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- Herausgeber: Icon Books
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
'Adam Plowright's excellent book captures the strangeness of Macron's life' Evening Standard THE FIRST BIOGRAPHY OF EMMANUEL MACRON IN ENGLISH From total unknown to one of Europe's most powerful men in just a few years, at 39, France's youngest leader since Napoleon is intent on conquering the world stage. But what lies beneath the façade of this youthful, ultra-confident and calculating president? How did someone from small-town France assemble -- in just 12 months -- the network, team and finances to win the presidency? Now elected, can he make the French feel better about themselves? Can he rally Europe around him and turn the tide of right-wing nationalism sweeping the continent? Critically, what will his presidency mean for Britain? Featuring never-before printed interviews with key members of Macron's team, his friends, mentors and political detractors, acclaimed Paris-based journalist Adam Plowright asks: can the shine on this brilliant new president last? And for how long?
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‘Plowright’s excellent book captures the strangeness of Macron’s life.’
The Evening Standard
‘Eye-catching detail.’
The Financial Times
‘For real insight into the remarkable rise – and character – of the new French president, Plowright’s is the book to read.’
The Sunday Telegraph
‘A highly readable and well-judged portrait of a fascinating character.’
The Times
‘Most political biographies are perfunctorily written, not this one. Adam Plowright is fascinated by his subject.’
The Sydney Morning Herald
‘Expertly researched … a fine addition to the bookshelf of anyone interested in France, Europe and international geopolitics.’
The Hindu
For Natacha, Arlette and Marlow
Contents
CHAPTER 1
Lost Glory
‘I BET HE’S TURNING IN HIS GRAVE SEEING THE LOT WE have governing us nowadays,’ sighed Sylvie Gautier, a 52-year-old former policewoman standing in spring sunshine in the small French village of Colombey-les-Deux-Églises at the end of March 2017.
She and her partner Didier Consigny had come to pay their respects at the final resting place of Charles de Gaulle, France’s most illustrious 20th-century leader, who died here in his family home in 1970.
The small and peaceful village, with its stone cottages surrounded by gently rolling hills, is a French pilgrimage site with a symbolic value every bit as important as the great royal or revolutionary landmarks of Paris.
The Louvre and the Palace of Versailles, the Place de la Concorde, Place de la République or the Bastille column around the capital are monuments to the great clashes of the last two centuries that saw the French Republic ultimately triumph over royal autocracy.
Each of them bears witness to France’s epic history, to its role as a cradle of democracy and its people’s fight for human rights and the freedom of speech. This battle, which shaped the modern state, helps explain why the French seem so assured of their own exceptionalism and convinced that their experience carries a universal message to the world.
Colombey-les-Deux-Églises, a three-hour drive into the countryside east of Paris, is a place to reflect not on France’s role as a beacon for democracy, but rather on its own salvation from chaos and defeat, as well as the fraught relationship between the French people and their leaders.
In 1934, Charles de Gaulle, then a lieutenant-colonel in the French army, bought a large home here, La Boisserie, at a bargain price from an elderly local woman, in order to provide a stable base for his wife and young children as Europe was again lurching towards war.
This pretty but unexceptional village set around a church dating back to the 12th century would become the place he would write, brood and plot, as well as the backdrop to some of the great political theatre of his extraordinary life.
‘Whenever it is possible, we go to La Boisserie,’ he wrote, reflecting on his life a few months before his death at the age of 80. ‘It’s there that I go to think. There that I write the speeches which are a painful and perpetual effort. There that I read the books which are sent to me. There, watching the horizon of the land and the immensity of the sky, that I restore my serenity.’
Today, politicians as well as thousands of visitors like Gautier and Consigny come every year to visit his grave in the church cemetery where he was buried in ‘France’s good and blessed land’ next to fellow villagers.
Beside his tomb, marked by a simple cross in white stone and the inscription ‘Charles de Gaulle 1890–1970’, lie his beloved wife Yvonne and his handicapped daughter Anne, whom the devoted general once credited as an inspiration for his achievements.
The manor house of La Boisserie, where de Gaulle would work in his downstairs office admiring the view of the morning fog, or the forested hills beyond, has been turned into a visitors’ centre.
The handsome building with its ivy-covered facade is now a museum containing his belongings, including his books and the dining table where he would eat his favourite meal, roasted pig’s ears, after attending mass with Yvonne on Sundays. It also contains the table where the famously straight-backed 1.95-metre lover of cards slumped over during a game of patience after suffering a massive heart attack on the evening of 9 November 1970, less than a fortnight before his 80th birthday.
As a statesman, de Gaulle continues to tower over French public life. He set a precedent so high that none of his successors ever seem to match up. As a general, as the leader of French resistance to Nazi occupation and then as father of the modern Republic, he is the epitome of how extraordinary individuals are able to shape history through their own personality and will.
His incredible life is told at a second museum in Colombeyles-Deux-Églises, the Charles de Gaulle Memorial, an angular, white building of modernist design which opened in 2008 on a site set slightly above the roofs of the village below. Behind the memorial, at the top of the hill and visible above the trees, stands a giant Cross of Lorraine in granite and bronze – a cross with two bars that de Gaulle adopted as a symbol of French resistance during the Second World War. Its construction was one of the few things he expressly wished for after his death: ‘It will inspire rabbits around there to stand and resist,’ he joked.
Unfolding from the museum’s entrance is a panoramic view of the fields and woodland below, which was eulogised by de Gaulle in his memoirs: ‘Vast, uncultivated and sad horizons; wood, meadow, crops and melancholic fallows; the outlines of former mountains worn down and resigned; quiet villages of little wealth of which millennia have changed neither the soul nor location.’
The serenity he found in the landscapes can be appreciated when set against the photographs, videos and recordings on show in the museum that place him at the centre of the disintegration and rebuilding of 20th-century France.
They provide an insight into de Gaulle’s enormous personal courage as a soldier in the First World War, during which he was injured on three occasions, the last time in 1916 when he was captured and presumed dead before being imprisoned in Germany. As a tank commander in 1940, he demonstrated similar bravery when the vastly superior and more organised German forces, backed by air power, left the French outgunned and outmanoeuvred on the eastern front.
