6

MACRONISM

‘France is an intellectual country ... This isn’t Texas.’

Adviser to President Macron, November 2017

Decrypting Macronese is a high art. Like sinologists after the nineteenth National Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 2017 decoding Xi Jinping’s ‘Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’, French commentators sit down after a long and often convoluted speech by President Macron to try to work out what he really means. What is his guiding ideology? What is his thinking all about?

Perhaps the best place to start is his phrase of choice: en même temps (‘at the same time’). As candidate, Macron was much mocked for this rhetorical habit. It crops up in prepared speeches at rallies, or in spontaneous conversation. No Macronian sentence, it seems, can start with one point without swinging to another halfway through, thanks to this lexical hinge. During the campaign, Macron managed to pull off the unusual political feat of acting as his own contradictor. Every idea could be objected to, and he managed to voice both sides of an argument in a single breath, anticipating rebuttal before it was articulated. After a while, when he uttered the phrase, the crease of a smile would emerge at the corner of his mouth as he recognized the habit. It reflected, say his detractors, a ‘culture of ambiguity, a rhetorical strategy ... a concern to avoid deciding in order not to displease anybody’.¹ Macronese seemed to be about evasive ambiguity, or an inability to make up his mind, which left listeners perplexed and opponents delighted. Macron – said Benoît Hamon, the Socialist Party’s presidential candidate during the campaign – is ‘du bla bla bla’.

Macron’s politics are on the left, and at the same time on the right. He is in favour of reducing public spending, and, at the same time, he promotes a big public investment programme. He supports free trade and globalization, and at the same time seeks to ‘protect’ Europe and its citizens from competition. He has called the wearing of the ‘burkini’, the body-covering swimsuit that stirred up a furious debate in France over religious freedom, ‘a problem’, and at the same time is against banning it. When I watched him give a speech in Toulon, a naval port on the Mediterranean coast, Macron used the phrase en même temps 29 times. At another rally in Paris, his own supporters began to chant the phrase, turning it into a chorus of approval. It made Macron the object of merciless satire. The opening lines of one YouTube parody, a mash-up of clips of him speaking, went: ‘On the left, on the right, but at the same time/Before you, behind you, but at the same time/In the middle, then on the left, and on the other hand/Yes, no, but at the same time.’

Ideal in an era of soundbites for partial quotation for political ends, it was also a habit that got him into trouble. During the election campaign, after Macron declared in a speech in Lyon that ‘there is no French culture’, the bien-pensant left and nationalist right rose up in unison, aghast. ‘Far too hard to defend Molière, Victor Hugo, Proust,’ sniffed François Fillon. ‘Far easier to mix up all cultures in a melting pot of French identity.’ Macron had in fact gone on in the same phrase to state that, at the same time, ‘there is a culture in France, and it is diverse’. He was not belittling French literary greats, he later explained, and the French ‘should be proud of their heritage’, but he was ‘against a conception of culture as an identity that excludes’.² Few bothered to listen to his sentence to the end. Macron’s rhetorical reflex was also a gift to those who traded on simplistic binary messages. Those on the political fringes seemed to know what they wanted. For Marine Le Pen, it was ‘no to Brussels; yes to France’. For Mélenchon, ‘quit NATO; end “war” on Russia’. During a televised debate in 2017 among all 11 official presidential candidates, Macron interjected at one stage: ‘I agree with you on that last point.’ As Le Pen let out a howl of laughter, François Asselineau, a Eurosceptic candidate, shot back at Macron, ‘Yes, you always agree with everybody.’

What is behind this verbal twitch? To say that Macron embodies contradictions is not quite good enough. A closer look at his accumulated public writings, speeches and interviews over the years, which reach back to 2000, suggests a structure to Macron’s way of thinking, and a logic behind it. Jacques Delpla, the economist at the Toulouse School of Economics who served with Macron on the Attali Commission, told me that the key to understanding Macron is to know that ‘he doesn’t come to politics through the structures of power, but through ideas’.³ And not humdrum ideas. Macron turned to politics from philosophical thought, and to political philosophy from metaphysics. This background is crucial to making sense of the way he conceives public policy and political action. ‘Macron has an intellectual framework that is out of the ordinary,’ Pascal Lamy, the former head of the World Trade Organization, told me. ‘He has a philosophical foundation that is very stable, and very thought-through.’⁴

The main early intellectual influence on Macron was Paul Ricoeur, the French philosopher, whom he met while studying philosophy at the University of Nanterre. The young student’s decision to enrol for this degree, in parallel with his studies at Sciences Po, was unusual for a French high-flyer, above all one who was preparing to take the entrance exam to ENA, which trains the future administrative elite. Macron chose to combine his time among the cafés and bookstores of the Paris left bank, around the Sciences Po site on the rue Saint-Guillaume, with trips on the distinctly unglamorous RER suburban railway out to Nanterre. A block-like concrete campus beside the railway tracks in an unfashionable district west of Paris, Nanterre was the birthplace of the 1968 student rebellion, before it spread to the Sorbonne. Ricoeur had been a member of the philosophy faculty during the May uprising, ignominiously ending up later with a rubbish bin on his head. (This was the anecdote Macron tried to tell his baffled supporters at a campaign rally.) At a time when Marxism and structuralism were the defining currents of French academic thought in the social-science departments of university campuses, Ricoeur was against philosophical dogmatism, arguing that it was necessary to ‘grant equal rights to rival interpretations’, and that philosophical thought rested on the uncomfortable contemplation of these. ‘He is the exponent of the “both-and”, and the opponent of the “either-or”. Thus he finds instruction not only in both Kant and Hegel but also in both Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Benedict de Spinoza, and Karl Marx and Freud,’ wrote Bernard Dauenhauer, a Ricoeurian scholar. ‘In short, in all his works, Ricoeur looks for “connectors to think together two antinomic poles”.’⁵ This is pure Macron. The president’s syntax and approach to public policy, argues François Dosse, a French historian, can be traced directly back to Ricoeur.⁶

