‘I’m claustrophobic about life. I can’t stand being shut in, I have to get out, that’s why I can’t have a normal life.’
Emmanuel Macron to Emmanuel Carrère, 2017
Emmanuel Macron has just been hit in the face with an egg. It is a perfect arc of a lob, thrown over the heads of his security guards, the hard shell landing with a splat on his forehead, disgorging glutinous yellow yolk into his hair and onto the fine cloth of his well-cut navy suit. Instantly, a bodyguard thrusts his arm over the candidate’s head, and hustles him to the side. But Macron is unfazed. ‘It’s an egg!’ he protests. ‘It’s nothing. Don’t worry.’ That evening, in a scene broadcast later in a television documentary, Macron looks at the video replay on his campaign director’s phone, letting out a high-pitched giggle as he watches the egg land with uncanny precision smack onto his head. ‘I took it right in the face! ... He threw it from far, did you see that? The guy was really lucky.’1
Macron is unflappable. Almost preternaturally so. He can be tough, exacting, authoritarian even. He knows what he wants, and what he needs to do to get it. He drives himself hard, and expects the same of his team. He sleeps little, and sends texts in the early hours. ‘He is incredibly demanding of himself, and of others,’ Adrien Taquet, the brand consultant, told me. ‘It’s very tiring working for him.’2 But, say aides, he does not panic. And he almost never loses his temper. ‘He has an Obama-like level of self-control,’ said François Heisbourg, a security analyst from the Foundation for Strategic Research think tank who advised him on counter-intelligence policy during the campaign.3 Among the rare times that Macron was known to swear during the election was when his football team, Olympique de Marseille, lost. ‘Oh merde, for the second time, putain!’ he was heard muttering after one such defeat, the scene caught on camera. ‘I have never known anybody as serene,’ said Laurent Bigorgne, who has been a friend for over a decade. ‘Nothing – nothing – gets him annoyed.’4 If anything, Bigorne said, Macron is ‘sometimes almost expressionless. He’s afraid of nothing. He has total self-control.’ He does not even sweat, Emmanuel Carrère, the French novelist, noticed while accompanying him to the hot and humid Caribbean island of Saint Martin after a hurricane struck in September 2017.
‘He has an absolute calm, an incredible sang-froid,’ Benjamin Griveaux, Macron’s campaign spokesman, told me.5 When his friends talk about him this way, it sounds improbable, excessive, robotic almost. Yet I saw it myself, when I accompanied the then minister in the autumn of 2015, aboard a small government Falcon jet back from RAF Northolt in London to a French military base near Paris, in order to interview him while in transit. As we approached the French capital, we flew into a violent storm. Sitting opposite him across a table, I clenched the seat handles. Members of his staff on board exchanged nervous glances. Lightning flashed through the porthole windows; the plane began to shudder and lurch, on its way to a bumpy landing. He did not flinch once. ‘I’m not made to lead in calm weather; my predecessor was,’ Macron said after reaching the presidency two years later, ‘but I’m made for storms.’6
This inner poise made him an unusually calm and self-assured campaign manager. But did Macron have what it would take to seduce voters? What was not clear before the presidential election campaign was whether the former investment banker, énarque, adviser to the most unpopular president in modern French history, friend to the Parisian financial elite, defender of globalization, and pro-European to boot, would make a good sleeves-rolled-up, on-the-stump campaigner. ‘I remember a conversation quite early on, when I was urging him to run for the presidency, and sensed his anxiety,’ a friend of his told me. ‘It wasn’t about whether he would be a good president. His anxiety was about whether he could be a good candidate.’ In private, Macron deployed his legendary charm. French ministers, who are treated like minor royalty and fussed over by butlers and chauffeurs, often adopt a demeanour of entitlement while in government, mistaking the trappings of political office for personal self-importance. There was none of that with Macron. In his office overlooking the Seine, in the modernist Finance Ministry, the minister would leave his suit jacket on the back of the chair, and strike a friendly conversational tone that steered clear of the overly chummy. ‘On form?’ he would ask cheerfully, before sitting down on the deep black-leather sofa to give questions his full attention, both mobile phones lying unattended beside him. The technocrat, in other words, had demonstrated a private capacity for political seduction. But could he win over the public?
In some ways Macron was a disappointing performer. He turned out at first to be a stilted public speaker, bewilderingly so for someone who had spent his teenage years on the stage. His speeches often lacked lyricism or rhythm. The first time he held a rally after the launch of En Marche, at the Maison de la Mutualité in the 5th arrondissement of Paris, Macron emerged on stage, and paced about, struggling to project his slightly metallic voice. His final line carried promise: ‘This movement, nothing will stop it. Because this movement, it’s the movement of hope, that this country needs. This movement, we will carry it together, until 2017 and until victory!’ But, from where I was sitting, his voice lacked resonance or range. If this was a politician hoping to become a Barack Obama à la française, he had none of the American politician’s cadence or crescendos, let alone his musical notes.
