‘Everyone sees what you appear to be, few experience what you really are.’
PARIS, JANUARY 2018
‘I’m a bit like my dog,’ Emmanuel Macron declares suddenly, ‘a half breed.’1 It is an overcast wintry Saturday afternoon, the Elysée Palace is silent, and the French president is dressed for work in his sober navy suit and tie. On the first-floor marble landing, a huissier, or usher, in a wing-collared white shirt and bow tie, tails the colour of anthracite and a ceremonial chain, is pacing about slowly. Since the last time I sat down to talk to the president, in his first-floor interconnecting corner office, I seem to have been upgraded. Today, we are sitting in the sumptuous salon doré, whose ceiling-high mirrors reflect the intricate silk upholstery and gilt-decorated wall panels, lending the whole room an overwhelming golden glow. This is where he received Donald Trump for one of those handshakes. It is also the spot where the newly arrived presidential dog once urinated against the fireplace. But today Nemo, a black Labrador-Griffon cross that Macron adopted from an animal shelter, is nowhere to be seen.
I have asked the president what he meant when he once described himself as a ‘métèque’, an outsider in ancient Greece with only partial rights. ‘I’m not a thoroughbred,’ he replies. Then he is off, comparing himself to his mongrel dog, and reciting the lyrics to ‘Le Métèque’, by the Franco-Greek singer Georges Moustaki, ‘a magnificent song by the way’: ‘Avec ma gueule de métèque,/De Juif errant, de pâtre grec’ (‘With my face of a foreigner/Of a wandering Jew, of a Greek shepherd’). The French president may now be one of the most powerful leaders of the free world, but he sees himself as an interloper, a misfit, someone who does not quite belong. ‘The problem for the métèque is that others don’t like him,’ Macron says coolly. ‘People’ did ‘everything’ to make sure he would not succeed in politics, ‘because I was not one of them’. He had the same welcome when he turned up at Rothschild’s, and his colleagues said ‘he’s a strange guy, not really a banker’, and then that he was ‘a thief’ when he pulled in his Nestlé deal. And he felt it again, he says, when he took up his job as adviser in the Elysée Palace, and ‘they called me the banker, because I was not of the same species, I hadn’t done the right things.’ All his life, he declares, ‘I have always had that, it has always stuck to me.’
For a split second, I wonder whether he is trying to cultivate sympathy. Am I supposed to feel compassion? For the lifelong professional outcast who is sitting opposite me upon a silk-upholstered Empire sofa in a presidential palace? But it is obvious that what Macron really wants to say is that he is free. He doesn’t care what others think. Or at least he doesn’t care what other politicians think, or the bien-pensants in Paris. In fact, he cares a lot about what the French think. Earlier in our conversation he speaks at length about how he tries to get out of the Elysée Palace as much as possible, and away from France’s big cities and the ‘bubble’ of protocol, to get a feel for what people are really concerned about on the ground. He has just come back from the snow-covered Puy-de-Dôme in central France, where he spent the night. Indeed, when I turn up for my appointment earlier this afternoon, I find a commotion in the street outside, with policemen carrying assault rifles and a knot of excited shoppers and tourists on the pavement; Macron has stepped out to greet passers-by. At this point in our conversation, though, what the French president is trying to convey I think is his sense of liberty to take decisions, to antagonize if necessary, and do what he has to do.
The great advantage of not fully belonging, Macron continues, is that it helps him ‘to avoid the mistakes of habit’. There is nothing more ‘idiotic’, he says, ‘than people who are all the same and think they belong to the same club; I’ve always hated that.’ When you are different to others, and unbothered by that, you take your own decisions freely. Has he always felt different? ‘Yes,’ he replies, ‘not because I wanted to be different, but because the choices I have made have always led me to be, voilà, a bit apart.’ He never went to boums, or early-adolescent parties, as a child, he says, preferring ‘piano and literature’ and ‘time with my grandmother than with my classmates’. That is how he was then; that is how he is now. He does not owe any political party, or union, or lobby, or financier, for his job. Being different, he says, ‘has given me strength, and made me independent’. When I remind him later that he described Trump as ‘not a classical politician’, he replies: ‘Neither am I. Perhaps that’s what nourishes our relationship.’