Faced with the defeatism of his superiors, his moral clarity shone through as he continued to urge the government to regroup their forces and continue fighting the Germans, first as an outspoken general in the French army, and then when he was promoted to deputy war minister. Throughout the 1930s de Gaulle had urged the government to modernise the army and invest in tank technology – in vain.
As his government capitulated to the Nazis in 1940, de Gaulle fled to London on a British plane, watching from the window as smoke billowed up from destroyed ships and burning munitions dumps below in his shattered country. After stopping off on the island of Jersey in the English Channel to refuel the plane and buy a case of whisky for British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, de Gaulle headed for London to present himself to the British government as the leader of Free French Forces.
‘Whatever happens, the flame of the French resistance must not be extinguished and will not be extinguished!’ he said in his famous first address to the French people on 18 June 1940, which was broadcast across the channel by the BBC.
After the entry of American forces decisively swung the war in favour of the Allies, de Gaulle’s triumphant return home in 1944 for the liberation of France provided the French people with a new narrative for their war-time experience, which had hitherto been one of military humiliation and capitulation. But like the great war leader Churchill, de Gaulle later found himself surplus to requirements in peacetime. He disagreed with the new constitution that had been proclaimed in 1946, which created the Fourth Republic* based on a parliamentary system which he felt gave too little power to the government. De Gaulle headed his own party, the Rassemblement du Peuple Français (RPF, the Rally of the French People) but after his failure in general elections in 1953, he abandoned politics. So began his ‘wilderness years’ at La Boisserie in Colombey-les-Deux-Églises (which had been occupied by German forces during the war), where he devoted himself to writing his memoirs and spending time with his family.
But after he had helped save France once, the natural authority of the man nicknamed ‘the constable’ was required a second time in 1958, when political deadlock and the possibility of a coup by the rebellious generals fighting France’s brutal war in Algeria threatened a civil war in mainland France. Answering the request from President René Coty for ‘the most illustrious of Frenchmen’ to take charge, de Gaulle put an end to his political exile and stepped forward to take control of the government as prime minister and steer France away from another precipice.
The new Republic he ushered in, the Fifth, endures to this day: it scrapped the parliamentary system, which had been blamed for unstable coalition governments and political squabbling, in favour of an executive presidency to be headed by a towering and unifying national leader who was given powers that far exceed equivalents in other democracies. The presidency was built in de Gaulle’s image: the spirit of the French presidential election was to be ‘the meeting of a man and his people,’ he famously declared (no woman has ever held the position). Long viewed as an authoritarian regime by critics, this system was decried as a ‘permanent coup d’état’ by the Socialist François Mitterrand, who would become the first left-wing leader of the Republic in 1981 and then use – and abuse – the immense power of the position.
De Gaulle, as the architect of this system and the first holder of the office, in which he served for eleven years, left a personal stamp and an idealised memory of the role of a president that few, if any, have been able to live up to since. He defined France’s role in the world and demonstrated remarkable strategic vision, helping to launch the country’s nuclear programme and a host of state-backed industrial projects. His ‘Gaullist’ foreign policy doctrine of keeping France independent and positioned between the super powers – the United States and the Soviet Union, in his day – has been diluted over time, but it still endures as an idea and influences policy. In his personal life, he was a model of integrity and public service. He refused a state funeral for his death and was so parsimonious that he and Yvonne insisted on paying their own bills at the presidential palace while in office.
The genius – and flaw – of the Fifth Republic was the way that it elevated the head of state into a position that was effectively that of an elected monarch: an alloy forged from France’s struggle between royalist and republican forces. The president was a democrat, but one who lived beneath the tall gilded ceilings of the Élysée Palace – built for a French nobleman in the 18th century – with its more than 300 rooms and 800 staff. The transfer of power from one head of state to another takes place at a ceremony whose pomp and splendour would make many kingdoms blush.
But in 2017, 47 years after de Gaulle’s death, France and the Republic he had bequeathed to the nation were sick.
The country was still a world power: it boasted the sixth-biggest economy, a seat on the UN Security Council and a world-class military that was carrying out combat operations against Islamic extremists in Africa and the Middle East. Average income per person was around $40,000 – three times the global average – while it had a public health system, transport networks and multinationals that were the envy of the world. More tourists visited France every year than any other country, marvelling at the slow pace of life in its villages, the elegance and grandeur of its cities or the variety of its landscapes from the Alps to the Atlantic. The famed French lifestyle of long holidays, fine dining and family time seemed to be resisting the march of modernity. Though its dominance had declined, relative to other countries, France was still a world-leading cultural force in film, food, fashion and literature, as well as a sporting powerhouse at the Olympics and football World Cup.
But on this sunny spring day in Colombey-les-Deux Églises at the end of March, seven weeks before France headed for fresh presidential elections, the people arriving in a steady trickle at the de Gaulle Memorial revealed a mix of nostalgia for the past, anger at the present and a dark foreboding about the future.
Gautier, the former policewoman, stood in the sunshine outside the museum and summed up her view of the outgoing president, François Hollande, as ‘that guy who’s a big nothing, who hired his hairdresser for €13,000 a month.’
The hairdresser’s salary – actually €9,895 pre-tax as revealed in a press report in June 2016 – was far from the worst of the personal embarrassments for the balding Hollande, who had also been caught having croissants delivered by moped to his mistress at public expense.
At least – so Hollande’s supporters pointed out – he departed the office without leaving behind a string of legal cases to answer: unlike his right-wing predecessor Nicolas Sarkozy, who is still surrounded by a cloud of suspicion. Sarkozy, the hyperactive president who married a supermodel, left office in 2012 as the most unpopular president in France’s history – only to see his unenviable record immediately beaten by Hollande.
French people are ‘sick of it all’, explained Gautier, who hailed from the local Champagne region. Her partner Consigny nodded along in agreement; he didn’t understand ‘why we’ve let in all these people, immigrants, when we don’t have enough work already and there’s mass unemployment.’
