Presidential campaigns in France are moments of intense individual soul-searching and collective effervescence, and as such provide compelling insights into French ways of thinking. All the more so that a French presidential contest rarely gets bogged down in empirical trivialities: it is a profoundly metaphysical exercise, concerned with existential questions of representation, incarnation and destiny. In May 2017, the victory of Emmanuel Macron is that of an insurgent candidate who swept away the French establishment, presenting himself as the modern symbol of provincial republican meritocracy, and enduring French ideals of progress, rationalism and fraternity. Notwithstanding the complaints about Charles de Gaulle’s republican monarchy, his messianic vision of the presidency as “la rencontre d’un homme et un peuple” continues to captivate the national imagination.

I experienced this fervour at one of Macron’s final Parisian rallies at Bercy in mid-April. The hall was crammed with 20,000 enthusiasts, with thousands watching on giant screens outside. Many were carrying copies of his pamphlet Révolution, the En Marche! version of the Little Red Book. The peuple Macronien is overwhelmingly young, urban, employed and educated. In conversation, they express their severe disillusionment with “the system”, but also their real sense of hope: for many, this is their first ever engagement with politics, and they are brimming with confidence both about themselves and France’s future; the safeguarding of European unity in the post-Brexit context also comes up repeatedly. Their embrace of Macron is passionate: one lady speaks of a “coup de foudre”. As soon as their hero appears on stage, this charisma is palpable. With his careful elocution, radiant energy and repeated invocation of his “amour” for his fellow compatriots, he is a classically nineteenth-century figure, combining the earnestness of a republican schoolteacher with the mysticism of a Saint-Simonian preacher. His speech provokes outbursts of acclamation from his fans; the frequency of applause is greater at a Macron meeting than at any of his rivals. There is an affectionate complicité, too, between the orator and his supporters: the philosophy-trained Macron is a devotee of Descartes’s sceptical method, and frequently uses the expression “en même temps” to juggle with opposing ideas, or qualify his adhesion to a particular view. The first time he does so at Bercy, the crowd bursts into laughter, followed by the candidate.

“La chance”, Napoleon once remarked, is the essential quality in a general, and Macron ended his Bercy speech by acknowledging his good fortune. The elimination or non-particpation of all the heavyweights on the Right and Left (Sarkozy, Juppé, Hollande, Valls), the self-inflicted blows which destroyed Fillon’s campaign, and the Socialists’ designation of a well-meaning but hopelessly amateurish candidate: all worked to his advantage, without his needing to lift a finger. But it was not all down to luck: Macron proved to be a formidable political operator from the outset. When he founded his En Marche! movement in April 2016, he reassured his mentor François Hollande that it was just a youth movement, whose primary purpose was to buttress the latter’s presidential re-election campaign. As a centrist, Macron was also ideally positioned to take advantage of the quirks of the French electoral system. As the race tightened in the final weeks, more than half of Hollande’s 2012 electors rallied to him on the first round (what the French call the vote utile), and millions of voters from Right and Left came over on the second ballot, distraught by the prospect of a Front National victory. Daniel Cordier, the veteran French Resistance hero, spoke for them all when he declared that a Marine Le Pen presidency would be “monstrous”.

Macron’s election is symptomatic of the advanced decomposition of the traditional French party system, which he has helped to precipitate. But old intellectual habits and frames of reference die hard, and the 2017 campaign demonstrated, if anything, the resilience of classic Gallic ways of thinking. Candidates compensated for the collapse of the traditional division between Left and Right with a furious deployment of abstractions such as democracy, sovereignty, identity and humanism. The French love of dichotomies was honoured, too, with a veritable deluge of binary oppositions: insiders were pitted against outsiders, the people against the oligarchies, the forces of good against the agents of evil, and, in the finale, Macron’s vision of an open European patriotism against Marine Le Pen’s closed nationalism. The electoral outcome revealed a further set of fractures: between the relatively prosperous and upwardly mobile cities and large towns, which massively followed Macron, and the declining peripheral and rural parts of the country, which backed Marine Le Pen. This caesura is reinforced by a geographical divide, with the deindustrialized north-east, the east, and the Mediterranean territories endorsing the Front National candidate, while Macron’s support is concentrated across the western flank of France, in the departments of Rhône, Isère and Savoie, as well as in Paris (where he won 90 per cent of the vote on the second round). France thus remains coupée en deux, and the cognitive dissonance between these two worlds is perhaps greater even than that which used to separate the Left and the Right.