Over time, Macron hired a voice coach, deepened his pitch and improved his performance. His rallies, warmed up with the booming bass of the track ‘Walk In’, and packed with supporters who had queued in the street to get a place, carried an authentic zeal and fervour. Yet, even so, Macron’s speeches were too long-winded, as Brigitte Macron kept telling him.7 He was rarely conversational in tone, shied away from the particular, and tended to submerge his audience with theoretical abstractions. The end of his rallies often left the audience dissatisfied, his words short on intimacy and emotion, dramatic build-up or dénouement. The great advantage of campaigning in France is that, when short of a good final note, there is always the cry of ‘Vive la République! Vive la France!’ followed by a rendition of La Marseillaise, a national anthem made for political campaigning. Yet the final lines of a Macron speech often fell flat, as they did at his rally in Reims: ‘Because the real patriots are here. They love France. Because real patriots look at the past and the future, and reconcile them!’8 In Dijon he ended his speech: ‘Yes, my friends, during these 30 days, be real patriots. You are defending France, you are defending a project, an ambitious project, a project of reconciliation, a generous project. You are patriots and progressives. Fight each hour and each day!’9 And in Besançon: ‘My friends, right to the last hour, I want your mobilization, your energy, because we are going to win!’10 Macron, who could recite long passages from Molière by heart, did not do folksy. He spoke of his grandmother, but seldom mentioned an encounter with ordinary people on the campaign trail. The closest he got to a personal anecdote was the tale of an incident that concerned a philosopher.
Even his first televised debate, on 20 March 2017, was not an unequivocal success. Macron put in a competent performance, which kept him in the race. But he lacked the killer one-liner of the sort that Jean-Luc Mélenchon was able to deliver with quick-witted ease. At one point, François Fillon argued that labour relations should be decentralized to company level, to which the far-left firebrand retorted: ‘I’m not in favour of one labour code per firm, just as I am not in favour of one highway code per road.’ Macron’s intellectualism, his long elaborate sentences and splendid abstractions, seemed to hamper his ability to make a mark. ‘You’ve spoken for seven minutes, and I have no idea what you said,’ Marine Le Pen snapped at him, in one of her feistier moments. ‘Every time you talk, you say a bit of this, a bit of that, and never decide.’
Yet, as curiosity about Macron began to swell, and the queues to get in to see him started to snake down the roads ahead of his public appearances, it became clear that something was nonetheless happening. And this something had less to do with his performance, a work of political theatre, and more to do with the symbolism of what he was trying to achieve. If Macron had charismatic leadership, or the ability to inspire and lead others, it was through his capacity to incarnate hope and change. That he managed to climb steadily in the polls for months before he finally unveiled a manifesto, in March 2017, testified to the fact that this was a campaign constructed not according to a checklist of policies but around himself. Macron’s programme was Macron. In this sense, the personal qualities that he brought to bear on the campaign were also fundamental to its success. Three stand out: his ability to cast himself as a disruptive insurgent that matched the anti-establishment mood; the authentic message of optimism he sought to embody; and his ability to set a broad objective and go about achieving it in a disciplined, orderly fashion.
On the first point, Macron transformed factors that might in ordinary times have disqualified his candidacy into markers of insurrectionary change. In the early months after the launch of En Marche, it had looked as if the candidate might attract only rootless liberal types. At his first rally, in the Latin quarter of Paris in July 2016, a trial run for the not-yet candidate, the hall was packed with the sort of well-heeled, young, mostly male, metropolitan crowd who might have stepped out of business school, or a tech start-up. It reminded me of the improbably well-dressed French students who queued up the winding staircase at the LSE in London to hear the minister speak while on a visit in the autumn of 2015, an early sign that Macron was stirring interest. If this was to be his support base, though, it looked desperately narrow: a conversation among like-minded professional types, not a pitch to France’s broad middle.
Yet, as the campaign wore on, Macron managed to cast his net wider. He did this partly by using a political lexicon – ‘revolution’, ‘emancipation’ – that spoke directly to a far broader swathe of people. The language he employed was designed to tap into the dégagiste mood, urging voters to sweep the old political class aside: ‘You will conquer,’ he told them, ‘This is your project.’ On a bright wintry day in February 2017, I followed the candidate on the campaign trail in the département of Mayenne. This is an expansive stretch of rolling farmland, marked by villages without cafés and patchy mobile reception, that lies between Le Mans and Rennes in western France. The En Marche campaign then still had an improvised low-cost feel to it. To the surprise of fellow passengers, Macron travelled second class on the TGV from the Gare Montparnasse in Paris. The campaign team had no budget to lay on the logistical services – a press bus, sandwiches – that the well-financed parties provided for a full day on the road during an election campaign. Upon arrival by train in the city of Le Mans, we hired a car at the station, and tried to keep up with the candidate as he raced in his campaign car from village to village down narrow country lanes. At each stop, a small gathering of locals had got wind of Macron’s visit, and were waiting for him to arrive. In a muddy farmyard near the village of Gennes-sur-Glaize, I came across Patrick Pervis, a bearded 63-year-old of generous girth who described himself as a paysan (peasant farmer). ‘All the other candidates live off politics,’ he told me, sinking his hands into his jacket pockets: ‘But Macron hasn’t been in politics, he hasn’t had his nose in the trough.’ While Macron trod his way through puddles and mud-splattered dairy pens, in his city shoes and Paris suit under a navy wool overcoat, Pervis displayed an arresting solidarity with the former banker. ‘Macron, like us, knows the world of work.’