France and Europe were in the grip of the biggest migrant crisis since the Second World War – caused by instability and poverty in the Middle East, Africa and South Asia – that had led to more than a million people crossing the Mediterranean Sea into Europe in 2015.
Consigny, who worked for a local waste management company, thought Muslims in particular were a problem. ‘It’s always the same profile you see on the telly,’ he explained, referring to the mostly young men of North African descent who had carried out a series of terror attacks in France that had killed more than 200 people since 2015.
Both the ex-policewoman and her partner repeated the words that were ringing out at far-right rallies across the country at the time, which crystallised a widespread feeling of resentment in France about immigrants and insecurity: ‘On est chez nous’, they said. ‘This is our country’.
Faith in French politics had plummeted across the board, while the vicious election campaign that was already underway in spring 2017 had seen other cornerstones of the Republic – notably the justice system and the independent media – attacked and further undermined. Less than a third of French people at the time thought that democracy was working well. Less than half had faith in the justice system and only a quarter trusted the media.1
François Hollande, who had promised to be a ‘normal’ president who was close to the people, was coming to the end of a presidency that many saw as having debased the institution beyond repair, with the 62 year old showing an approval rating of just 4 per cent at the end of 2016.
The sense of disenchantment in France created by Hollande’s major policy U-turns, his lack of personal authority and the fact that his presidency had seen record unemployment of 3.5 million people, had been made worse by the series of appalling terror attacks. ‘He was never up to the job,’ François Guillot, a grey-haired retired doctor, said bitterly as he stood with his wife outside the memorial museum. ‘We need a father of the nation.’
Each interview in Colombey brought fresh complaints or grievances, all underpinned by the feeling that France had somehow lost its way and lacked the leadership to correct its course. All chimed with the sour national mood in a country that had spawned a new category of social scientists, the so-called ‘declinologues’, experts in diagnosing France’s decline.
In a major survey of public opinion by polling group IPSOS Mori in 25 countries at the end of 2016, France came off as the most pessimistic by far, with nearly nine in ten people saying they believed the country was on the wrong track.
Walking into the non-fiction section of a book shop at the time was a spirit-sapping experience. Two Presidents for Nothing was the title of a book by a leading political commentator. Understanding the French Tragedy, read another by a famed historian. Jihad: It’s Arrived in Your Neighbourhood was on sale next to Don’t Know What To Do, Don’t Give a Shit?, a book by a respected pollster about how many French people were now so despondent that they had tuned out of politics altogether.
France’s leading economic indicators gave scant reason for cheer. No French government had managed to balance the national budget since the early 1970s. The national debt, swollen by huge bailouts after the global financial crisis of 2008, had shot up to nearly the equivalent of a whole year’s economic output at more than €2 trillion. The unemployment rate was around 10 per cent of the working population and was double that for the under 25s. There was growing inter-generational tension between the wealthy, consumerist post-war ‘babyboomers’ and young people who will inherit the crushing national debt and a polluted planet showing signs of climate change.
Gael Chocteau, a carpenter from northern France a few years from retirement, was hurrying back to the car park away from the museum when he stopped for a chat about the election. ‘We thought we’d have a look as we were driving through, but it’s not free. Sixteen euros each to get in. It’s too much, isn’t it?’, he said, squinting into the sunshine under a blooming cherry tree.
‘There’s really not enough work in this country,’ he explained, adding that he was anxious about his pension. The problems were down to too much immigration – ‘We’ve sort of let anyone in’ – and the global financial crisis, which had hurt his business in the construction industry particularly badly.
He hadn’t made his mind up yet who to vote for, but one thing was certain. ‘It won’t be for one of the traditional parties. Definitely not,’ he said.
Rosa Sion, a 66-year-old retired secretary visiting from the Vosges area of eastern France, stopped to talk in front of exhibits recounting de Gaulle’s wilderness years on the periphery of national politics from 1953 to 1958. ‘It would do our politicians good to come here and learn about humility,’ she said. The spectacle of parliament she saw on television seemed completely out of touch with reality. ‘They don’t know about real problems, they’re completely out of it. They don’t even know how much a baguette costs,’ she said. The cost of everyday baked goods had tripped up a leading conservative only a few months earlier. The presidential candidate and former head of the right-wing UMP party, Jean-François Copé, had underestimated the price of a pain au chocolat by a factor of ten.
Sion’s husband Jacques, who had spent much of his working life running funeral parlours, thought that many politicians were simply in it for the perks nowadays. ‘They’ve got no idea what real work is,’ he said.
But it wasn’t just France’s political system that was showing signs of strain. On the same day, 400 kilometres to the north in the Belgian capital, the British ambassador to the EU handed over a letter to the European Commission formalising Britain’s decision to quit the 28-member European Union, the cornerstone of post-war peace and stability in Europe, after the UK’s in-out referendum.
Colombey-les-Deux-Églises had played its part in healing the wounds of the continent and spurring the integration of conflict-scarred Europe. Despite his experience of two world wars and his having been a prisoner-of-war in German camps, de Gaulle invited the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to La Boisserie shortly after taking power in 1958. The two men strolled in the garden and ate dinner together, which had been prepared by Yvonne. Adenauer became the only head of state to spend the night there, in a powerful personal and public gesture of reconciliation. Five years later, the two men would go on to sign a historic treaty of friendship between France and Germany.
Nonetheless, de Gaulle, a proud nationalist opposed to any attempt to limit French sovereignty, would have been appalled by the modern European Union. He would have been even more horrified by the way France had been surpassed by Germany as the organisation’s dominant force and was now yoked into an unloved and half-completed federation that looked as if it were only one election away from catastrophe.
The French far-right leader and 2017 presidential candidate Marine Le Pen, running on an anti-EU, anti-immigration platform, had promised to withdraw from the European common currency area, at the risk of triggering a financial crisis. She had also promised a referendum to end what she called France’s ‘submission’ to the European Union.
Civil servant Thierry, 44, was visiting Colombey with his friend Jean-Pierre, 53, and they too were a picture of disenchantment. Neither planned to vote in the upcoming election.