Listening to Macron speak, it occurs to me that what he is saying feels both disingenuous and plausible. He is at once a product of the French system for manufacturing its elite, and an insurgent against it. One of them, and yet not quite. ‘I have never sought approbation or truth in the eyes of others,’ he claims. Of course it cannot be true for any elected leader that he does not seek the approval of others. Maybe he doesn’t mind much whether the French like him. ‘As president,’ he told Der Spiegel, ‘you cannot have a desire to be loved.’2 But Macron will doubtless want to be re-elected in 2022, and at the very least he needs the French to think he has done a good job – which requires a form of approbation. He comes close to conceding as much when he confesses to ‘an obsession with being understood, in order to be followed’. People can hardly approve of, or back, a leader they can’t understand at all.
Besides, Macron, the disciple of Ricoeur, is a keen student of meaning. And if he can’t get the meaning right, and make himself understood, then he is going to be in trouble. So when I ask him whether he is ever wrong, his answer surprises me. ‘Yes, often,’ he replies. Which is not the impression he gives in public, this president who seems to have an answer for everything, does not like to be caught out and appears to doubt nothing, least of all himself. Such as, I ask? There is a long pause. Macron looks at the ceiling. He puts a knuckle into his mouth, and he seems to be biting it. The question seems to require a great presidential effort.
He thinks that he was wrong, he says finally, not to have launched sooner a review of French prisons. And he reproaches himself, he adds, for ‘not doing things sufficiently early’ – a regret that many leaders make, but usually once they have left office, yet Macron is only eight months into his term and, by most measures, has already done a great deal. Then he adds that he is ‘always wrong when I get annoyed, which does happen’. This is interesting for what it may, or may not, say about the self-control so many people attribute to him. Perhaps that composure of his requires more of an effort than it appears to. Finally, Macron comes up with the last thing I was expecting: that he was wrong to have said, as president, that a railway station is a place where those who succeed pass by ‘those who are nothing’. It’s not what he thinks, he tells me, the line was improvised, and he now realizes that it was taken for condescension. The same goes, he says, for his comments about the ‘lazy’. ‘I never treated the French as lazy,’ he insists, ‘and it’s not what I think, so I was wrong not to have been explicit. And I never thought that when you do not succeed you are nothing. It was precisely to denounce those who think that, but it was not understood. So it was a mistake.’ Perhaps the Jupiterian president is a little more self-critical, more attuned to the perception of haughty arrogance, than he lets on.
At any rate Macron seems to be continually running his presidency through the scanner, evaluating and adjusting as he goes. Not just to assess progress on policy, although ‘execution’ is a word Macron uses frequently in our conversation, talking of the need to ‘keep up this level of intensity’ and ‘not to grow accustomed to inertia’. He speaks a lot about the need to keep ‘pushing’, and ‘following up’, not to be defeated by the ‘weight’ of the system and those ‘who are used to saying it’s not possible’, in order to make sure that the ‘execution is perfect’. It sounds to me a lot more like the job of a hands-on line manager than that of an exalted de Gaulle-like figure who rises above the mundane and the quotidian to a higher sanctified place of guidance. ‘Nothing enhances authority more than silence,’ wrote de Gaulle. ‘Prestige cannot exist without mystery.’ For all Macron’s flighty rhetoric about the need for a regal incarnation of presidential power, he likes to micro-manage, to supervise everything, to run it all from the Elysée Palace. Before I can point this contradiction out, he anticipates my question. ‘The function has changed. Before, one would have been able to lay out the principles, to give a direction, and delegate the execution elsewhere.’ If he wants to restore faith in public action, in a hyper-connected transparent era, he thinks it is his job to make sure that actions match words.
