out cheques. Victory in 2017 depended not only on identifying the political space, and building a party; it also required a particular sort of leader. ‘You can construct a movement around common values, build a campaign, create a political narrative, raise enough funds to carry it out professionally,’ Guillaume Liegey told me, recalling his American experience. ‘But you still need a Barack Obama.’ In the end, for all that the marcheurs on the ground felt that they were building this campaign, it was ultimately dominated by the figure of Macron himself.