Later that afternoon, we arrived in Angers, a cathedral town on the river Maine and the medieval seat of the Plantagenet dynasty. Macron was due to hold an evening rally there, and long before he emerged onstage hundreds of supporters lined up on the pavement outside the convention centre, wrapped up in winter coats and scarves, hoping for a seat. The team had booked an auditorium for 1,200. In the end, nearly twice that number turned up. The atmosphere was electric. As Macron arrived on the pavement, volunteers dressed in En Marche T-shirts had physically to hold people back. When the auditorium was full, an overflow crowd of enthusiasts, the grey-haired as well as the young, sat on the floor in the draughty entrance hall, their coats buttoned up, to watch a broadcast of the speech on a screen. A retired tax inspector, who usually voted Socialist, told me that she was drawn to Macron because he was ‘young and brilliant’ but above all ‘different’. She had ‘had enough of dishonest politicians’ and he, unlike them, had ‘not been at it for years’. Voters, it seemed, were willing to make a distinction between a technocratic member of the establishment (good) and a political hack (bad). In other words, it was electoral party politics, not the quality of the country’s administrators, that was seen as rotten. The same point emerged when I went to watch Macron speak at a small event for start-ups in the banlieues, Paris’s high-rise suburbs, which seemed unpromising territory for the former investment banker. There too, participants appeared unbothered by his deep establishment ties. Macron was an outsider. He was ‘not one of them’, and had cultivated a reputation for insubordination that went down as both courageous and novel. ‘In France we never try new things, it’s always the same faces,’ Yacine Kara, an entrepreneur of Algerian origin, said to me. ‘His political inexperience is positive. He’s taking a risk, like us.’
So Macron managed to turn political inexperience into an asset, wrapping it in the language of popular insurrection, and in doing so broadened his vote. In the end, his first-round score was indeed strongest among city dwellers, and those with university degrees. Macron did not capture the youth vote, which went to the extremes, to both Mélenchon and Le Pen. Yet he scored well in all age groups over 25 years. Macron gained as much backing from public-sector workers as did Mélenchon, and two points more than Mélenchon from those with no formal qualifications.11 He scored twice as much of the unemployed vote as Benoît Hamon, the Socialist candidate, and two points more of the rural vote than François Fillon. En Marche deputies were elected even in remote parts of la France profonde, including in the départements of la Corrèze and la Creuse.
In the end, unlike Mélenchon and Le Pen, Macron represented a safe variety of insurgent. New to politics, untested and young, he was different in those respects. But he did not represent much of a risk. A former Sarkozy voter I met one February weekend buying waxy lemons in a fruit market in the naval port of Toulon, under an azure sky, told me that he was backing Macron because he is ‘from the new generation, but he’s also been a minister; he knows what he’s doing’. That seemed to sum it up. Macron’s appeal as a radical insurrectionist who would crush the old guard met the aspiration for renewal, but was softened by a reassuring familiar feel. You could vote for him as a form of protest against the establishment, with the comfort of knowing that he understood how to work the machine. Laurent Bouvet, a political scientist, called this the ‘taking of power by the technocracy’: the frustrated high-flying civil servants, who had complained for years that politicians failed to reform France as other countries had done, finally had found one of their own.12 Macron, Bouvet said, was the first of them to say: ‘we can’t just complain, we have to get on and do it’. Once an adviser to the prince, Macron decided to become the prince himself. For a country that veered between rebellion and regret, revolution and counter-revolution, Macron succeeded in embodying both change and continuity. His was a political insurgency without pitchforks or pikes: a response to the urge for revolt that did not frighten the French.
Macron’s skill at reinventing himself to fit the dégagiste mood was matched by the second factor: a gift for conveying an optimism that had long eluded France. En Marche was launched at a time of deep French malaise. The country had been under a state of emergency since the bloody terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015. The year 2016 brought more gruesome bloodshed. Two police employees were stabbed to death in their home by a jihadist. A lorry was driven into festive crowds in Nice on Bastille Day. Terrorists slit the throat of an 85-year-old priest during mass in Normandy. This blackened an already sombre mood. Unemployment was at 10 per cent, and still climbing. Between March and July students and trade unions were on the streets almost weekly, protesting against new labour laws. Nativists of the far right and class warriors of the far left alike were building their politics on division and distrust. Political faces tended to be stern, frowns fixed and adjectives gloomy. Manuel Valls, the prime minister, who had warned the French that they had to learn to live with terrorism, seemed to wear a perma-scowl.
Up to a point, of course, melancholy is treated by the French as a badge of national identity. ‘Optimism,’ says a disabused Candide in Voltaire’s novel, ‘is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.’ The strange beauty of sadness has been a constant of the country’s literature. The French Romantics regarded miserabilism as a form of pleasure. ‘Melancholy,’ wrote Victor Hugo, ‘is the happiness of being sad.’ In the twentieth century, the left-bank literary clique led by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, which gravitated to the cafés of Saint-Germain-des-Près, adopted ennui as a way of life as well as a philosophy. When Sartre handed the original manuscript of Nausea to Gallimard, his publisher, he gave the novel the title Melancholia. Monique Canto-Sperber, a philosopher at the elite Ecole Normale Supérieure, once told me that this outlook was due to French philosophical training and the art of critique. ‘The rationalist tradition makes us sceptical; we exist through criticism,’ she said: ‘We treat those too full of hope as naive.’ Michel Houellebecq, the Goncourt prize-winning novelist, populated such nihilist works as Whatever or Atomised with characters who invariably lead empty, often sordid and always disillusioned lives. ‘In the end,’ writes Houellebecq in The Elementary Particles, ‘there’s just the cold, the silence and the loneliness. In the end, there’s only death.’ The point is handed down through the generations. All French pupils are examined on a compulsory philosophy paper for the school-leaving baccalauréat, with such essay questions as ‘Is man condemned to self-delusion?’ Optimism, in Europe’s most self-consciously intellectual country, is for the naive; sophisticates know better.