When Macron first met the French philosopher, the young student had been flirting with the political ideas of Jean-Pierre Chevènement, a maverick left-wing nationalist who had broken away from the Socialist Party.⁷ Macron had chosen to write a master’s thesis on Hegel and the public interest, as well as a dissertation on ‘Political Fact and Machiavelli’s Representation of History’, and was following a class taught at Nanterre by the Marxist philosopher Etienne Balibar. Ricoeur, Macron said, ‘re-educated me’.⁸ A social democrat, with a gentle courteous manner and proclaimed Protestant faith, Ricoeur was linked to a group of thinkers seeking to define a middle way between liberalism and Marxism, and was close to Michel Rocard, a moderate centre-left Socialist former prime minister. From Ricoeur’s philosophical thought Macron absorbed a conviction that society should work collectively towards ‘the common good’ as well as, crucially, a belief in the constant need to confront ideas with reality, and to create a permanent tension between competing ideas themselves.

Fully 64 years separated the pair, and they formed an unlikely bond, Ricoeur becoming for the young student the first of many mentors who were decades older than himself. Ricoeur took on Macron as an editorial assistant for his work, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, on the recommendation of François Dosse, who had the young student in his class at Sciences Po.⁹ Macron spent long hours with the philosophy professor, travelling out on the train to his home in an intellectual community in Châtenay-Malabry, in the southern suburbs of Paris, helping to check his references and notes, and offering annotated thoughts to the great master. Macron was a prodigious, and presumptuous, supplier of advice. Some of the notes he made on Ricoeur’s manuscript, unearthed in the archives by Le Monde, betray an astounding self-confidence, given Macron’s tender age and his own confession that he was ‘completely incompetent’ to offer such advice.¹⁰ ‘Define more precisely the concept of chronosophy’, read one of Macron’s notes.¹¹ ‘Re-do’, reads another injunction. ‘Specify from the start that you are presenting hypotheses.’

Ricoeur’s politics may in reality have been more radical than Macron’s, but he helped to shape both the young student’s thinking and, later, his decision to go into politics. The French philosopher, Macron told Le 1 in July 2015, taught him that ‘any element thrown into public debate can be critiqued’, and that the discipline of political philosophy involved a perpetual re-examination of theory in the light of experience, inflicting a necessary intellectual discomfort. Ricoeur’s life work, Macron said, was ‘the alternative path of 1968’: a refusal to retreat into dogma and certainty, a responsibility to confront ideas with practice, and an acceptance of the intellectual instability that this implied.¹² Ideology, argued Macron, was ‘a work of translation’ between philosophy and politics: ‘it is never perfect’, and always subject to improvement and adjustment. Ricoeur, who had spent five years in Nazi detention camps and also shaped the young Macron’s thinking about history and memory, trained him to think ‘in a constant back-and-forth between theory and reality ... It is in this permanent but fertile disequilibrium that thought can be built and political transformation can be carried out.’¹³

As much as he admired Ricoeur’s mind, Macron knew that he did not have the temperament to stay in academia. ‘I didn’t want to have the same sort of life as him,’ he said. A university career ‘lacked a form of action, of participation in public action’.¹⁴ Macron knew that he did not have the patience to spend his life as an academic, like Ricoeur, but wanted to roll up his sleeves and do things. It was Ricoeur, he told Le 1, who ultimately ‘pushed me into politics because he hadn’t done so himself’. Macron as policymaker picked up where Ricoeur as a political philosopher left off. Well before he went into politics, Macron began to think about the nature of political action, shaped by Ricoeur’s scholarship. ‘Contemporary political action requires permanent deliberation ... which enables decisions to be adjusted, reoriented, adapted to reality,’ Macron argued in an article in 2012, while still at Rothschild’s bank.¹⁵

Is it possible that, behind the opaque abstractions of Macronese, what passes for ambiguity is in fact a political translation of Ricoeurian philosophical thought? ‘To want at once to liberate work and to protect the most precarious, this manner of introducing a sustained tension between two apparently incompatible formulations, is really very ricoeurien,’ said Olivier Abel, professor of philosophy and ethics at the Protestant Institute of Theology in Montpellier.¹⁶ Put in this context, some of the policies that Macron advocates may be less an exercise in evasiveness, or the quest for a woolly consensus, than a pragmatic attempt to put ideas into place within the constraints imposed on public policy. In a telling comparison, Macron once contrasted the job of the politician with that of the novelist. An author, he said, has to stop at some point, however imperfect the literary work. But ‘in political life, dissatisfaction is remedied, or at least fought, through action,’ he said. ‘For as long as you are not totally satisfied, you remain active and keep going.’¹⁷

Could Macron’s quest to reconcile apparently contradictory forces help make sense of what sometimes appears to be an ambiguous approach to fundamental policy issues: the trade-off between liberalism and regulation, between markets and protection? Might it, in a delightfully intellectual French way, help to explain the contradictions in his abstract formulations? Macron argued fervently during the campaign that he could not stop the forces of globalization, and that any politician who promised to do so was dishonest. Yet, once elected, those fellow Europeans who had concluded that he was a pure market liberal discovered to their consternation his insistence on a ‘Europe that protects’. Maybe, some Northern Europeans wondered, the new French president was not as liberal as he professed to be.