These polarized world views were further reflected in the intellectual contrast between the ideal of regeneration and threat of decadence. The optimistic candidates – Macron, the radical leftist Jean-Luc Mélenchon, and to some extent François Fillon – all painted an image of a positively transformed France; in so doing, they drew on the rhetoric of regeneration, one of the pillars of French thought since the eighteenth century. The language of Marine Le Pen, however, was entirely apocalyptic, denouncing the nation’s “submission” (a nod to Michel Houellebecq’s novel), holding up the prospect of a civil war, and the dispossession of Frenchness by an unholy combination of immigrants, Islamists, cosmopolitan capitalists and European bureaucrats. The Front National’s success further fuelled the French penchant for conspiracy theories, which were never more spectacularly on display than in 2017. Le Pen’s Eurosceptic rhetoric was often tinged with wild allusions to the secret agendas of Brussels and Berlin; and her heavy-handed references to Macron’s former employment as a Rothschild banker encouraged scores of internet trolls to lambast him as the agent of an international Jewish conspiracy. Even the hapless Fillon joined in the conspirationist frenzy, claiming to be the victim of an occult “cabinet noir” orchestrated from the Élysée Palace.

This glaring absence of a strategic vision ultimately brought Marine Le Pen down. She fought a rambling, incoherent campaign, veering between the populist themes of welfare protection and denunciation of financial oligarchies on the one hand, and classic hardline Frontist arguments against immigration, insecurity and the “Islamic threat” on the other. During the second round, she rarely forced Macron onto the defensive – except on one occasion, when she showed up unannounced at a factory in Amiens threatened with relocation to Poland, just as her opponent was holding discussions with its trade union representatives. Her agreement with the maverick Eurosceptic candidate Nicolas Dupont-Aignan, anointed as her Prime Minister-designate, failed to create any positive dynamic among mainstream conservative politicians. Marine Le Pen’s presidential hopes were effectively dashed on the night of the second-round debate, when her hectoring and ghoulish performance provoked widespread revulsion among French viewers – including many who were considering voting for her. In that one fatal, self-destructive moment, she wiped away years of efforts to “normalize” her party; perhaps the spirit of her estranged father came back to haunt her, reminding her that vulgarity, extremism and xenophobia are indelibly inscribed in the Front National’s genetic code.

The candidate who stole the show during the 2017 campaign was Mélenchon. His too was a full-blooded populism, but it was a creative, imaginative and optimistic variant, in stark contrast with Le Pen’s morbidity; indeed he played a critical role in containing the Front National’s surge. Mélenchon won the most votes among the 18–24-year cohort, not least through his ingenious use of new technologies. He spoke simultaneously at multiple rallies, thanks to the projection of his holographic image; he created his own YouTube channel, and his supporters produced an entertaining video game called Fiscal Kombat, which raises funds for Mélenchon’s redistributive policies by literally shaking down agents of global financial capitalism such as the IMF head Christine Lagarde. He combined these innovations with an appeal to traditional republican ideals such as social justice and peace. He was the only candidate who talked about poverty and homelessness in France, and he began his meeting in Marseille by getting the crowd of 90,000 to observe a minute’s silence for the migrants who had drowned while trying to cross over into Europe from North Africa. It was an extraordinarily moving moment.