Yet France by 2016 was in a state of depression that went deeper than this. For over a decade, French intellectuals and academics had been dissecting the causes of what was known as ‘le mal français’: a fracturing of society, a collapse in economic competitiveness, an ossification of political life, a decline of diplomatic influence, a loss of cultural panache. Books with titles such as Illusions gauloises (Gallic Illusions), Le suicide français (The French Suicide) and L’identité malheureuse (The Unhappy Identity) became bestsellers. Commentators described France, variously, as in a state of economic decay, moral decline and political desolation. Declinism became something of an academic speciality. After Le malheur français by Jacques Julliard came Comprendre le malheur français by Marcel Gauchet. In a book published in 2003 the commentator Nicolas Baverez wrote of the ‘atomisation of French society’, the ‘spread of social nihilism’, and the ‘anaemia’ of French democracy.13 In foreign policy, he argued trenchantly, the French had concealed the deterioration of their military capacity, misread the consequences of the fall of the Berlin Wall, and clung to a sense of global importance long diminished. ‘There is effectively something metaphysical in the sentiment of decline which is engulfing the old world in general, and France in particular,’ commented the writer Franz-Olivier Giesbert.14 It was a time of disorientation for much of the West, faced with the rise of China and other emerging powers, the transformations brought by the digital economy and the revival of identity politics. But the French, with their universalist aspiration, seemed to feel it with almost unique pain. In Adieu à la France qui s’en va (Goodbye to the France that has Gone), Jean-Marie Rouart wrote lyrically of the loss of France’s soul.15 Pessimism, concluded Sudhir Hazareesingh, in his history of French thought, ‘broadened out from a confined sense of anxiety to become one of the entrenched features of the contemporary French mindset’.16 The country that brought the world the Enlightenment seemed trapped in the darkness of its own collective depression.
Macron’s optimism came as a shocking remedy, a sharp tonic. Bruno Bonnell, the robotics entrepreneur who became a local En Marche representative in Lyon, compared Macron to a bereavement counsellor. ‘We kept calling it a crisis,’ he told me.17 ‘But in reality we were grieving for a former France.’ The Socialists, he suggested, were still in denial. Mélenchon and Le Pen represented anger against the new world. Macron offered the French acceptance. ‘He said bluntly: this is the world, we have to accept the reality, and then rebuild.’ As minister, Macron had set the tone, linking himself to tech start-ups, a world defined by confidence and risk. ‘The Spring of Optimism’ was the title of a speech he gave at the Finance Ministry just weeks before he launched En Marche. ‘What our country needs,’ he declared, ‘is to rediscover a taste for the future, rather than a morbid fascination for an uncertain past.’ Macron blamed the country’s obsession with post-modernism and structuralism for its cynicism and nihilism. During the campaign his speeches were resolutely upbeat, infused with positive semantics: ‘optimism’, ‘confidence’, ‘ambition’ and ‘hope’, along with a denunciation of ‘miserabilist discourse’ and those who inflamed the country’s ‘sad passions’. En Marche volunteers carried cheery balloons. The movement even came with an exclamation mark, which felt jaunty before it became tiresome, and later was often dropped. Macron’s tone was unfashionably courteous. At rallies, he told his supporters not to boo or whistle at his opponents. This was positive politics done politely. Cécile Alduy, a professor of French at Stanford University, compared Macron to a preacher or tele-evangelist, an ‘apostle of goodwill’. Against the odds, perhaps exhausted by their own depression, voters seemed to connect to this. ‘It’s the first time,’ said the retired tax inspector I met in Angers, ‘that a candidate is offering something positive.’
Of course, plenty of politicians promise what Sarah Palin called ‘that hopey changey stuff’. On the centre-right, Alain Juppé had tried to campaign for the primary on the back of his plea for a ‘happy identity’ for France. Macron’s breezy approach could have been lifted straight from the playbook of upbeat former campaigns, in France (Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in 1974; Mitterrand in 1981) or abroad (Bill Clinton in 1992; Tony Blair in 1997). Or even from the scripts of The West Wing television series, which several of his young advisers watched over and over again. Macron’s declarations, that he ‘believed in hope’ or promised ‘a new future’, were neither novel nor eloquent. Even Hollande, after all, had vowed to ‘re-enchant the French dream’. The reason that such a message worked in Macron’s case was that it felt authentic. It matched the persona of the candidate, and the nature of his political adventure. En Marche was the incarnation of optimism. I have taken my own risk, Macron seemed to say to voters; why not now take a bet on me? And the more he climbed in the polls, the less absurd or naive or quaint his adventure appeared. Macron gambled on his voters’ better nature. Against the odds, he found a way to persuade a morose people, or at least enough of them, fatigued by the prevailing defeatist national mood, to believe in their country again. By the end of 2017, the share of French people polled by Harris Interactive who described themselves as optimistic about the coming year jumped to 59 per cent, ten points more than at the end of the year of Hollande’s election, 2012. For the under-35s, the figure was a massive 75 per cent. The French seemed to have ‘resigned themselves to optimism’, said a commentator on RTL radio, as if it required a peculiar effort. Michel Houellebecq, better known for his own nihilisme, put it this way: Macron, he said, represented a form of ‘group therapy’ for the nation, a sort of collective self-medicated optimism.