To understand Macron’s approach, it is perhaps more helpful to see it as an attempt to find a policy structure that serves apparently competing objectives, rather than as the expression of an ideology. It is a mistake, for instance, to try to cast Macron as a pure liberal in the English-speaking economic tradition, which the French call ‘Anglo-Saxon’. When I asked him once whether he defined himself as liberal, he replied that he was ‘liberal in a Nordic sense’. In Macron’s book, he put it this way: ‘If by liberalism one means confidence in mankind, I accept being categorized as liberal.’¹⁸ That Macron calls himself a liberal at all is courageous in France. Jacques Chirac once described liberalism as a greater threat to Europe than communism. Ségolène Royal, the defeated Socialist presidential candidate, declared that ‘to be liberal and socialist is totally incompatible’. In France, a state before it was a nation, l’Etat is dignified by capital letter and a special place in the collective imagination. The great French theorists of liberal thought, among them Jean-Baptiste Say, Frédéric Bastiat or Benjamin Constant, have been marginalized in the French mind by a history of ‘permanent interventionism’ that reaches from pre-revolutionary to republican France.¹⁹ Over the past two decades, the ultimate political insult in France, and optimum way to shut down an argument, has been to label somebody not just liberal but ultra-libéral. When Alain Madelin ran for the French presidency as a liberal in 2002, he scored 3.9 per cent. Nobody tried again.

Macron may defend globalization and an open trading regime, but he is not an advocate for unbridled laissez-faire. Mathieu Laine, the liberal analyst, put it this way: ‘he is not the product of a liberal intellectual tradition. His roots are on the progressive centre-left that reconciled itself to the market economy.’²⁰ Macron is above all the intellectual inheritor of a social-democratic tradition, said Laine, whose ideas were then ‘rubbed up against the reality of the world of business’ during his time as a banker, as well as ‘a deep understanding of the coming economic transformation’, lending them a pragmatic social-liberal flavour. The president’s starting point is not liberalism as an ideology, but a mix of rationalist Enlightenment belief about the perfectibility of man and the need to liberate individual capacities along with raw empirical observation. During his campaign, Macron insisted repeatedly on the need to ‘liberate energies’ and ‘give individuals the tools to succeed’. As Laurent Bigorgne and his co-authors point out, his belief in the capacity of individuals to ‘realize their talents’ and ‘choose their lives’ carries a distinct echo of Ricoeur’s concept of the ‘capable man’.²¹

This thinking also borrows much from Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, and his work on empowerment. He conceived of anti-poverty policy in terms of improving an individual’s ‘capabilities’ to realize his full potential.²² Macron acknowledges that his reading of Sen ‘structured a lot of my thinking on social justice’.²³ His desire to put liberty back into the equation when devising social policy in France, which on the left has long been dominated by the quest for equal outcomes, is at the heart of this philosophy. In this, Macron also draws on the work on social justice by the American philosopher John Rawls, as well as Ronald Dworkin, who are relatively little studied in France but both of whom he has listened to in public lectures and found ‘very inspiring’.²⁴ Already, as a student at Sciences Po, Macron was drawn to a form of social-democratic thinking that was based on individual rights, ‘not just the infinite extension of collective rights’, said Marc Ferracci.²⁵ Macron refutes the view that liberty and equality are incompatible. It is egalitarianism, not equality of opportunity, that he rejects. ‘Our duty,’ declared Macron in his speech to a joint sitting of the two houses of parliament in Versailles, ‘is to emancipate our citizens.’²⁶

At the same time, as it were, Macron watched what had happened to France over two decades, and drew his own pragmatic conclusions. If high taxes and high spending were the answer to poverty and joblessness, then France would have eliminated both (which it hasn’t). If workable ideas could be borrowed from the right, there was no ideological reason to reject them (so he didn’t). ‘My predecessor taxed wealthy, successful people at a higher rate than ever before. And what happened? They left. And what came of it? Did unemployment drop? No.’²⁷ ‘For a century and a half, the left and the right in France have tried to apply an ideology to reality,’ Benjamin Griveaux, a co-founder of En Marche, told me. ‘Our approach was the exact opposite. In our intellectual method, we were not very Socratic and more Anglo-Saxon, more pragmatic.’²⁸ It is in this sense that Macron’s no-taboos approach to policy in France is radical.

Traditionally, the state has applied home-grown theory taught to successive cadres of mandarins. Macron’s method is pragmatic, his inspiration eclectic. And his technique required a clear-out of old-school politicians, reminiscent of the call by the nineteenth-century political theorist Saint-Simon. Indeed, there is very much something of a Saint-Simonian about Macron, in his faith in technical competence and meritocracy, as well as his determination to sweep aside the class of rent-seeking career politicians and replace them with technocrats. In office, he put technical experts in government, among them Jean-Michel Blanquer (education) and Dr Agnès Buzyn (health), and has surrounded himself with technocrats at the Elysée, the nerve centre of his highly centralised administration, under the tight grip of his chief of staff and old ally, Alexis Kohler. Macron’s problem-solving approach to policy is both top-down and non-ideological. His quest to transcend the political divide between left and right, in other words, is also built on a Saint-Simonian belief in applying rational, scientific analysis to problems. ‘We need a state that says: I’m not going to lead your life for you, I’m not there to replace what you do,’ Macron told me in July 2017. ‘Some will do well, others less so. But I will protect you from the great accidents of life and I will help give you the capacity to succeed.’ His project is about the possibility of individual emancipation, backed by the protection offered by the state.