‘Everything is dictated by the European Union nowadays, so from that point of view what’s the use in voting?’, said Jean-Pierre. He’d love to see France follow Britain and leave ‘but then it’s chaos,’ he said.
Thierry laughed at a question about whether France was in good health. ‘It doesn’t matter where you go, everyone thinks the same thing. Of course not. Actually maybe in some parts of Paris they think everything’s fine,’ he said. ‘I think Le Pen’s probably got the best ideas, but then it’s a civil war.’ They headed into the museum shortly after a coach had dropped off a group of noisy teenage German school children.
The in-out referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU on 23 June 2016 was the first of two political earthquakes that year which many had forecast would start a domino effect of members exiting the bloc. It was followed four and a half months later by the election of Donald Trump as US president, something which looked like a potential tipping point for Western democracies.
De Gaulle had written to a friend in the 1930s that ‘The world is moving and devouring itself … our generation will have the privilege of being present at events of such a scale that no other, except perhaps at the Great Flood, will have seen so many great things in so little time.’ Watching the spread of newly virulent nationalism in Russia, India and Turkey and now at the heart of the West in Britain and in the US, many historians began to discuss the parallels between the current age and the morbid 1930s.
But a different, competing historical reference point was also gaining traction in France. In an interview to the Valeurs Actuelles magazine which was on news-stands as the visitors wandered around the de Gaulle Memorial, the right-wing presidential candidate François Fillon said that he saw a parallel between the country in 2017 and the end of the Fourth Republic.
‘With every sense of proportion, we are in 1958, at the moment of the return of de Gaulle,’ the 62 year old said of his hero. Fillon was far from being alone when he warned during campaigning that France was ‘on the verge of a civil war’. It was perhaps a typically French rhetorical flourish, yet the idea of a violent confrontation between citizens, or an uprising against the government, was on the lips of politicians and voters with alarming regularity as the country went to the polls.
De Gaulle’s return to government in 1958 had put an end to the rebellion by French officers in Algeria and the risk of a coup d’état. In addition, he had neutered the flourishing far-right party, the Poujadistes, an alliance of shopkeepers that was the forerunner to Le Pen’s National Front.
Yet though Fillon now dreamed of becoming the country’s saviour after his nearly 40 years in politics, he was out of touch with the popular mood. In ordinary circumstances, the French tended to look for his blend of experience, age and solidity in their presidents. However, in spring 2017, they were driven by a desire to wreak revenge on their political class.
Instead, the man of moment was Emmanuel Macron, a 39 year old running in his first ever election who would go on to engineer the most sensational victory in modern history. The one-time economy minister, investment banker and philosopher’s assistant from the provincial city of Amiens had been laughed at when he started his own political party less than twelve months earlier. He was a complete unknown to the French public until August 2014, and even in spring 2017 had barely registered internationally outside of media and political circles. Depending on who you listened to, he was either a Mozart-style genius or a shallow opportunist.
His surge in popularity defied the usual rules and had observers scrambling for an explanation. Experts like Jean Garrigues, who specialises in political history, had a theory: it was the revival of a dormant phenomenon that had repeatedly influenced French political life. Although the country prides itself on its history of battles by the people for power, it has a historic tendency to deliver itself up to charming, authoritarian figures in moments of crisis. It is both a weakness and contradiction at the heart of the national psyche. These figures are known collectively as ‘providential men’.
‘It’s both a reality and a myth,’ Garrigues said, as he commented on the emergence of Macron-mania in 2017. ‘Each time French society finds itself at a dead end or in crisis it has a tendency to look for an exceptional individual: someone to offer a personal solution to our collective problems.’ Famous examples included Napoleon Bonaparte, the brilliant military commander who grabbed power in the chaos of post-Revolution France, but all great French leaders of the past, including the First World War hero Georges Clemenceau and particularly de Gaulle, have been propelled in part by the perception of them as redeemers of lost national prestige. ‘It’s a sort of nostalgia for the unifying figure of the monarch,’ added Garrigues, who wrote a book on the subject of providential men in 2012.2 Over the past centuries, these figures have tended to emerge from outside the political system and are seen as heroes able to reverse the failures of the elites in power, or offer a balm to the nation’s conscience.
France’s first so-called ‘providential man’ was actually a woman: the national heroine Jeanne d’Arc, a peasant girl who believed she was acting with divine guidance when she led the French army into victorious battles with the English in 1429.
The concept is the French equivalent of the popular 19th-century ‘Great Man Theory’, espoused by the Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle and others, which posited that history was forged by the actions of exceptional individuals whose time had come.
This concept also dovetails with the secular idea of the ‘cunning of reason’ put forward by the German philosopher Hegel, who Macron has studied. Hegel stated that humankind, in its quest for freedom, was served by ‘world historical’ figures who advanced the cause, driven by their own self-interest.
‘There’s also a form of charisma, an ability to create a sort of collective enthusiasm, which Bonaparte and de Gaulle clearly had,’ Garrigues continued. ‘And a Christ-like dimension, a sort of mysticism.’
‘The comparison with Macron is undeniable,’ Garrigues said. ‘We’ve arrived at a sort of impasse in the Fifth Republic. The failures of Sarkozy and Hollande are obvious with the rejection of them as two symbols of the political system. We’re in a period of a total breakdown in confidence between the French people and their political leaders. And those moments create the ideal conditions for the emergence of a providential man.’
On 7 May 2017, Macron triumphed in the second round of the presidential election, becoming the country’s youngest ever president in a victory that exploded the traditional parties who had run France for nearly 60 years. He inherited a deeply demoralised and divided country, in which at least half of voters saw him as a dose of plague, rather than a providential man of yore.
‘The confidence that the French people have shown in me fills me with immense energy,’ Macron said in his inaugural address at the Élysée Palace, where one of his earliest political backers, the 70-year-old mayor of the city of Lyon, Gérard Collomb, shed tears at the sight of the new leader who was nearly half his age.
‘The intimate belief that together we can write one of the most beautiful pages in our history will guide my action,’ Macron concluded. ‘At these tipping points, the French people have always known how to find the energy, the discernment and the spirit of togetherness to bring about profound change. We’re at one of those moments. It’s in the pursuit of this goal that I will humbly serve the country.’