The more that I listen to Emmanuel Macron speak, the more it strikes me that he has in this short time grown into the role. There are no evident signs of fatigue. His face is not drawn. He has not visibly filled out on presidential banquets. He still manages to fit in some tennis when he is in Le Touquet, and when he says tennis he means an intense coaching session, not Sunday afternoon doubles. (He was once ranked 15/1, which under French rankings is good amateur competitive level.) Macron may have a high self-regard, but he tempers it in conversation with a relaxed good humour. Perhaps this is theatre too. After all, he describes the need for ‘a crazy energy’ in the job, and confesses, this man who has a reputation for needing little sleep, to feeling tired sometimes in the evening. In the month of January alone Macron has found time for a three-day tour of China, a stop-off in Rome, a Franco-British summit in England and a quick trip to Davos, for a very long speech, before heading off for three days to Tunisia and Senegal.
The man in the presidency is, like his party, en marche, on the go. All this moving, and pushing, and ‘getting traction’. It’s that concept of motion again, which Pascal Lamy, who knows Macron well, spoke of. And this, of course, is deliberate too. Partly because Macron wants to show his country that he is serious about turning France around, and that politics can make a difference. But also because he hopes to stir the French from torpor and defeatism. In this, Macron seems to have discovered his inner Norman. The French, he declares, ‘have a passion for conquest’. They are ‘a people of adventurers, of discoverers, of explorers, of engineers, of scientists, writers, philosophers, politicians. It’s the country of Lafayette and Buffon, of Descartes, Pascal, Victor Hugo.’ As he elaborates, I realize that, in his mind, conquest and power, the two phases I separate in this book, blend into one. For Macron, power is a form of conquest. He seems to see himself on a campaign for the French mind, or perhaps the French soul, or at any rate the French heart, to ‘awaken the spirit of conquest’ and ambition.
It is impossible not to think, as he speaks, of David’s oil portrait of Napoleon crossing the Alps. Here today is another precociously young French leader, mounting his steed to guide the French into battle and conquer new lands. Or of de Gaulle, that master of national myth-making, who also saw himself as a prophet and a guide. ‘The mainspring of a people is ambition,’ the General told a reporter a few months before he returned to power in 1958: ‘France has successively had the ambition of the unity of its frontiers, the gospel of the Revolution, the domination of Europe, the restoration of Alsace-Lorraine, and finally, Liberation. Today there is no collective ambition.’ France, judged de Gaulle, was a country that needed to be exhorted and inspired into greatness. Like Macron in the Puy-de-Dôme, he also ventured into its rural heartlands, folding his tall frame into the back seat of his presidential Citroën DS to head off and galvanize the people. ‘France,’ the General declared, ‘is only true to herself when she is en marche towards progress.’
Does Macron, no stranger to ambition, aspire to de Gaulle-like heights? He certainly sounds as if he does. ‘During the Renaissance, under François I, under Louis XIV, under Napoleon, under de Gaulle: each time there have been these moments of a new collective imagination, new mythologies, republican or anti-republican,’ he tells me. ‘That’s the deep ambition I have, to bring this out.’ If you just tell the French that they need reform ‘because of some OECD ranking,’ he says, ‘the French won’t care and they’d be right not to! It’s the best way for us to say we won’t do anything because we are different. If you recognize their difference, tell them that it’s a transformation, a revolution, which will be different to others and better, then you can carry people with you.’ And to do this, he says, they need to believe in heroes.
I want to know more about Macron’s talk of heroes. It sounds at once silly, intriguing, and a personal risk for him. It is hard not to conclude, the moment he talks about heroes, that the president casts himself as one, on a glorious romantic mission – like a character in a novel he perhaps has yet to write – to rescue France from itself. Or perhaps what he really wants has more to do with the French than with him: to provide them with moments of collective exaltation, of common feeling, that bring a nation together, in awe or in sorrow. A young Tony Blair, back in the glow of his first New Labour prime ministership, understood this too. He had such a moment after the Princess of Wales’s death in 1997, calling her ‘the people’s princess’ and telling the British people that ‘I feel like everyone else in this country today’. When Johnny Hallyday died on 6 December 2017, it seemed very much to be Macron’s Diana moment. If you read the written words today, they do sound faintly ludicrous. ‘You are here for him,’ Macron began solemnly, standing in a winter overcoat on the church steps before the coffin, and addressing the crowds in a speech that was all about them. ‘You had to be here for Johnny, because from the start Johnny was there for you ... In his voice, through his songs, in his face, there was this indefinable humanity that would go right through you and make you feel less alone ... He became an indispensable presence, a friend, a brother.’ On that crisp winter day, outside the Madeleine church in Paris, however, where hundreds of thousands of people had lined the route of Hallyday’s funeral cortège, the words felt not ludicrous but wholly in tune with the stunned and bereaved nation.