‘I believe in the market economy, the open world,’ Macron told me in the same interview. ‘But we need to rethink regulation so as to deal with the excesses of global capitalism.’²⁹ Rightly or wrongly, he judges such excesses to be behind Britain’s vote for Brexit in June 2016. Voters, he argues, need to feel that they are not out there alone faced with the threat of machines or open borders. Otherwise they will gravitate to the likes of Le Pen in France, or Trump in America. What Macron seeks instead is an alternative, benign way for the state to offer reassurance: a framework of protection that breeds the confidence people need in order to feel that they can accept or adapt to change. Only then, he judges, will they accept the rules of competition and liberalization. ‘He believes that if you want to keep a society open, you have to protect it,’ one of his advisers said. Unless governments can provide a framework of protection for their citizens, along with opportunities within it, Macron argues, political extremism will win the day.

To Anglo-Saxon ears, this mix of market economics and social protection carries distinct echoes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. When I asked Macron about this, he dismissed the idea that Third Way politics or New Labour were an influence, let alone a model.³⁰ He has read Anthony Giddens, and has known Peter Mandelson and Alastair Campbell for a number of years, though he has met Blair only a few times. Macron sees the Third Way, rather, as a political response to a particular moment in British history, and the rejection of neo-liberalism after the Thatcher years. ‘The Third Way, as conceived by Giddens, was justified in a country that emerged from 20 years of Thatcherism and that was hyper market-friendly,’ Macron told me. ‘France’s challenge is different: one of an over-dominant state that needs to become more efficient, and to prevent rather than cure.’³¹ In this sense, Macron insists, his ambition is very different in its philosophy. If anything, his model, as laid out in a speech at Davos in 2018, leans towards more protection and state control. The Third Way, Macron told me, ‘revealed its limits in the absence of, or weak, regulation of the market’. His university friend Marc Ferracci put it bluntly during the 2017 campaign: ‘Blair has never been a particular object of fascination for him.’

Certainly, Macron’s grandiose presidential style is a world away from the call-me-Tony, shirt-sleeves manner of Blair’s early prime ministership. Macron does not do Blair-style speechifying, with homespun anecdotes and sentences without verbs. He never sought to win power by reforming a party from within, nor to define his politics in relation to the left and the right. Perhaps Macron is also keen not to associate himself with the toxic politician that Blair, post-Iraq, became. Yet Blair and Gerhard Schröder, who developed his own version of the Neue Mitte, were in office while Macron and his friend Ferracci were students, and there was much discussion at the time about the new moderate form of social democracy that they represented. Back in 1989, Giddens identified Europe, global warming and regional devolution as matters about which it was unhelpful to think in terms of left and right, just as Macron finds it unhelpful today.³² Third Way talk about rights and responsibilities, pragmatism and flexibility, and the redefining of opportunity in terms of skills and innovation, share a lot with the way Macron frames contemporary French public policy. It is hard not to be struck by the intellectual convergence between Macron’s approach and, if not Blair’s, then at least that of Gordon Brown, his successor as prime minister, and his particular focus on early education. When Brown in 2008 addressed the Labour Party conference and argued that ‘the modern role of government is not to provide everything, but it must be to enable everyone’, or when he called for ‘a settlement where both markets and government are seen to be the servants of the people, and never their masters’, the similarities cry out. It is interesting to note that Gordon Brown remains to this day close to Amartya Sen, the Indian economist, whose influence Macron readily acknowledges.

The underlying political reference points that Macron does acknowledge are, rather, what is known in France as the deuxième gauche, or the second left. This is a current of thought traced back notably to Michel Rocard, the chain-smoking, thrice-married, Protestant prime minister under President François Mitterrand between 1988 and 1991. Rocard’s ambition to create a moderate centre-left set him for years on a collision course with Mitterrand, who was wedded to more of an anti-capitalist doctrine, and allied the Socialists to the Communist Party with his programme commun, a joint programme signed back in 1972. Rocard rejected the economic nationalization espoused by Mitterrand, and struggled for years against his party’s Marxist-leaning wing, advocating instead a pragmatic centre-left based on a mix of market economics and efficient public services. The cynical, sphinx-like Mitterrand won that battle, becoming president twice and in the process sinking Rocard, who said that he was kicked out of the Hotel Matignon ‘like a domestic servant’.

Rocard’s minority current within the French left survived such indignities. The tall, bearded Edouard Philippe, a writer of political thrillers whom Macron made his prime minister, was once a young disciple of Rocard’s, before Philippe moved to the centre-right. So was Macron, more than a decade after Rocard left the prime minister’s office. ‘Michel Rocard, like Mendès-France, thought about justice and social progress in a way that did not exclude liberty. That was the absolute error made by part of the French left, which thought about justice only in terms of equality,’ Griveaux told me.³³ Rocard’s free-thinking, disruptive approach to politics, his ability ‘to say that we should do things differently, think about the world differently’, said Griveaux, was a lasting influence on Macron. The former prime minister’s support for private enterprise and risk, and his interest in grass-roots politics, chime with Macron’s views today. So does Rocard’s approach to anti-poverty, which stressed investment in education rather than a narrow focus on redistribution. Indeed, Macron’s link to Rocard was one of friendship as well as admiration. They met shortly after Macron graduated from ENA, and Rocard was a guest at Macron’s wedding. When the former prime minister died in July 2016, Macron described him as ‘one of the great figures of the 20th century’. At a ceremony shortly after Rocard’s death to award the légion d’honneur to Bernard Spitz, a former adviser to Rocard, it was Macron who stood in for the former prime minister. Rocard’s efforts to remodel the centre-left, and overcome old ideological and partisan divides, Macron said, were a ‘precursor’ to what he dreamed of achieving. His description of Rocard as a ‘rare blend’ of statesman and ‘convinced, extremely free and committed’ politician sounded like a model for himself.