No amount of defiant optimism or revolutionary rhetoric, however, could have carried Macron to the presidency without a third personal quality: his capacity to see the big picture and work out how to get where he wanted. For all the expertise gathered, and the loyal advisers assembled, Macron was ultimately his own campaign manager. Ideas were discussed; working groups convened; thematic papers prepared and debated. But almost none of the movement’s members had any more direct experience of a presidential campaign than Macron himself. Which is to say almost none at all. En Marche did not outsource the campaign to a professional hack or strategist. The consultancy they had used for the Grande Marche was unavailable due to an exclusivity contract with the Socialist Party. The campaign’s behind-the-scenes director really was also its public face: Macron himself. In the spring of 2016, shortly after the launch of En Marche, the minister summoned his inner circle for a strategy meeting. At the time, it was widely assumed that Hollande would stand for re-election, and that Sarkozy or Juppé would be the Republican nominee. For ten minutes Macron outlined his baseline scenario for the rest of the year: Hollande, he judged, would not be able to run again, the party primaries would polarize the presidential nomination on the mainstream left and right, and this would open up an unusual space for him. ‘I thought that either he was a genius,’ said a person present, ‘or that he had been smoking something.’
As the campaign unfolded, nobody at headquarters in Paris had any doubt as to who was in charge. Macron had no real campaign director. In theory, the 32-year-old Jean-Marie Girier, who had worked on Hollande’s 2012 campaign, occupied the job. But his role was more organizational than strategic. For all that the grass-roots En Marche volunteers thought they were shaping this campaign from the ground up, the cajoling, the remonstrating, the setting of a strategic line ultimately came from Macron. The 39-year-old addressed his staff during the campaign as ‘les enfants’ (children); they called him le chef or le boss. He set the pace. Volunteers worked, unpaid, late into the night. Pinned to the wall behind the cramped kitchen sink at campaign HQ in Paris, next to a sign urging les helpers to wash up their dirty coffee cups, was a stern black-and-white photo of le boss, as if they needed a reminder. ‘Everyone is tired ... but nothing is guaranteed,’ Macron told his assembled team at campaign headquarters sternly, two weeks before the first round. ‘Everybody needs to know that for the next fortnight they can sleep or eat,’ he warned them, ‘but the rest of the time they do nothing but this.’18
His attention to detail verged on the obsessional. Should he wear the navy-blue suit? What was the plan if there were any empty seats at the next rally? He redrafted and corrected printouts of his speeches by hand with a felt-tip pen, and took handwritten notes at his own meetings, as he continues to do as president, even at summits of European heads of state and government in Brussels. ‘I have always been someone who wants to explore things down to the last detail so that I can understand them,’ he told Der Spiegel.19 It sounded suspiciously self-congratulatory. But I saw it one evening in the autumn of 2015, at a working dinner for entrepreneurs at the Finance Ministry hosted by Macron when he was in government. Blue felt pen and small sheets of paper in hand – to the amusement of the digital-native tech types present – he spent the evening moving from table to table, listening, jotting down notes, and asking guests how to make thing simpler for their start-ups to grow, invest and hire.
Surely there was dissent, or push back, against this hyper-personalized management style? Macron was ‘not afraid of debate or being contradicted’, claimed one aide. Ideas would be batted back and forth. In some ways he needed constant feedback. ‘Was it OK? Did I say anything stupid?’ he would ask after a television debate, or a public rally. ‘He is smart, and smart enough to know what he doesn’t know,’ François Heisbourg, the security analyst, told me. ‘He is a sponge, learns fast and remembers everything.’
Ultimately though, at En Marche HQ, as later at the Elysée Palace, all decisions were his, and Macron did not hesitate to take them. The campaign could not have worked without the backing of a citizens’ movement, but was in reality run by a very small team and their boss. ‘Macron has the charm of Obama, but unlike Obama he is decisive,’ said Heisbourg. ‘He takes decisions in his own time, and therefore benefits from a surprise effect, which can come across as very secretive. He absorbs things, mulls them over, thinks about it, doesn’t tell anybody. Then suddenly there’s a result.’ Philippe Besson, a French novelist who followed Macron during the campaign, made this observation: ‘he listens a lot, asks for comments, suggestions, yet he rarely deviates from his initial intent or his intuition.’20 In the end, ‘he decides alone’.
‘He constructed his campaign without looking for a second at what the others were doing,’ Benjamin Griveaux told me. ‘He said: “I know where I’m going. The others can do what they want, with the calendar they like and the diary they like. I know exactly where I want to go.”’ Surely he had doubts, uncertainties about his decisions, or his ability to get it right? His campaign team insists not. Perhaps it is that self-control again, that ability to keep his fears and fragilities deep inside. For those who were working with him, biting their nails at every dip in the polls, or hacking attempt, the only member of the team who seemed to believe it was possible all the way through, and stay focused, was Macron. When preliminary charges were brought against Fillon during the campaign, recalled Griveaux, ‘We were the ones to say: if Fillon is no longer the candidate, we’ll have to change things.’ Macron disagreed. ‘He said: Fillon will go all the way and told us just to keep concentrating on what we were doing.’ Such inner drive resembles the psychology of a professional sportsman, a point made by Macron’s tennis coach, Patrice Kuchna. Once himself ranked 125th in the world, Kuchna said that his pupil has a ‘rare’ mental solidity in his game, describing the player as ‘hyper-determined, rigorous and disciplined’. Kuchna coached Macron at the club in Le Touquet, even squeezing in a quick session on the eve of the second round of the presidential election, when the candidate crept out of his house via the back garden to avoid the paparazzi, climbing over a neighbour’s wall to join his coach on the nearby courts.