From the moment that the Elysée published the president’s homage to Johnny at 4 a.m. on the morning that he died – and there cannot have been many people up in the palace at that time – it was obvious that Macron had grasped its significance. Johnny may have been scorned as derivative and populaire by the Paris intéllos, but for the French at large he was not just a ‘French Elvis’. He was a glimpse into their soul: rebellious, nostalgic, fragile, flawed, lyrical, theatrical, passionate, proud. Astride a Harley Davidson, his arms generously tattooed, Johnny was everything that they were, or hoped to be, and his music had been the soundtrack to their lives since the 1960s. The address he gave at the church, Macron tells me, ‘was not at all unintentional: I did it on purpose.’ His point was ‘to share a moment of popular emotion with people’ and to let the French know that ‘I understand your emotion as well’. ‘To tell people that their passion is wonderful and very important, because it awakens something, this spirit of conquest. I totally rewrote my speech that very morning to be in phase with popular emotion.’
This comment seems important. There is something both romantic and deeply calculating about it. It reminded me of Macron’s cool line about being splashed on the cover of celebrity magazines, ‘because I sell. Like washing powder.’ This young philosopher-king, with a sense of destiny and the part of a hero in his own unfolding drama, is also a hard-headed cynic. And perhaps that is a good thing. Perhaps we shouldn’t worry that he is too flattering to Trump. He seems to mean it when he says that they have formed a bond. But he doesn’t really want to be his friend. Maybe it is precisely the combination of both, the romantic and the realist, that could help Macron to create political, and diplomatic, space in the years ahead. Nothing he does is anodyne, in this search to build relationships and acquire leverage. Macron thought carefully about what he wanted to say by offering to loan the Bayeux Tapestry to Britain. ‘People in the UK hear about this tapestry. They don’t necessarily know what it is, but it speaks of what? Of a history,’ he tells me. ‘What will they talk about in their kitchens or at dinner tables? That we’ve had it for 1,000 years. That we fought, but we managed to reconcile. And that we are going to lend it to them when it hasn’t been there for 1,000 years. It moved people. People didn’t come up to me in London and say thank you for the new treaty on migration. But they did say thank you for the tapestry.’
Democratic politics needs to find a way ‘to touch spirits, hearts and souls’, he argues. Otherwise, the realm of the imagination is left to the nationalists, extremists and fanatics. Populists cannot be defeated only by rational arguments. Progressives need their own, rival, narrative. ‘Why do we have a revival of religious and other fanaticisms?’ he asks. ‘Because they have a hold on the imagination, sometimes an extreme hold, which responds to an ontological need that mankind has for exaltation, for figures that count. Political leaders should never neglect the symbolic element of office. If our mission is seen only as functional, we will become mere technicians. Politics is also about emotion. If we leave emotion only to cynics or nationalists, we will be making a colossal error.’ This man on a mission does not intend to lower his ambitions.
Our conversation draws to a close. The sky outside is starting to turn to dusk. As I walk back down the red-carpeted ceremonial staircase of the Elysée Palace, around the edge of the front courtyard, and out to the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, it strikes me that Macron sounds less implausible in French, the language in which we had our conversation and one well suited to his exalted ambitions and glorious abstractions. When I translate his words later on, something happens. The English tongue does not really do grandeur, and seems to make his phrases sound convoluted and over-intellectual. The French like their leaders to speak this way. In English, it all risks sounding like a vanity project, dreamed up by Jupiter to justify all the palaces and parades, grand gestures and sweeping pronouncements. It strikes me that Macron really is a president for France, not for Britain or for Germany, or Texas, as his aide told me. But then the next day, on television, I see Trump calling him ‘my friend, Emmanuel’. He can also connect, this scholar-president, even to a brash real-estate mogul who never reads books. There is definitely something about him. He is a leader to watch closely, and not to underestimate.