Yet Macron did what Rocard never did. The former prime minister was steeped in the history, iconography and traditions of the Socialist Party, a movement originally founded by Jean Jaurès, as the French Section of the Workers’ International (SFIO), in 1905. Macron, by contrast, was utterly unsentimental about the party. He had no tribal attachment to it. He became a card-carrying member only briefly, and soon let his membership lapse. Although many of his young team of advisers came from the Strauss-Kahn wing of the Socialist Party, Macron had no political base there, few allies in the parliamentary party, and almost none out in the powerful regional federations. Had he wanted to mount a bid for the Socialist presidential nomination in 2017, he would have found few friends, and many ready to block his way. Macron’s ambition, unlike Rocard’s, was not to reinvent the left: it was to render the old division between left and right redundant. He turned his back on a Socialist Party that always considered him a maverick, and in doing so pretty much destroyed it.

Between Ricoeur and Rocard, philosophical reflection and pragmatic reaction, Macron has no political qualms about admitting to complexity and contradiction. Some people ‘like their ideas in boxes, neatly organized’, Macron told a packed rally in eastern Paris, during one of his last campaign speeches in 2017. ‘Well I want to tell you this evening that I will continue to use “at the same time” in my sentences, but also in my thinking. Because “at the same time” simply means that one takes into account imperatives that appear opposite but the reconciliation of which is essential to the good functioning of society.’³⁴ The crowd began to chant ‘at the same time! at the same time!’ ‘Apparently it’s a verbal tic,’ Macron declared. ‘A verbal tic that means that I’m unclear, I don’t know how to decide, and that I’m blurred.’ But, he finished, ‘yes, I chose liberty and equality; yes, I chose growth and solidarity’. He was not ducking choices, he insisted, but seeking a way to reset the balance between market capitalism and social protection, a new social contract for the twenty-first century.

If the tentative contours of Macronism are beginning to emerge, they are partly based on this: a narrative built upon solidarity as well as opportunity, and on the shared values that set Europe apart. Just as Teddy Roosevelt’s turn-of-the-century effort to push a new social contract in America became known as Progressivism, Macron defines his politics as progressive³⁵: an attempt to inject Sen and Rawls into French thinking about the relationship between the state and individuals, in a way that unleashes people’s capacities rather than hampering them. If the Grande Marche of 2016 revealed a widespread French feeling that lives were ‘impeded’, Macron’s vision of the state is about lifting those barriers. He may be tarred by opponents as the ‘president of the rich’, and he makes no apologies for cutting corporate tax and transforming the wealth tax. Yet it is interesting to note that, of the five leading candidates during the 2017 presidential campaign, Macron was the one who used the word ‘equality’ the most.³⁶ One of the first measures he put in place upon taking office was to halve the size of primary-school classes for five- and six-year-olds in poor neighbourhoods. This, rather than increasing benefits, is his version of anti-poverty policy. If Macronism means anything, it may partly be this: striking a new balance between liberty and protection, in which an enabling state becomes a tool for individual advancement. This is the basis of the overarching narrative that Macron seeks in order to give people the confidence and security to embrace a changing world without turning to nationalism.

Yet it is not solely this. There is another dimension to Macronism, and his attempt to fashion a response to populist politics. Statecraft, in his view, depends not just on policy checklists but on symbols and meaning. He is not the first French leader to grasp the power of iconography. Mitterrand, who did his own solitary walk to the Panthéon after his election in 1981, and held hands movingly with Helmut Kohl at Verdun, was an artful student. Modern French theory has its specialists in semiotics and the decrypting of signs, such as Roland Barthes. French history, monarchical and republican, is peopled by leaders who set great store by the meaning and power of symbols. On hearing of the death of the Turkish ambassador, the French diplomat Talleyrand is said to have asked: ‘I wonder what he meant by that?’ Paul Ricoeur, who specialized in hermeneutic phenomenology, or the interpretative study of meaning, said: ‘The symbol sets us thinking.’ And Macron is a faithful disciple. Nothing the president does, no gift he gives, no location he chooses from which to give speeches, is anodyne.