Inevitably, this single-mindedness also had its casualties. Macron had no qualms about forging political alliances when they suited him, and dropping them when they did not. As candidate, Macron happily took on board François Bayrou when he needed him; and, as president, readily let him go when a preliminary inquiry was opened into the misuse of public funds by Bayrou’s party at the European Parliament. Macron showed little mercy towards Manuel Valls, refusing to let him stand as a legislative candidate for En Marche – although he did not field a rival candidate against the former prime minister in his constituency, and he was able to keep his seat. Some of those who worked closely with Macron on the campaign were then passed over for jobs in government, and technocrats were preferred to economists for top posts at the Elysée Palace. ‘Macron has an instrumental approach towards people,’ one campaign adviser told me. ‘Does he use people? Yes,’ said another former aide who failed to get a job after the election. ‘But it’s part of the game. He’s ruthless when he needs to be.’
As much as En Marche was built up from the ground, the presidential campaign of 2017 was in the end hyper-personalized, and centred on Macron himself. And this worked because of the way the candidate exploited the constitution of the Fifth Republic. De Gaulle devised an unusually strong presidency, and introduced direct elections to it four years later, precisely in order to remove power from the hands of political parties, which he blamed for the ‘disastrous’ manoeuvrings of the unstable Fourth Republic. A directly elected president would – like le général – embody the nation, and rise grandly above the grubby business of party politics. The French presidential election would therefore act as a ‘meeting between a man and a people’. Over the previous decade, the introduction of primaries had added a filter not foreseen by the constitution, the party machine. Macron’s gambit was that the visibility such primaries gave to political parties masked an opportunity, written into de Gaulle’s original version: the direct unfiltered link between a leader and his fellow citizens. ‘The Fifth Republic constitution was open to this sort of adventure,’ said Sylvain Fort. ‘It offers the possibility of winning everything in one go.’21 Macron’s was a political assault on political parties based on a return to the original source of legitimacy of a modern French president, introduced by de Gaulle after a referendum in 1962: the direct mandate of the people. In the end, Macron toppled the party system, but reinforced its institutions.
The danger of this strategy of hyper-presidentialization, of course, was that it would personalize the campaign to narcissistic excess. In an astonishing interview with Le 1 newspaper in 2015, Macron had argued that the French had never really wanted to kill their king. At a time when he was still the economy minister, better known for discussing bond yields and market deregulation, Macron spoke of the ‘emptiness’ at the heart of the French Republic caused by the ‘absence of the king’. The post-revolutionary Terror, he suggested, had created an ‘emotional, imaginary collective void’, which the French had tried to fill over the centuries with other monarchical figures (Napoleon, de Gaulle).22 It was a presumptuous analysis for a sitting politician who might have harboured presidential ambitions of his own. Macron went on to alarm those who suspected him of grandiosity by developing the idea of a ‘Jupiterian’ presidency, in an interview with Challenges in the autumn of 2016. France’s highest office of state, he suggested, like the Roman king of the gods, should be invested with a certain aura.23 The concept of a ‘normal’ presidency, he argued, in a thinly disguised dig at Hollande, ‘destabilized’ the French, and made them feel insecure and leaderless. The French presidency was not merely an executive authority, he judged, but an embodiment of the nation, and so any pretender to the office had to believe he was in some way special. It was the form of charismatic authority that Max Weber identified: a leader ‘treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities’.24 ‘Politics,’ said Macron, ‘is mystical.’25
At times during the campaign, the boy from the school called La Providence seemed to believe not just in the mysticism of politics, but in his own special powers. After a long speech at his first big rally as candidate, in a hangar-like conference centre on the southern edge of Paris in December 2016, Macron lost it. He began to yell, his voice became strained, and he flung his arms out wide in a Christ-like pose, face up and eyes shut. It was a moment of pretentious absurdity. Watching it on television later, he exclaimed: ‘Shit, I look like a madman.’26 Throughout the campaign Macron seemed to tread a perilous line between a desire to cloak himself in a sense of mystique and a risk of appearing preposterously self-aggrandizing. A month after launching En Marche he made a trip to Orléans, to pay tribute to Joan of Arc, the fifteenth-century folk heroine and symbol of French redemption. For years the National Front had monopolized her memory, and Macron, keen to embrace France’s pre-republican history, sought to reclaim her. His speech that day, though, steered treacherously close to the ridiculous, with its parallel to his own missionary ambitions. ‘Joan was a nobody. But she carried on her shoulders the will to progress and justice of an entire people. She was a crazy dream,’ Macron declared. ‘But she ended up imposing herself as something obvious.’
Such moments were a caricaturist’s dream during the campaign. Plantu, Le Monde’s front-page cartoonist, depicted the candidate as a smug little Messiah. Macron was much mocked for his haughty manner, fuelled by his background as an investment banker, as well as an unfortunate history of making dismissive comments that caused offence. This made him an easy object of ridicule for his political opponents, who sought to underline his remoteness and disdain. At one point a fake video circulated on social media suggesting that Macron used a wet wipe after shaking workers’ hands (the hand-wiping moment was in fact captured after he had been out on a small boat fishing for eel). The most sombre manifestation of this attempt to portray him as the arrogant banker was a caricature published during the campaign by the Republicans on Twitter, which depicted Macron as a hook-nosed, top-hatted banker. The echo of the anti-Semitic imagery of the 1930s was as crude as it was abject. The party retracted it.