Like his predecessors, he headed out of the Élysée Palace for the ceremonial trip up the Champs-Élysées to visit the tomb of the unknown soldier below the Arc de Triomphe, which lies at the top of the gently sloping avenue. Macron chose a military command car for his first journey as president, standing ram-rod straight at the back in a deliberate nod to the legacy and image of General de Gaulle. In his official photo, which now hangs in government buildings across the country, a volume of de Gaulle’s wartime memoirs lies open on the table behind him.
In an interview two years before he took power Macron had been asked for his view on what the French people looked for in their leaders. There was always a sense of something missing in French democracy, he said. ‘This absence is the figure of the king, whom I don’t think fundamentally the French people wanted to kill,’ Macron added, referring to the guillotining of Louis XVI, the last king before the Revolution.
Macron perhaps pondered this fact as he wandered alone around the graves of Louis XVI and his wife Marie Antoinette only hours after announcing his run for the presidency in November 2016. After firing the starting gun on his campaign, he asked to be dropped off at the Basilica of St Denis north of Paris, the final resting place for more than 70 French kings and queens.3
The problem of the Fifth Republic, according to Macron, was that since de Gaulle’s departure ‘the normalisation of the presidential figure has created an empty seat at the heart of our political life. Except that what people expect from the president is that he takes this position. This is the source of our misunderstanding.’4
As he sat on the throne of the Republic in the summer of 2017, Macron had every intention of filling that space, and of aping the regal style de Gaulle had pioneered that had fused France’s monarchical and democratic traditions. The new young president held his election night victory party amid the splendour of the Louvre, home to successive monarchs since the early 16th century including Louis XVI; two months later he called a joint meeting of parliament in the Palace of Versailles, the first time that both houses of the legislature were united there, other than at a time of a national emergency. Restoring French pride and faith in their leader would be one of the priorities of the reign of Emmanuel I.
Notes
1. Confidence survey by CEVIPOF, Sciences Po, January 2017.
2.Les Hommes Providentiels: Histoire d’une Fascination Française by Jean Garrigues, published by Seuil, 2012.
3.Un Personnage de roman by Philippe Besson, page 79, published by Julliard, 2017.
4. Interview with Le 1, 8 July 2015.
* France’s ‘First Republic’ was proclaimed in 1792 after the Revolution against the monarchy. It was short lived, but a seminal moment in European and world history, kicking off more than 200 years of instability and constitutional changes in France. There have been five Republics in total (including the current one), interspersed with periods of empire following coups by Napoleon I and his nephew Napoleon III, as well as constitutional monarchy.
CHAPTER 2
The Small-town Boy
THE MAYOR OF AMIENS, A JOLLY WOMAN CALLED BRIGITTE Fouré who is sometimes referred to as the ‘mother’ of the city by her supporters, shuffles on the edge of her seat and sucks her teeth as she ponders the local inhabitants in her corner of northeast France.
After a moment’s reflection from an armchair in her office in the city hall, the former university lecturer hits on some of the characteristics of Amiens, which is situated around half way between Paris and the Belgian border: ‘Firstly, in terms of temperament, we’re a workers’ town, so that tells you about the sociology,’ she says of the city, which is split in two by the placid waters of the river Somme.
But its once important textile industry, famed for its velour and a blue vegetable dye which helped finance the city’s dazzling gothic cathedral, has all but disappeared. Its more modern car parts companies and factories are also heading the same way, part of a broad trend of industrial decline across the surrounding Picardy region.
This is reflected in local politics, where Communist and Socialist mayors held sway for decades until the end of the 1980s, before being replaced by Fouré and her fellow centrists as the city’s economy shifted towards retail, science and higher education. Unemployment remains high here, at around 12 per cent, two points above the national average, and far higher in the poorest neighbourhoods. Worse-off areas in north-east France have shifted gradually towards the far-right National Front.
‘And I’d say the Amiénois don’t open up spontaneously,’ Fouré continues, warming to the task of analysing her electorate. ‘You need to get to know them. They won’t let you in easily. That’s probably linked to our history of war and invasions,’ she says.
Amiens is a story both of tragedy and a form of uncelebrated glory, the scene of military victories won at devastating cost. The centre of the town had to be rebuilt twice: first after a desperate and unsuccessful last-ditch German offensive in 1918 at the end of the First World War and again after its bombing and occupation in the Second World War.
The UNESCO-listed 13th-century cathedral, the largest of the gothic period in France, is visible from miles away in the flat fertile fields of the Somme floodplain, where hundreds of thousands of soldiers were slaughtered in the rain-soaked trenches of the First World War. Miraculously, the cathedral escaped major damage during the 20th-century fighting and today it is the main tourist attraction in the tastefully restored heart of the city. Trams, bicycles and pedestrians have gradually pushed out cars and trucks from its cobbled streets.
‘On the negative side, there’s also a real lack of pride and ambition here: you don’t have confidence in yourself if you’re Amiénois,’ Fouré adds of the city’s 200,000 residents. ‘It’s often people from the outside who come and say “your town is beautiful” and we’re tempted to reply “do you really think so?” I’m always fighting against this.’
Like much of France, its streets are often picturesque, mixing old-fashioned shops, bakeries and cafés alongside more modern retailers. A charming central area of canals and landscaped riverbanks draws foreign visitors who stop off here during their tours of the surrounding battlefields.
But the city’s fortunes and self-image were further undermined by the loss of Amiens’ status as regional capital in 2016, while mass layoffs announced for a factory owned by the American appliance maker Whirlpool were another blow to its brittle self-confidence. In 2014, another US multinational, tyre maker Goodyear, shut its factory here, leading trade union leaders to lock up an HR executive and a production manager at the plant for 30 hours in protest. Eight of them received jail terms afterwards for illegal confinement.
‘We sometimes have the impression that we’re only there to maintain the cemeteries and provide cannon fodder,’ Fouré adds sadly, alluding to the hundreds of neatly-tended graves throughout the Picardy region filled with servicemen, French and foreign.