The French were given an early taste of Macron’s approach the moment that the president-elect stepped into the courtyard of the Louvre on election night. In 2007, Nicolas Sarkozy had spent the evening of his victory holed up in Fouquet’s, a glitzy restaurant on the Avenue des Champs-Elysées, before appearing late in the evening at the Place de la Concorde. Five years later, François Hollande celebrated his election onstage in the provincial town of Tulle with a few awkward and improvised dance steps to ‘La Vie en Rose’, accompanied by an accordion, with his partner of the moment, Valérie Trierweiler, before flying to Paris for a celebration rally at the Place de la Bastille. Macron, by contrast, offered the French a moment that flirted with grandiloquence. In the former royal palace of the Louvre at night, he crossed the Cour Napoléon on foot, accompanied by the EU’s national anthem, and addressed his flag-waving supporters against the backdrop of the modernist plate-glass pyramid. The scene both rooted his presidency in the country’s imperial past and its cultural history, and projected it into a (European) future. From that day, Macron slowed his pace, lifted his chin, and began to crease his brow. After the tornado that was the Sarkozy presidency, and the bland mediocrity that was Hollande’s, the French found themselves with a leader who aspired to de Gaulle-like heights of incarnation – and Mitterrand-style intellectualism.

The first point about Macron’s iconography is that it is unapologetically cerebral and learned. To the foreign ear, his speeches are flights of intellectual fancy. When Macron is in full flow, he can lose his audience with philosophical thought and abstraction. For his first big speech on Europe in September 2017, he went to Athens, spoke of Europe’s lost soul, opened his speech in modern Greek, and quoted from Hegel. In interviews, Macron talks earnestly about ‘ethereal transcendence’ and ‘spiritual elevation’. He says, with no apparent irony, that he owes ‘many of his emotional philosophical moments’ to Kant. When he decided not to take part in the traditional French Bastille Day television interview, in 2017, his aides explained that this was because his thoughts were ‘too complex’.

Macron has written three unpublished novels, which he described as ‘incomplete’ and has shown to very few people besides his wife. He does not seek to conceal his erudition. The president described listening to Bach as ‘like looking at a painting by Georges de la Tour: despite all its beauty, there is an extreme austerity. It forces a person to drop any sense of vanity’, and he talked about Mozart as being ‘to music something like Rimbaud was to literature’.³⁷ To get a sense of Macron in full flow, here is the candidate, who won third prize as a teenage piano student at the Amiens conservatoire, discussing his tastes in music: ‘I give Bach a special prize. He has been very important to me. His work for keyboard (organ, harpsichord) and cello is of a precision that does not prevent spiritual elevation, but so to speak favours it. I hear less a mathematical coldness than a musical speech carrying all possible emotions. Bach is a smuggler between several worlds, indefinable and brilliant.’³⁸

Macron is a president who wears his culture without complex, and wants the French to know it. Here he is, for instance, on literature: ‘Houellebecq is surely the novelist who best describes contemporary phobias and fears. He also succeeds, perhaps like no other, in portraying the post-modern character of our society. He addresses the possibilities of genetics at times, or Islamism, and infuses all of it with a certain amount of absurdity. I get a very strong sense of that in Submission.’³⁹ Macron quotes from contemporary francophone writers such as Leïla Slimani and Kamel Daoud as much as from Victor Hugo or Molière, and says he tries to read fiction or poetry every day. ‘I thoroughly believe that reading and literature can help a society to better understand itself.’⁴⁰ Macron, said one fellow pupil from his high school, is fundamentally ‘an author, more than an author: he’s someone who was shaped by language’. His presidency, wrote a French commentator, marked the first time in a long while that ‘France has carried to power an authentic intellectual’.⁴¹

The second aspect of his iconography reflects Macron’s aspirations to embody French power. To the outsider, just as his unabashed displays of intellectualism draw derision, this too can come across as excessively grandiose. One British commentator described Macron’s walk through the Louvre as ‘rather embarrassing’. Even for some of the French, Macron’s monarchical excess is laughable. Laurent Joffrin, writing in Libération, called the new president ‘Emmanuel Bonaparte’, and the newspaper described him variously as ‘sliding into the proud habits of a republican monarch’ and displaying an ‘absolutist’ characterization of power that was ‘forced in its theatricality’. From his analysis of the need for a Jupiterian presidency, it took little to infer that he considered himself to be the king of the gods. From his suggestion that the French regretted the absence of a king, it was only a short leap to conclude that he took himself for a modern-day monarch. On the day he announced he was running for president, Macron dropped in on the Basilica of Saint Denis, the burial place of French kings.⁴² Shortly after his election, there he was staging action-man stunts, being winched off a nuclear submarine into a helicopter one day, or dressing up as Tom Cruise in Top Gun when visiting a French military air base on another. Jupiter, sun king, action man: Macron’s iconography comes hazardously close to bathos. He has his own personal make-up artist to powder his face, who billed the presidency €26,000 for her first three months of work. Even his friends worry about hubris.

It is nonetheless worth considering the possibility that, underneath the powdered presidential cheeks, Macron’s obsession with culture, symbols and grandeur is more than just a form of intellectual arrogance, or self-aggrandisement. France expects a degree of both erudition and incarnation from its modern leaders. This is a country that treats its intellectuals like national treasures, devoting hours of talk shows and pages of newspapers to them. Philosophy is part of the national curriculum. Any senior French businessman is as at ease discussing Voltaire as he is analysing spreadsheets. ‘The French have high expectations of their presidents. It’s an old tradition that pre-dates the republic,’ Sylvain Fort, Macron’s speechwriter, told me: ‘They expect it in symbols and in speech. The mastery of the language is in itself a demonstration of authority.’⁴³ Macron’s ability to embody this cultured sense of national self is a very French way of restoring respect for the presidency and confidence in the country. ‘We like our presidents to speak French well, even if we don’t understand every reference,’ a French business coach once told me. ‘It’s not political arrogance, but a matter of representing France well.’ You didn’t need to have read Hegel, in other words, to understand that when Macron spoke in Athens, the cradle of Western democracy, he was reminding the French of their own part in the story of European civilization. ‘France is an intellectual country,’ one of his advisers told me. ‘This isn’t Texas.’