Macron is a French president who matters more than most. For his country, and for Europe. The French have put their immediate future in the hands of an untested leader, in whose hands it could yet all go horribly wrong. He may struggle to persuade Germany to move his way on Europe, and the eurozone may not have seen the last of financial crises. The continent, and France, remains vulnerable to terrorism. Europe is fringed by instability and authoritarianism, on its eastern borders, with Russia and Turkey, as well as across the Mediterranean sea. Another mass migrant influx would put the union’s resilience, and Macron’s liberal internationalism, sorely to the test.
At home, the odds on any leader turning around a country as proud and unruly as France are never high. There is a perfectly plausible scenario in which promise leads to disappointment. High hopes vested in young leaders often do. Revolutions are usually followed by counter-revolutions, and France is no stranger to either. Macron may not yet face any credible political opposition. But neither has he found a way to speak to those who did not vote for him, in places where his rootless internationalism and hobnobbing at Davos is an affront. If he fails to bring back jobs, investment and growth, a revived FN, under Marine Le Pen or her successor, will have learned the lessons of 2017. The party will head into 2022 having ditched its unpopular opposition to the euro. It may also have changed its name as well as its leader. Party-political boundaries remain fluid in France. A nationalist right-wing grouping could yet emerge to challenge Macron’s liberal internationalism, which reaches from the Republican right wing to a newly named far right.
To fend such opposition off, Macron needs results. He may face virtually no opposition in parliament, yet those who will resist his reforms probably lurk, rather, inside the administrations and professions, which are set to lose the most. En Marche, which played its grass-roots part in Macron’s conquest of France, may struggle, under Jupiter, to work out what the movement is now for, and its unity will be tested by an uncompromising approach to matters such as immigration or security. Macron is a poor delegator; yet he cannot do everything himself. At once a prince and his counsellor, he relies on his own judgement, probably to excess. His predilection for sibylline pronouncements and heroic theatre, and taste for imperial grandeur, open up his presidency to mockery in a merciless age. The Elysée Palace, behind its high wrought-iron gates, is a place of architectural isolation. Hubris could still get the better of him.
And yet you don’t need to approve of everything Macron does to see this presidency as an opportunity for France. The country has entered territory that is uncharted, but promising. Its image abroad has been transformed, and the French are rather enjoying the unfamiliar glow of approbation. His popularity fell faster than any other modern president, but it has recovered somewhat. Macron was a lucky gambler, but he is also a capable, disciplined one. If he can hold his own, and tame his inner monarch, he has both the institutional power, and the political potential, to have a considerable impact, on France, Europe and even beyond.
When I turn up at the Elysée Palace in January 2018, I have understood for a while that the conquest of power the previous year was a form of bloodless political revolution such as France had not seen for over half a century. When I leave, I think I have grasped something else. Macron may not in fact believe that the French really need another revolution in order to turn their country around in the coming years. Things need fixing, for sure; but they are not critically broken. Elegant, creative, intellectual France has many deep strengths. Yet it is also a country that moves forward in spasms. It took the guillotine, Robespierre and then Napoleon for the French to shift from absolutism under Louis XVI to parliamentary monarchy in 1814. The following century, it took six weeks of turmoil in May 1968 to throw off tweed jackets and social conservatism. What Macron really means by revolution I think is not that the country needs one, but that it needs to think it is taking part in one. That to get the French moving they need to believe they are engaged in a glorious epic moment, for a grander purpose. And that this is something that they, the French, are uniquely capable of pulling off. It is a smart take, and a gamble. But if 2017 showed anything, it is that it’s a mistake to bet against Emmanuel Macron.