Gloomy old Amiens. Even the weather, which is often overcast and rainy, seems appropriate for the place. One of its biggest claims to fame is being the one-time home of French novelist Jules Verne, the author of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (among other prescient works of science fiction), whose name has been given to the bustling modern university. Even then, most French people associate Verne with Nantes, the city of his birth.
In 2017, Amiens, a place with no recent history of producing national leaders, suddenly had a famous new son to put it on the map: Emmanuel Macron was France’s biggest political celebrity at the time of the interview with Fouré in early spring. But was the young presidential candidate, with his outsized ambition and unshakeable self-assurance, a typical local?
‘Not at all,’ Fouré said, her eyes twinkling.
Emmanuel Jean-Michel Frédéric Macron was born on 21 December 1977 at 10:40 am in the city, and spent all of his childhood here.
As he took his first breaths, the centrist president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, a man remembered now not for his ambitious plans to modernise the economy but for the social changes he pushed through in France, was mid-way through his one and only term in power.
Less than two years later, Margaret Thatcher became prime minister in Britain, and the following year Ronald Reagan was elected president in the United States, unleashing a wave of deregulation, global trade and free-market economics that would eventually hit the heavy industry of France’s north-east.
Contrarian France would take a different path from ‘lesanglosaxons’, electing as its president a Communist-backed Socialist in 1981, François Mitterrand, who nationalised the country’s banks at the same time as the Chicago school of liberal economics was finding favour in the White House and in Westminster.
The Macron family home is a short ten-minute drive to the south from the town hall, in the wealthy area of Henriville, which prospered from the 19th-century textile trade and escaped the worst of the 20th-century war damage.
Henriville boasts street after street of elegant two or three-storey homes built in terraces of red brick, which gives Amiens and the surrounding towns of north-east France their distinctive look – attractive for visitors, less so for locals, or so it seems.
It’s an image of gentle, provincial bourgeois France, a haven of middle-class comfort that is distinct from the commercial centre, the scruffier student areas of the city, or the rough neighbourhoods of north Amiens. The view at the end of the Macrons’ street offers a glimpse of the poorer side of the city. The descending lines of homes frame a distant picture of high-rise tower blocks, home to some of the city’s African-origin immigrants.
In Henriville, the terraced homes are made from the same brick as the rows of workers’ cottages that were built at the same time in other parts of the city. But the facades of the buildings here are embellished with intricate stonework, small mosaics or wrought-iron balconies. It’s not flashy and neither are the cars parked in the street, but comfortable lives are being led here by doctors, lawyers, academics or small business owners. Most homes have gardens, often behind neatly trimmed hedges.
The local café is still a simple ‘Bar Tabac’, of the sort found all over France serving coffee, beer, cigarettes and lottery cards. The décor – assorted photographs and pictures on the walls, plastic-topped tables and wooden chairs – remains predictably stuck in time. Only the cigarette packets have changed: they’re now mostly foreign and covered in a ghastly array of tumours and infections designed to put off smokers.
The owner, known as Fifi to his clients, confirms that Macron’s father, a professor at the medical university in Amiens and a neurologist who is divorced from Macron’s mother, still lives in the family home a short walk up the street. He doesn’t come to the bar though, and in any case Fifi initially says he doesn’t want to talk politics.
He leans over the local paper, the Courrier Picard, which he reads from the metal counter of the bar. ‘We, the French people, have gone completely mad, we really have,’ he says, his face lined with fatigue.
Its front page carries the horrifying story of a local three-year-old girl who was set on fire by a disturbed neighbour, while playing in front of her home in a village near the city.
Having read the report to the end, Fifi opened up a bit more about his views on France. He wouldn’t be voting in the coming election and had completely given up on the country’s politicians. ‘One bad leader you could understand, but look what’s happened to the country! It’s not getting better, it’s getting worse. Wouldn’t you think we’d have learned?’, he says. ‘It’s been 30 years, 35 years, of the same shitty policies and crisis after crisis.
‘France’s problem is work. They’ve let all the employers leave here. It’s all gone. And it’s not just the big names; before there were small companies in the local villages,’ he says.
Fifi lay much of the blame for this with the European Union, headquartered in Brussels, 200 kilometres to the northeast. ‘This “Europe” of ours: it’s great if you’ve got capital to move around – the companies love it, don’t they? It’s not meant for us, though.’
He suggested a wander up to look at the Macron home and the nearby private Catholic school, the Lycée La Providence, which Emmanuel joined at eleven, after his early years in the local state-run primary.
A client, one of only two who stopped for coffee in the otherwise empty bar, said it was the most prestigious school in the city: for the sons and daughters of anyone with money and ambition, as well as the wayward offspring of wealthy parents based in the capital. ‘Some parents send their kids there to keep them out of trouble back in Paris,’ he says.
Unlike most of the buildings in Henriville, the two-storey Macron home is detached and slightly set back from the road. Its two downstairs windows and main door open out onto a small front garden separated from the street by a black metal fence. Jean-Michel and Françoise Macron moved here when Emmanuel was a toddler, anticipating their need for more space and the arrival of his other siblings.
The couple had met in medical school in the early 1970s, falling in love after a class on neurology and marrying a year later – in church despite their lack of faith – while Françoise was four months pregnant.
After the joy and euphoria of the ceremony, their life together got off to the worst possible start. Their first baby was stillborn, a trauma felt particularly acutely by Françoise, who had specialised in paediatrics. The daughter was never named and, in the wretchedness and grief that followed, Françoise herself nearly died after contracting septicaemia.
Both in their twenties, they would only start to recover from this ordeal with the arrival of their eldest son. Macron’s father says there was no intended symbolism in their choice of name for him (Emmanuel is the messiah foreseen by the prophet Isaiah in the Old Testament), but as a baby, Emmanuel Macron was also keenly awaited, and his arrival was experienced as a mixture of happiness and deliverance from his parents’ past suffering.