France’s sense of self is partly built on its ideas and the printed word. It is also about the incarnation of power. Macron argues that the presidency has to be exercised by somebody who, ‘without considering himself the source of all things, has to lead society by force of conviction, and action, and give a clear meaning to his approach’. Fundamentally, argued Macron, ‘the office of the president is not a normal office’.⁴⁴ France is not Germany, where political authority is derived from the application of law. French society, through the historical influence of the Catholic Church, was structured vertically, and retains that expectation of central authority. The French demand more than legalistic leadership, Macron argues: they seek a figure to stand above daily affairs, embody the nation and give political action a sense of direction and meaning. If not, identity politics steps in to take its place. Citizens today, Macron wrote in Révolution, expect their leaders ‘to give a sense to things’.

Long before his election, Macron was already thinking about the nature of presidential authority, and the need to articulate a vision that transcended policy technicalities. For 17 years, between 2000 and 2017, he was a contributor to Esprit, a social-democratic review and incubator of thinking about the moderate, anti-Marxist French left. In a meditation on political action he published in 2011, Macron criticized ‘those who assert a facile post-modern critique of “great narratives” ... Political discourse cannot just be a technical discourse that lists measures. It is a vision of society and of its transformation.’⁴⁵ Ricoeur had taught him to think about storytelling as a means of unlocking people’s capabilities.⁴⁶ Macron put it this way: ‘The function of the president in France is one of meaningful symbolic value ... Everything you do, everything you say – but also what you don’t say – suddenly has meaning.’⁴⁷ From Ricoeur, Macron forged a belief in the need both to hold a microscope to political action, and then to stand back to look at the sweep of history, in order to give the narrative context. ‘The great difficulty of politics today lies in the paradox between the permanent need for deliberation, which takes place over the long run, and the urgency of decision-making,’ he said. ‘The only way to resolve this is to articulate a great horizontal transparency, necessary for deliberation, and to resort to a more vertical relationship necessary for decision-making. Otherwise, you end up with either totalitarianism or political inaction.’⁴⁸

It was in this context that he returned to his point in the autumn of 2016 about the French yearning for a monarch. ‘Evidently,’ Macron said, ‘I don’t think we should bring back the king.’ But, he went on, ‘we absolutely do need to invent a new form of democratic authority based on a discourse about meaning, on a universe of symbols, on a permanent determination to project into the future, all anchored in the history of the country’.⁴⁹ As if to make the point, there he was again in Versailles only weeks after his election, telling a joint sitting of both houses of parliament about French grandeur and its place in the ‘history of humanity’. Further into his presidency, Macron developed these thoughts into a plea to liberal democracies to embrace the need for ‘political heroism’.⁵⁰ ‘I don’t mean that I want to play the hero,’ he insisted. ‘But we need to be amenable once again to creating grand narratives.’ Without storytelling and symbols, contemporary political leaders, he argued, were leaving a space open to competing darker, dangerous narratives: extremism, fanaticism, even jihadism.

‘Our society needs collective narratives, dreams, heroism,’ he said in an interview with Le Point, as an alternative to ‘fanaticism or a death wish’.⁵¹ Many of those who turned in France to jihadism, it seemed, did so as part of a quest to transform small, angry lives into powerful ones. ‘Why do young people from the banlieues leave for Syria?’ he asked in the same interview. ‘Because the propaganda videos they watched on the internet in their eyes transformed terrorists into heroes.’ The error, he judges, is that Western society, in a post-modernist urge to deconstruct, mock and deride everything, has given up on storytelling. ‘Why can’t there be such a thing as democratic heroism?’ Macron asked. ‘Perhaps that is exactly our task: rediscovering something like that together for the 21st century.’⁵² The challenge for liberal democracies, in his view, is to find a way of speaking, as populist politics do, to the yearning for emotional security and the quest to give meaning to ordinary lives, but in a way that draws on positive emotions, and inclusive identities.

What can he possibly mean by all this? Does France’s action-man philosopher president see himself as the star of his own national drama? Does he seek to turn the French themselves into heroes? It all sounds singularly ill-suited to the cynical political age. Yet this may be exactly Macron’s point. Political elites, who failed to see Trump or Le Pen coming, have become the victims of their own liberal, urban cynicism, no longer able to see that people need meaning and inspiring leadership to make their lives matter. Before his own presidential election campaign, Macron watched replays of Trump’s speeches. He grasps the way in which Trump forged a link with people, using their language and harnessing the anti-establishment rage. What Macron seeks is a counterpoint to the divisive nativism and negativity inflamed by populist leaders: a way to appeal to people’s better natures, to overcome what he often refers to as the ‘sad passions’ of jealousy, distrust and mean-spiritedness.⁵³ In order to give people the confidence to seize opportunities at a time of anxiety, political leadership needs to provide them with the security and sense offered by symbols and stories: in his case, that of a strong France, heading in a clear direction, and a mobile society which enables all to take part. This is what his talk about a ‘Europe that protects’ is all about. This is why he constantly reminds the French of their cultural heritage and intellectual tradition, and seeks to restore national pride through embodying French power.