In the final month before the election, Mélenchon’s posters seemed everywhere in my Parisian neighbourhood. I also overheard him being discussed in my local park, and on the bus and metro; a Socialist friend anxiously asked me how best to convince her daughter not to vote for him, and five successive taxi drivers waxed lyrical about his intellectual qualities (as one of them put it to me: “he is our Victor Hugo”). Mélenchon is the perfect symbol of radical French intellectualism: he speaks in the name of the disenfranchised, and his rhetoric is peppered with allusions to Rousseau and the French revolutionary tradition (his campaign pamphlet was entitled De la Vertu). His rallies attracted huge crowds across France, and he electrified his audiences as much by his lyrical eloquence and his wit as by his vitriolic denunciation of economic inequality. Yet Mélenchon’s contradictions attest to the persisting French cult of the paradoxical: for here was an outsider who had spent much of his political career in the gilded halls of the French Senate; a fiery advocate of revolutionary citizenship whose speeches were studded with allusions to de Gaulle and Mitterrand; and a lifelong anti-Front National republican crusader who obstinately, and somewhat sullenly, refused to endorse Macron in the run-off.

There will be no honeymoon period for Macron. Indeed, he faces immediate and pressing challenges, beginning with the campaign for the June legislative elections. He cannot govern without a parliamentary majority, and he will hope that the traditional presidential coat-tails effect will work in his favour. French voters normally give their new president a parliamentary majority. But these are not normal times, and incumbent MPs across France will put up a stiff fight, especially as they will face En Marche! candidates who will often be political novices. Even if Macron is able to forge a stable progressive coalition, with the help of Socialists and centrists, he will then have to deliver on reducing unemployment, promoting economic growth, tackling poverty, and bringing back into the fold of the Republic the millions of men and women who live on the periphery and in the urban banlieues, and who feel abandoned by the system. It is a Herculean task.

Restoring public confidence in France’s bedraggled political elites will be Macron’s greatest challenge. How he meets it is hard to anticipate, not least because he is aspiring to write a new page in the history of presidential leadership. Moreover, running a good campaign is no guarantee of a successful presidency, as highlighted by the cases of Sarkozy and Hollande – in hindsight, the latter’s 2012 victory proved to be his greatest achievement. But there are encouraging signs. Macron is young, fiercely determined and energetic: he gets by with a few hours’ sleep. He is indebted to no one for his success, and is not surrounded by mediocre sycophants, like traditional French party leaders: so, he will be able to appoint to key positions on merit. He absorbs information at a prodigious rate, possesses great reserves of emotional intelligence and is an excellent listener. He may be a pragmatist, but he has strong convictions, notably on Europe – as Mrs May and her B-list Brexit ministers will soon find out. He is also committed to strengthening France’s republican civic culture, notably by opening up a constructive dialogue about France’s colonial past, in order both to recognize the flawed aspects of this heritage and address its social consequences in contemporary French society. His conception of laïcité is open and inclusive, and he commands respect among France’s ethnic minorities for his denunciation of racism and discrimination, and his refusal to equate the actions of a few deluded jihadists with the values of the Islamic community as a whole.

Macron’s sober victory speech shows that he understands the scale of the task ahead, and that his compatriots have yet fully to embrace him in their hearts. A quarter of the electorate abstained on the second round, and a sizeable chunk of his own support came from people who voted against his opponent, rather than for him: a vote de raison. He has learned, however, from the mistakes of his recent predecessors. No rash promises have been made to the electorate, and unlike the hyperactive Sar¬kozy, he will not try to meddle in every aspect of policy-making: as he declared at Bercy: “I want a president who presides, and a government which governs”. Nor will he commit Hollande’s blunders of gossiping endlessly with journalists, and trying to pass himself off as a regular bloke. As illustrated by the solemn choreography at the Louvre pyramid on Sunday night, he appreciates that presidential authority needs elevation, and even a touch of grandeur. In these respects, and above all in his ambition to heal the divisions of his anxious and fractured nation, Macron strikes an alluringly Gaullian note.

Paris, May 9, 2017

courtesy : "The Times Literary Supplement", 9 May 2017