Macron's Fatal Misreading of History

Next Monday, the French government is almost certain to fall, pushing France into a renewed political crisis. Since the elections called by President Emmanuel Macron in the summer of 2024, the country has stumbled along with a hopelessly divided parliament and minority governments that only survived thanks to the tacit support of the far-right National Rally. With the Rally now having abandoned that policy, plus a deepening budget crisis, and a wave of strikes threatened for the autumn, it is an open question whether the situation can continue, and whether a new Prime Minister can succeed Élisabeth Borne, Gabriel Attal, Michel Barnier and François Bayrou as the fifth occupant of the office in just over three years. There are many reasons for the crisis, but a central one is Macron’s arrogant refusal to take seriously some basic history lessons.

Just as Charles de Gaulle had a “certain idea of France,” so Macron has long had a certain idea of the French presidency—an ill-founded one. In a famous 2015 interview, riffing off Claude Lefort, he spoke of the sense of “incompleteness” that inescapably afflicts democratic societies. In France, he continued, “this absence is the figure of the king.” De Gaulle, he added, managed to fill the void with the monarchical presidency he created for the Fifth Republic, but, in subsequent decades, “the normalization of the presidency again created an empty seat at the heart of political life.” As a candidate in 2017 and then as a newly elected president, Macron promised to undo this “normalization” by governing in a “Jupiterian” manner. And ever since, he has shown enormous irritation when his fellow citizens have treated him as a mere politicien rather than as a regal figure floating high above the political fray, taking magisterial charge of the nation’s destiny.

Unfortunately, you can’t play the king merely by striking a pose. France’s actual kings benefitted from possessing the blood of legendary ancestors, an office shrouded in ancient mystique, and a bevy of bishops testifying to their status as God’s anointed. Macron owed his assumption of the presidency to rather more banal qualities: his talent for competitive exams, his ability to flatter and impress powerful patrons (he was nicknamed a “dragueur de vieux”), and his good timing, appearing a fresh face in a political field dominated by tired ones. These were useful political skills, but not exactly the stuff of which majesty is made. Had he thought about his country’s history with a little more humility, he might have realized that the sort of presidential role de Gaulle envisaged cannot be conferred by election alone but has to be won by extraordinary service and heroism like de Gaulle’s own. For unheroic figures like Macron, the presidency will always be inescapably “normal.”

Since his first presidential campaign—for which he wrote a manifesto entitled Révolution—Macron has also positioned himself as a unifying, centrist figure, “ni droite ni gauche.” During that campaign, after taking a position on one side of the political spectrum, he would reflexively, almost as a tic, add “en même temps…” and explain that the counter-argument had its merits as well. He meant to present himself as moving beyond exhausted ideological divisions, but in truth he was following in one of the oldest traditions of French politics. Since the end of the Terror in 1794, nearly every single French regime has attempted to position itself as centrist and unifying, valuing technocratic expertise more than radical ideological prescriptions. Yes, there have been exceptions: the Restoration’s reactionary turn under Charles X; the first months of the Second Republic; the Paris Commune; Vichy; Mitterrand’s first years in office. But even if you throw in part of the history of the Third Republic, the years of strongly ideological tilt are still dwarfed, numerically, by the years of professed centrism. And as Pierre Serna has argued in his book La République des girouettes, the turn towards the “extreme center” has most often involved a reliance on an overly powerful executive. Macron is of course no Bonaparte, but he has used article 49.3 of the constitution, which allows him to enact certain legislative measures without the consent of the Assembly, more extensively than any of his Fifth Republic predecessors. And while he initially raised hopes that he might draw creatively on both right and left-wing ideas while in office, in practice he has followed a predictable conservative program, aimed above all at loosening aspects of the French social safety net to make the country more economically productive and to put it on a sounder fiscal footing.

If Macron had studied history more carefully, and with less of an eye towards his own aggrandizement, he might have recognized a humbling fact. The political success he has had owes nothing to his posing as an elected monarch and little to his centrism. Rather, it comes above all from being seen as the best bet for keeping the political extremes out of office. He has not been “ni droite ni gauche” so much as “ni Le Pen ni Mélenchon.” In the years before his first election, the Socialist Party fell into a state of utter collapse, and the neo-Gaullist Républicains did not do much better. Meanwhile, the thuggish Jean-Luc Mélenchon appropriated much of the former left-wing electorate for his La France Insoumise and Marine Le Pen attempted with considerable success to “de-demonize” the National Rally founded by her racist, antisemitic father with the help of a former member of the Waffen SS. With each election, Le Pen seemed to do a bit better. In 2017, Macron looked like the best bet to bar the extreme right’s road to power. To the extent he could pose as anything like a de Gaulle-like savior, it was as the because of his ability to block Le Pen’s route to the Élysée Palace.

Unfortunately, since his 2022 reelection, Macron has been failing at this basic task, and with his centrist austerity policies gaining little support, the result has been a catastrophic fall in his popularity levels. In the parliamentary election that immediately followed the presidential one, the National Rally gained more seats than any extreme right party since the nineteenth century. Then, in June 2024 the Rally came in first in the European elections. It was this shock that prompted Macron, disastrously, to call new parliamentary elections, resulting in the hung Assembly and governments that survived only with Le Pen’s tacit support. Worse, although the single largest bloc in the Assembly came from the New Popular Front that briefly united the different factions of the left (including La France Insoumise), Macron refused to choose a Prime Minister from its ranks, preferring Barnier, one of the most conservative figures in the neo-Gaullist Republicans. The decision only further alienated groups on the left who might have given him grudging support.

And now the government looks poised to fall again. Le Pen herself cannot run for either the Assembly or the presidency, thanks to her conviction in a fraud case involving no-show jobs for her party in the European parliament. But that conviction has done much to galvanize her supporters, and she has a second—the charismatic young Jordan Bardella—who can run in her place.

Le Pen herself now says her goal is to force Macron’s resignation and a new presidential election in which Bardella could run (or she herself if a court reverses the ban on her candidacy). Macron has repeatedly said he will not resign, regardless of what happens in the Assembly. Unfortunately, the resulting political chaos could be so severe that regardless of whether he stays, the National Rally could end up with a commanding lead heading into the next presidential election.

Here is a history lesson that Macron might consider (but won’t). In 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte returned to power from exile, after a decade and a half of ruinous war and authoritarian rule. In order to rebuild popular support, he tilted strongly to the left, revising the constitution of his First Empire in a more democratic direction. He did not, of course, succeed in holding on to power, thanks to the British and Prussian armies at Waterloo. But he did regain enough support on the left to leave Bonapartism a potent political force for the next several decades in France—enough to allow his nephew Louis-Napoleon to ride his legend to power (on this, see Sudhir Hazareesingh’s excellent The Legend of Napoleon).

If Macron wants to avoid going down in history as the man who allowed the National Rally to come to power, he might consider that he is overdue for an “en même temps” shift from the exhausted center-right to the moderate left, and put together a coalition that ranges from the left of the Républicains across to the Socialists, and that might even tempt some of the more reasonable insoumis to wriggle out of Mélenchon’s stifling embrace. If he were to promise to name a moderate left Prime Minister, he might shake up the political scene sufficiently to make the risk of new parliamentary elections worthwhile.

But will he do this? Doubtful. Far more likely, recent history is likely to repeat itself over the next few months, and not in a good way.