The French Exception

Emmanuel Macron – The Extraordinary Rise and Risk

Adam Plowright

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781785783111
• eBook ISBN:
  9781785783128
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

'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?

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 underpinn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Lost Glory
• Chapter 2: The Small-town Boy
• Chapter 3: Lonely and Lovestruck
• Chapter 4: ENA – Elite Networks Appear
• Chapter 5: Marriage and Machinations
• Chapter 6: The Banker
• Chapter 7: Ahead of the Pack
• Chapter 8: Into the Spotlight
• Chapter 9: The Precocious Minister
• Chapter 10: Presidential Dreams
• Chapter 11: On The Move
• Chapter 12: The Planets Align
• Chapter 13: A Path to Victory
• Chapter 14: Rumours and Russians
• Chapter 15: A Vision for France
• Chapter 16: Mightier than Le Pen?
• Chapter 17: Election Day Nerves
• Chapter 18: President Macron
• Chapter 19: The Regicidal Monarchists
• Chapter 20: Into Big Open Spaces
• Acknowledgements
• Index
• About the Author
• Copyright