Was Macron really as haughty towards ordinary people as he was portrayed? Three months after the launch of En Marche, in June 2016, I went to watch him in action at a shopping centre in the Saint-Lazare railway station, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. This is not just a place for the pin-striped crowd. Commuter trains arrive here from the banlieues of north-west and western Paris, transporting 360,000 passengers in and out of the capital every day, most of them employees in services, offices and shops. To the surprise of passers-by in the station’s indoor commercial centre, in walked Macron on the first day of the sales, past a children’s clothing shop and cosmetic store, a small cluster of aides and television cameras trotting along behind him. Outside a lingerie shop, the minister hesitated. It was not on the schedule. But the store manager had spotted him, and insisted. So Macron found himself greeting astonished shoppers as they leafed through piles of underwear and lace-trimmed bras. By the time he made it out, a crowd had gathered, some eager for selfies, others for a chance to unload their discontent. He lingered and listened. ‘It’s rare to see a minister stop to talk to people like us,’ said one astonished woman.
The first thing I noticed that morning was how tactile Macron is with strangers. He not only offers his right hand, but swiftly follows it with his left in a two-hand embrace. Then there is his willingness to engage with his critics, as if he has all the time in the world. This is not common with government ministers, most of whom pause for selfies, and move on. Macron stopped, listened, and argued his case. One woman stepped up to offload her grievances. ‘It’s not right that we work, and find it harder at the end of the month than those who don’t,’ she told him. ‘We have to pay for school lunches, when the ones who don’t work don’t.’ A young man of African origin wanted Macron to know how hard it was to get credit on a temporary work contract. ‘That’s why we need to make permanent contracts more fluid,’ the minister ventured. ‘Then they will hire people on permanent contracts.’ One young man who stopped to listen to the minister told me that Macron was ‘a fighter. He knows what he wants, and he wants to make a difference.’ A woman who fell into conversation with him apologized that she had to go, or would be late for work. ‘Tell them it’s because of me!’ Macron advised her. By 9.50 a.m., after more than an hour, his aides became agitated. He was due in a cabinet meeting at the Elysée at 10 a.m. But the minister showed no sign of wanting to leave. He posed for a few more selfies, and found more hands to shake on his way towards the street. At 9.55 a.m. he slid into his car, winked through the half-open window, and was off.
The political class in Paris continued, by and large, to dismiss Macron as aloof and out of touch, or to underestimate his chances. ‘You aren’t really old enough,’ Bayrou told him in a smart Paris restaurant, even as the pair met during the campaign to draw up an alliance. Yet the long queues that formed in the streets ahead of his public rallies came over the weeks to define the insurgent campaign. Other candidates had to bus in supporters in coaches. Voters turned up by themselves to see the En Marche candidate: in Quimper in Brittany, in Lille in the north, in Albi in the south-west. They hadn’t just come to support En Marche but to see Macron himself. At the time, I made a note to ask people at his rallies what they made of the candidate’s programme (he hadn’t got one). Policies didn’t seem to be the point. At a rally in the Mediterranean port of Toulon, I came across Jean-Luc, a lycée maths teacher, who told me that he had never been to a political rally before, but was drawn to the sense of ‘renewal, youth, and new generation’ about Macron. The candidate’s appeal, he said, ‘is more the personality than the programme’. Also at the rally was Robert, a retired salesman who lived in a village in the hills of Provence; he had driven down to the port city specially to see Macron. ‘He represents a different way of doing politics,’ he told me, ‘and it’s time for politics in this country to change.’
Watching Macron hold his nerve throughout the campaign, I found myself often wondering what lay behind this polished, focused exterior. When the novelist Emmanuel Carrère asked him, once he was in the presidency, to identify a flaw in his character, Macron put it this way: ‘I’m claustrophobic about life. I can’t stand being shut in, I have to get out, that’s why I can’t have a normal life. Deep down, my flaw is no doubt that I don’t love normal life.’ Which was an interesting answer, because in Macron’s case this is not really a flaw at all. A yearning to break out, head somewhere else and do things differently makes him sound like a wayward, tortured artist. Yet Macron seems to know exactly what he is doing, and where he is going. If he seeks a life that is not normal, it is because he seems to have the unfathomable self-belief and conviction that it will be a great one. ‘He has always been different, and that difference he has always accepted. He lives with it,’ said Antoine Marguet, the fellow pupil from Amiens. ‘And this accepting of his difference, I think, could help him in the completely mad, completely hysterical, office which is the French presidency ... He will be armed, as few presidents are, to live something that is, I would say, an ordeal. That is perhaps what François Hollande didn’t understand.’27
Indeed, by the end of the campaign, Macron the technocrat, the calculating banker, the man of uncommon self-control, came to offer a personal as well as a political narrative. This was a parallel story of triumph over adversity, centred on something he talks about only with reluctance: his unconventional marriage. Just as he and Brigitte Auzière had endured the social scandal among the Amiens bourgeoisie for many years before their marriage, so his public office made their marriage the subject of perpetual fascination and disbelief. Was it really possible to be married out of love to a woman 24 years older? ‘But you know he’s really gay,’ people would say for months in Paris, long before the campaign started. Rumours were spread, and retold. I was myself the subject of several attempts by a French financier to persuade me that it was true, and proof of his duplicity. Yet Macron seemed to have armed himself against all such attacks. The couple had lived with the crushing force of bourgeois social censure, and deep family disapproval, for years. ‘We’ve had our share of adversity,’ Brigitte Macron told Emmanuel Carrère. ‘To live a love like ours, we’ve had to harden ourselves against malicious remarks, mockery and gossip.’28
At one point during the campaign, rumours that Macron’s marriage was a cover for a secret gay life became insistent. His press attaché, Sibeth Ndiaye, told him that even her Afro hair stylist had told her Macron could never become president because he was gay. The candidate decided to punch back, puncturing the gossip with humour. At the time, the tech-savvy Jean-Luc Mélenchon was beaming a live hologram-like image of himself into remote meeting halls as a way of holding simultaneous rallies in different places. Before a gathering of En Marche activists in Paris, Macron took to the stage and joked that, if he was leading a double life, it was because his ‘hologram has suddenly escaped’. The rumours were odious on two counts, he told TÊTU, a gay magazine: the homophobia behind the assumption that a gay man could not be elected president, and the misogyny underlying the idea that a man who lives with a woman 24 years older than him could only be ‘either gay or a closet gigolo’. Macron paused, and then added: ‘I’ve lived this from the start ... I know how heavy the looks of others can feel.’ Carrère followed the president and his wife for a week during his first year in office and described how ‘Their eyes seek each other out, find each other’. It was obvious to him ‘that you can’t fake this sort of thing – not for that long, not all the time’.