It is perhaps in this sense that his theatrical presidency can also be understood. ‘If you want to understand Macron, you need to know that he is a superb actor,’ said one friend. On election night, Macron walked down seven broad stone steps before crossing the courtyard of the Louvre to make his victory speech. As he took each step, his eyes fixed ahead and a look of studied gravity on his face, he never looked down at his feet once. This is no easy feat. Most people would trip. It is what catwalk models are trained to do. Had he practised? Had he tried it out before? At the very least, this was a president-elect who had rehearsed in his mind the stage management of his own transformation into a president. ‘I think he had assimilated the role for quite a long time beforehand,’ said Christian Dargnat, his campaign fundraiser. Shortly after his election, Antoine Marguet, a fellow pupil from Amiens, told me: ‘I think it’s very clear in his mind. The face he will present as president, to the world, will in my view be a bit different to what he is ... He is somebody who has a clear consciousness of what he will be: anti-normality. François Hollande thought that you could run France like you run your family. Macron is conscious that you are obliged to present an image that is not necessarily the reality of what you are, a character which matches the function of the presidency.’⁵⁴

‘It’s simplistic to say that it’s just communication,’ Adrien Taquet insisted. ‘He’s a guy who has a sense of the history of France, who is saddened to see over the past 30 years a country blocked, depressed, out of work. Yes he has ambition, but it’s for his country. Because he believes things can change. He wants to mark history.’⁵⁵ Most world leaders do not fret much about their place in history until towards the end of their tenure. Unusually for a young first-time president, Macron seemed to be pondering his as soon as he took office. He chose to place a copy of de Gaulle’s memoirs, together with a ticking clock, in the background of his official photographic portrait. Behind Macron’s sunny disposition and engaging nature there is both a single-mindedness and a solemnity about him. He seems to carry the responsibility with an outward levity, and inner gravity. ‘Being president,’ he said shortly after his election, ‘is the end of innocence.’⁵⁶ It imposes an ‘absolute solitude’, he remarked on another occasion, and requires a certain detachment. ‘You have to be prepared to be disparaged, insulted and mocked; this is in the French nature.’ Macron does not overstate the ability of any individual leader to mark history. ‘Personally, I don’t think that it’s possible to do great things alone or through individual actions. On the contrary, I think it is only possible to know what to do in a specific moment once you have understood the zeitgeist,’ he said, in full Hegelian swing.⁵⁷ But he does really believe that he can make a difference.

Such lofty ambition informs the two features of Macronian iconography: the cultural and intellectual speechifying, and the magnificent talk of common destiny and conjuring civilization from chaos. The philosophy, the literature, the helicopters, the royal palaces: it all invites a mixture of awe and derision. The risk for Macron in his quest to embody something greater than himself, of course, is that he takes it all far too seriously; that, rather than offering ordinary people a sense of direction, hope and national pride from the great heights of the presidency, he appears to look down on them from above. Macron certainly seems to have a habit of causing offence. In Athens, the day after his speech on Europe, he declared that he would ‘not give in to the lazy, the cynical, or the extremes’. He once referred to railway stations as places ‘where one comes across people who succeed, and people who are nothing’. Who was he calling lazy? Who were the mysterious people who were ‘rien’? The French hold their cerebral presidents in high regard. But they dislike arrogance, and even less disdain. A few months into the presidency, as Macron’s poll ratings slid sharply, Jérôme Fourquet, head of polling at Ifop, concluded: ‘Whether you call it arrogance or condescension, there is a feeling among certain social categories, where Macron’s words are received like a slap in the face, that the president doesn’t care.’⁵⁸

Of the various risks to Macron’s presidency, one of the greatest is that Macron, in seeking to reach high, cannot find a way to dispel the perception that he is arrogant, out of touch or lacking in empathy. Or, worse, that he reinforces it, that his vanity gets the better of him. Christian Dargnat, his fundraiser, said this: ‘I remember one phrase he used. “When you embark on a presidential campaign, when you are a candidate to become president of the Republic, you have to have a dose of narcissism at the start, and I acknowledge that.” I have heard him say that in public.’ If charismatic leaders base their claim to authority on a compelling vision, a persuasive voice, and a capacity to embody change, they are also by definition more vulnerable to disillusion if their behaviour disappoints. When asked what was the main risk for the Macron presidency, somebody who knows him well replied simply: ‘Jupiter’. The Elysée Palace, organized around a front courtyard and backing on to a broad garden, is a curiously solitary and silent place for a building situated in the heart of a capital, just steps from the traffic and tourists of the Avenue des Champs-Elysées. Inside, it is a place of almost absolute silence. Georges Pompidou called it a ‘prison’. Macron has very few close advisers and friends who speak to him frankly. If anybody can keep him grounded, said Bruno Bonnell, the deputy, it will be the irreverent, humorous Brigitte Macron. ‘She brings wisdom. She lives at a different pace,’ Bonnell said. ‘And she’s rooted in the real world.’

Macron’s quest to forge a new social contract, devise a grand narrative to rival the appeal of populism and its darker variants, and bring about a transformation of France, is characteristically immodest. ‘Some presidents are better at acquiring power than at exercising it, and some feel that they will have failed only if they aren’t re-elected,’ Marc Ferracci, his best man, told me.⁵⁹ ‘I think Macron would feel that he has failed if his reforms aren’t implemented.’ The president said as much. ‘The biggest risk for the next five years,’ he told me, ‘is not to get things done.’⁶⁰ If the embodiment of an anti-Trump presidency fails to deliver results, French populism will be back. In the end, the symbols and statements will count for little if Macron cannot achieve something concrete: puting the economy back on track and the young back into jobs.