‘Emmanuel’s birth was a huge joy for me after this painful period,’ Françoise acknowledged in an interview with French journalist Anne Fulda.1
He was followed by two other children. A brother, Laurent, was born two years later: sporty with brown hair and glasses, he would remain slightly in the shadow of his academically brilliant older sibling. But Laurent was a popular boy with a large group of friends. The brothers later lived together in Paris but despite this are not close. ‘I’ve never heard Emmanuel talk about him, not once,’ a friend of Macron’s in Paris, who has known him for nearly a decade, said on condition of anonymity.
Laurent, now married with three children, has never spoken to the media and barely features in Macron’s own account of his childhood. His only public appearance in support of his brother was for his inauguration. He followed his parents into medicine, becoming a cardiovascular radiologist and researcher who currently practises in a northern suburb of Paris.
Their sister Estelle, five years younger than Emmanuel, is similarly low-profile and keen to avoid the limelight. She, too, embraced the family profession and became a kidney specialist, working in the south-west city of Toulouse.
Medical careers had been a means of social ascent for both of Macron’s parents, with the previous generation of his family comprising a railway employee and road engineer as well as a teacher and social worker.
‘I’m the only one not to have taken this path,’ Macron explained in his book Révolution, a mix of autobiographical information and his political manifesto, which was published in French five months before the presidential election. ‘In no way because of an aversion to medicine, because I’ve always had a liking for the sciences. But at the time when one chooses one’s life, I wanted a world, an adventure of my own.’
In Macron’s telling, his home was a place of hard work and highbrow culture, where both of his parents had a keen appreciation of the value of education. Conversations with his parents were about literature or philosophy, but he was also subjected to ‘medical discussions for hours too, during which life in the hospital, changes in practices or research, were the subject of constant debate.’
‘Some years later, my brother Laurent … and sister Estelle … would take over,’ he writes of these discussions with what sounds like relief.2
His father was a clever, well-read but also austere presence who gave his son Greek lessons. He kept an office that was out-of-bounds for the children, in which he worked on dozens of research papers that he has published over his four-decade career. One of his specialisms is the brain, and muscular processes that control sneezing in cats. He was pictured at Macron’s inauguration wearing a bow tie.
Few of Emmanuel’s friends came to visit the family home, and he spent hours reading in his bedroom with its Peter Rabbit wallpaper. His tastes were anything but childish however, and included French classics by Molière, Camus and Jean Racine, as well as books by Guy de Maupassant and André Gide, all of which he devoured in his teens or before. Many of them were chosen for him by his maternal grandmother who made him read passages out loud at her home, including from other lesser-known authors such as the First World War surgeon Georges Duhamel, who brought to life the slaughter and suffering that had taken place in the fields around his home.
This habit of reading, picked up early in childhood, continues today, even though the demands of the presidency have compressed his free time. ‘There’s not a day when I don’t read a book,’ Macron said in early 2017.3 He reads and re-reads, naming TheRed and the Black by Stendhal as his favourite book. This 19th-century novel tells the tale of Julien Sorel, an ambitious dreamer from the French provinces, and invites obvious comparisons with Macron’s own personal story. ‘I admit a certain weakness for romantic heroes whose lives lead them into the unknown, into danger and big open spaces,’ he has said.4 Another of his favourites is the Stendhal character Fabrice del Dongo from the 1839 novel The Charterhouse of Parma, which is considered a masterpiece of French literature. Del Dongo is an Italian aristocrat who makes a life for himself first as a soldier in Napoleon’s army, and then as a priest, in a tale of intrigue and sexual frustration.
‘Literature enlightens us in every situation we find ourselves in. It names our experience. It gives substance to our lives,’ Macron explained in a newspaper interview.5
He credits the source of this passion for fiction to his mother’s mother, who lived a few streets away in Henriville and treated him as her favourite grandchild. Her home is described romantically in Révolution as a loving cocoon, a place of homework and hot chocolates, where afternoons were spent listening to Chopin’s piano concerti.
Germaine Noguès, known affectionately as Manette, had a profound and lasting influence on him during her life, with a relationship which went far beyond what most people experience of their elderly relatives. The death of this former teacher and retired headmistress from the Pyrenees mountains would lead Macron to reassess his career choices in 2013, when he briefly left politics.
‘As a child, every day I would take up the discussion that had been interrupted [the day before] and I travelled through her life as if returning to a novel,’ he wrote. Most school days he ate at her home at lunch-time instead of at the canteen, and he would return there after the end of classes for homework and reading. There were frequent overnight stays, and she would join the family for holidays together in the Pyrenees.
These summer road trips to the village of Bagnères-de-Bigorre in the shadow of snow-capped mountains were the first opportunities for the young Emmanuel to discover his country. ‘These thousands of French odysseys create the invisible map of a France that is united yet diverse, mysterious and transparent, loyal and refractory,’ he wrote in Révolution, in a breathless description of the traffic-clogged French motorways during the mass migration for the August holidays.
Among other evocative memories of Manette which feature in his book is ‘the smell of coffee that she would make sometimes in the middle of the night. And the door of my room opened at seven o’clock in the morning if I hadn’t already come to see her.’6
This bond caused jealousies between Macron’s grandmother and his parents during his childhood, particularly when the five-year-old Macron asked his parents if he could move in with Manette. This painful family dynamic was revived by the tone of Macron’s book with its distant and cool description of his immediate family, who are thanked for providing stability and safety; Manette, by contrast, is credited with firing his imagination and making him dream.
This apparently ungrateful treatment of his parents was perhaps another of Macron’s acts of quiet but forceful rebellion against them. Throughout his life he has asserted his right to personal freedom and autonomy, and as a child he appears to have selected his own guardian, emancipating himself even from his own immediate genealogy.
‘My flaw? Maybe that I’m claustrophobic,’ he said in late 2017. ‘Not in the physical sense: I don’t have any listed phobias but I’m claustrophobic about life. I can’t stand being shut in, I have to get out.’7
As well as in his relationship with Manette, he further defied his father by asking to be baptised at the age of twelve. Macron described this moment as ‘the start of a mystical period that lasted for several years’ in an interview with the magazine L’Obs (he is no longer religious). When he was sixteen, he again held out against his father’s wishes, to pursue a scandalous relationship with his teacher. And after spurning the medical path taken by everyone else in the family, he then seemed to relegate his parents to being peripheral figures in the public’s imagination.
