One can only admire Emmanuel Macron’s poise and aplomb as he performs his ceremonial duties, addresses his people from the Elysée, and postures on the world stage. For as former minister Pierre Lellouche remarked recently, Macron is not a statesman but an actor, a shameless showman whose grand gestures meet a momentary need but who gives no thought to crafting the coherent policies and strategies that would convert words into actions.
There is no denying that Macron excels at glad-handing, putting people at their ease, and embracing foreign dignitaries as if they were his closest friends. For the writer Renaud Camus, who adheres to an older tradition of courtesy and formality, Macron’s presumptively intimate grasps of his victims’ bodies are more akin to groping. But it is Macron who is the more in tune with the times, and whose affectionate buddying up with Trump on his arrival at the Elysée this afternoon for the re-opening of Notre-Dame – an impressive display of double handed shakes, hand clasps, one-armed hugs, embraces and fist pumps ensued – symbolised a diplomatic coup for France. Trump cannot have forgotten that it was the French under Macron who, unlike the British, accorded him a full state visit last time round.
However, whereas De Gaulle regarded democracy as the rule ‘of the people by the people’ and resigned as president when his party lost its majority in the French National Assembly, Macron sees himself as an emperor who embodies the state – L’État, c’est moi – and whose people exist to serve him, as they did Louis XIV. So, when Michel Barnier’s minority centre-right coalition government fell on Wednesday, Macron’s centrist party having been reduced to a rump of 159 out of 577 seats in July’s snap National Assembly elections, it was only natural that, in his address to the nation the next day, Macron should wash his hands of any personal responsibility. That it was Macron who provoked the current political paralysis, by needlessly dissolving the Assembly in a fit of pique at the triumph of Marine Le Pen’s ‘far right’ Rassemblement National in June’s European elections, was passed over. Instead, he labelled the populist parties of the left and right who would not support his centrist coalition as ‘anti-Republican’ – the epithet ‘Republican’ (a proxy for reasonable and respectable) being reserved exclusively for the minority of voters and their representatives who supported Macron’s coalition. And yet it is Macron’s centrist elitist liberalism that has, over the past seven years, brought France to the brink of social, economic and financial collapse.
In his speech to the assembled dignitaries at Notre-Dame this evening, Macron spoke eloquently, as he always does on these grand ceremonial occasions, of what this magnificent cathedral, risen from the ashes, its great bells pealing once again, means to France. But after seven years of Macron’s presidency, it is France and its culture – the genius that Notre-Dame represents – that are under threat as never before. De Gaulle famously said that although the Republic was secular, France was Christian. But both are collapsing under the forces of global liberalism and mass immigration, and the Islamism these have unleashed, presided over by a detached and complacent liberal elite.