Macron accepted that he had to put his private life on display during the campaign. Photographs of him and Brigitte were splashed on numerous front covers of Paris Match magazine, whose well-leafed copies lie about in doctors’ waiting rooms and hairdressers across the country. It was part of the political game, and Macron embraced it with transactional sangfroid when he had to, recruiting a celebrity agent to control the sale of photographs, and commenting dryly that ‘I sell. Like washing powder. Nothing more.’29 That comment seemed to capture something important about Macron. Behind the earnest demeanour and private charm, he can be calculating and cynical when he needs to be. But Macron does not dwell on his relationship with his wife unless pushed. In the first draft of his book, Révolution, he scarcely mentioned her, or his family. Macron ‘suffered’, said Philippe Besson, who read an earlier draft, when he agreed to revise the manuscript in order to inject some personal detail and a modicum of emotion.
In reality, the period of ten years leading up to the Macrons’ marriage in 2007 is little chronicled. So is the couple’s choice not to have any biological children of their own, a risk that Macron’s mother raised angrily with Brigitte Auzière after learning of their liaison: ‘You don’t realize,’ she told Brigitte, ‘you already have your life; he won’t have children.’ During a 2017 campaign visit to a primary school, a pupil asked Macron whether he missed being a father. He replied calmly that it was a ‘choice’ they had made, to focus on bringing up Brigitte’s three children, and that lots of families look different these days. After Macron left Amiens to study in Paris, commuting up to Amiens or Le Touquet at the weekend, Brigitte Auzière was extracting herself from her marriage to André-Louis. ‘I know that I hurt my children, and that’s the thing I most reproach myself for,’ she told ELLE magazine. That time is now behind them. But the experience seems to have hardened an outer shell, which seldom cracks. During the election campaign, there was a rare moment when Macron let his heart speak. It was his reply to a cruel sideswipe by Jean-Marie Le Pen, who had declared that Macron could not claim to talk about the future because he had no children of his own. ‘Monsieur Le Pen,’ Macron replied serenely, speaking onstage at a rally, ‘I have children and grandchildren of the heart.’
For many French women, his relationship even seemed to serve as an antidote to the patriarchal social and political codes that had long made it acceptable for male French politicians to be accompanied by women half their age, but not the other way round. Brigitte became a sort of ‘heroine for feminists’, suggested Pascal Bruckner, a French writer, a ‘symbol of the revenge of the cougars’.30 Provincial not parisienne, bourgeois yet anti-conformist, with an undisguised taste for luxury brands, Brigitte Macron was a different sort of modern French woman. ‘Of course, we have breakfast together, me with my wrinkles, him with his fresh face, but that’s how it is,’ she joked. ‘She gives him an unfiltered view, a total liberty of expression,’ an aide told me. Their relationship, wrote the novelist Philippe Besson, was constructed against hostility, and in solitude: ‘Having triumphed in such an adventure ... they have become invincible,’ he wrote, ‘armed with a force that those who have known only facility and comfort can neither imagine nor comprehend.’
If fortune favoured the schoolboy from La Providence, Macron’s path to the presidency was also forged by the risks he took, as well as his ability to stay the course and withstand the violence of public electoral life. The campaign revealed a sangfroid that few had understood. Two years in the shadow of Hollande had taught Macron about the workings, and failings, of the presidency. Two years in government offered him lessons about the brutality and humiliations of politics. A transgressive personality, an insolent ambition, a calculating visionary mind – and a big splash of luck – propelled Macron to the highest office. Macron accepted his ‘dose of narcissism’ in embarking on this adventure. But at some level he seemed to live the campaign as an obligation, part of a mission. ‘This campaign has transformed me,’ he commented, while on a final election stop in the south-west. ‘I have picked up the anger, the bitterness and the immense expectations of the country. I have the inner feeling that, faced with nihilism and moral collapse, we need to restore the efficiency of public action. We’re on the edge of the precipice.’31 Having conquered the highest office, Macron’s task in power would be to pull France back from the brink.