Some observers have suggested that Macron exaggerated the personal narrative around his grandmother for political reasons, to push a story that helped in creating his unusual public identity. Manette, the literature-loving and left-wing headmistress who had an illiterate mother from the mountains, is a vivid illustration of the social mobility made possible by France’s state education system. As an obsessive student of power, Macron was acutely aware of the influence of personal storytelling on voters, both as a means for a politician to stand out from his opponents and to lend authenticity to his project. No one had done this better in recent times than US President Barack Obama, particularly in 2008, whose successful campaign Macron had followed closely. Obama’s personal story – of a black kid raised by a single mum who had been a one-time community organiser on the South Side of Chicago – echoed his core message to the American people of ‘Yes We Can!’
Macron had nothing this powerful himself, but Manette was a working-class success story, a symbol of hard work and a way for him to stress both his link to older generations and his grounding in France’s rich and sophisticated culture. His admiration appears entirely sincere. But the emphasis placed on her in his writing and his speeches was also political.
Macron’s description of his family life was clearly hurtful for Jean-Michel and Françoise, however, leading both of them to make attempts to correct perceptions encouraged by their own son. ‘No, we were not austere parents who abandoned their child to his grandmother!’ Françoise said in an interview in February 2017. ‘No, it was never a question of her adopting him.’8
‘According to some articles, Emmanuel had no family!’ she lamented in a separate interview, adding that she had always made her children a priority. ‘It’s something that I find very difficult to deal with.’9
The more reserved Jean-Michel, now divorced from Françoise and suspicious of the media and of politics in general, also spoke out in a bid to give a more rounded view of his son’s childhood. ‘He wasn’t a zombie always shut in his room!’ he told the authors Caroline Derrien and Candice Nedelec for their book Les Macron.
Emmanuel enjoyed fishing and football and played tennis at the local club over the road from his home, where paunchy businessmen and local notables can still be found today meeting for food and drinks in the clubhouse.
As well as the summer road trips to the Pyrenees, there were other holidays in exclusive Alpine ski resorts like Courchevel, or in Greece or on the dreamy Mediterranean island of Corsica, none of which are mentioned in his book.
It was an upbringing in comfort and privilege, between a private school, a home in an upmarket neighbourhood of the city and decent family holidays. He was a first child, who never wanted for support, care or attention.
Underneath the florid prose of his book and the selective airbrushing of parts of his middle-class life, there is no doubt about the depth of his feelings for his grandmother Manette. Nor about her influence on his education and politics, with her left-wing views credited by Macron as having had more influence on him than those of his more conservative father.
‘Ever since she’s gone, there isn’t a day when I don’t think about her or seek her gaze,’ Macron told the authors Bernard Pascuito and Olivier Biscaye in their book Les Politiques Aussi Ont une Mère (Politicians Also Have Mothers).10 Above all, she established a pattern that runs throughout his life: his attraction and fascination for people one, or sometimes several generations older than him.
‘He always told me that he was brought up by his grandmother,’ said Catherine Goldenstein, a 69-year-old friend who has stayed in contact with him since his time as a student in Paris. ‘As for the relationship between him and his father, I don’t think they are particularly close.’ The long-time friend from Paris said that ‘there are some people he never talks about, like his father … He’s a bit secretive.’
His embrace of Manette in his private life and political career, despite the tension caused with his parents, perhaps illustrates another characteristic. ‘I don’t think he’s ever felt indebted to anyone,’ one of his closest school friends from Amiens, Renaud Dartevelle, explained.
Dartevelle came to know Macron at the local private Catholic school La Providence – referred to as ‘la Pro’ locally – which was built during the post-war reconstruction of Amiens, less than five minutes’ walk from the Macron family home.
Its main four-storey building and accompanying annexes spread over twelve hectares stand grandly behind a three-metre metal fence, its entrance manned by security guards. Multiple playing fields, a swimming pool and auditorium offer opportunities for pupils to ‘Be, Act, Succeed and Grow’, the school’s motto. The state secondary school just next door looks tatty in comparison.
After a subscription fee, annual costs are modest compared to prestigious private schools in Britain or America – it costs a few thousand euros a year – and are adjusted depending on a family’s ability to pay.
‘There was some degree of social diversity,’ remembers Dartevelle over a glass of wine at his home in a southern suburb of Paris. ‘But were there kids from the economically less-developed areas of northern Amiens? No. And there was no racial diversity.’
Arnaud de Bretagne, a retired teacher who taught for nearly twenty years at La Providence, puts it more succinctly: ‘It’s a school whose intake comes from the local bourgeoisie.’
The religious education was limited to a few hours a week, but the school’s Jesuit philosophy encouraged pupils to take part in charitable causes like sponsored walks, to raise money for local associations.
Macron was enrolled for the high school, joining the ‘sixième’ year for pupils aged eleven to twelve. Thanks to his reading habits and a maturity beyond his years, he instantly stood out. According to his contemporaries there, he was brilliant, yet modest. Charming, yet slightly distant. Teachers fawned over him. Fellow pupils were jealous, but they found him difficult to dislike.
‘He had incredible results in everything. It was always between eighteen and twenty [out of twenty] in every subject,’ remembers Dartevelle. ‘If you got a better score than Emmanuel it was the event of the year. It was always like that.’
De Bretagne, who taught him geography and history in his final year at the school, recalls a pupil of ‘enormous ability, but nice and well-liked by his contemporaries.’
Another teacher, Léonard Ternoy, who taught Latin and French to Macron, said his praise for the cultured and naturally curious pupil caused tensions at home. Macron would often come to chat to him in private after class. ‘My daughter was in the school too and she got tired of hearing about him,’ he said. ‘There was some jealousy I think.’ For Macron, managing his evident difference and superiority over his classmates was a social challenge. From a young age he appears to have adopted a strategy: conceal and joke. Only share the parts of his life that were necessary or relevant, while deploying humour and his toothy smile for self-effacement. He would take the same approach throughout his life, charming many people in the process but leaving others with a sense that they do not fully know or understand him.
