My Evening with Dominique

I had an unusual opportunity for an American the other day, to pass an evening in the company of former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin. I wasn’t alone with him, to be sure. I was one of four contributors to the European magazine Le Grand Continent who took part in a roundtable discussion with him at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. The subject was the manifesto he just published in the magazine: “Le pouvoir de dire non.” And then I attended a dinner in his honor with about a dozen others. But I did have a chance to talk to him, and to observe him up close.

At age 71, de Villepin has long been considered one of the last real Gaullists on the French political scene: Gaullist in the sense of a politician whose views, while generally conservative, don’t fit neatly into any single ideological category and are pervaded by an almost religious devotion to “a certain idea of France.” Born in French Morocco to a family of the grande bourgeoisie, he attended the elite École Nationale d’Administration and began his career in the Foreign Ministry before becoming a close advisor to Jacques Chirac. As Chirac’s Foreign Minister in 2003 he received international attention for his fiery speech at the United Nations denouncing the American invasion of Iraq. He served as Chirac’s last Prime Minister from 2005 to 2007, trying to manage a series of difficult social conflicts. Last year marked a return to public prominence, when strong denunciations of Israel won him unexpected popularity on the French left. He is now spoken of as a possible presidential candidate in 2027, and the manifesto was clearly meant as a possible campaign document. Along the way he has published many books, including on French history, and volumes of poetry.

He has a striking physical presence: tall, spry, handsome, with an impressive mane of white hair and lively eyes. He has a strong voice and exceptional energy. He spoke for most of the hour-and-a-half set aside for the discussion and then dominated the dinner. He has the sort of verbal felicity that France’s elite educational institutions do such a remarkable job of teaching. In response to a question about Russia’s war on Ukraine, he spoke for over half an hour without a break and without notes, in perfect grammatical sentences, essentially extemporizing a lecture on his own experience negotiating with Vladmir Putin, on Russia’s geopolitical position (especially its rivalry with China), and on how Donald Trump’s election had changed things. There are plenty of American politicians who can give a great speech with a teleprompter, starting with Barack Obama, but none who come close to Villepin in off-the-cuff speaking ability. He very much loves the sound of his own voice—but then, what politician does not? And his expressive ability extends to his writing. At one point he said that he had written the entire 48-page, single-spaced manifesto by himself, in just two days. I don’t doubt it.

The manifesto is full of gracefully eloquent sentences, and many of them sound surprisingly left-wing, coming from an old Gaullist and Chiraquien: “The world is shuddering under the weight of its own excesses… Capitalism has tried to give every object and every gesture a measurable value… everything if for sale, everything is monetized…” He sums up his message this way: “We have the power to say No to the exhaustion of the planet, the return of imperial mindsets, to this Age of Iron in which war again becomes something ordinary, to the rise of authoritarianism and democratic resignation.” During the discussion, Le Grand Continent’s founder Gilles Gressani called Villepin, only half in jest, an “eco-Gaullist.” The only area where Villepin sounded more center-right was in his denunciation of “la politique identitaire”—the deriving of positions from a perceived identity rather than from rational discussion. While he included voters for the extreme right parties in this camp (the identity in question presumably being white French), there was also a strong echo of the by-now decades-old current of French thought directed against “communitarianism,” especially of the Muslim variety, because it is allegedly corrosive to a collective national identity.

Both in person and on paper (well, pixels), Villepin was long on eloquence and moral exhortation, but short on specifics. The voice was warm, insistent, and urging, with more than a touch of the pulpit to it. In the manifesto, the verbs devoir and falloir (both meaning “must”) abounded. But what should France do, concretely, to protect planetary resources, fight authoritarianism, and reverse “democratic resignation”? It wasn’t always clear. Villepin knows well that concrete proposals spur more opposition than grand generalizations. That said, he has promised a second installment of the manifesto, so perhaps specifics are forthcoming. For the moment, the principal, depressing message I took from the manifesto is that Europe has to act independently from the US and take the lead in fighting climate change and resisting authoritarianism. He is not the only person saying this, of course, but he says it very well.

I only had the chance to ask him two questions. The first, about political leadership, he didn’t answer, going off instead on a somewhat windy tangent. But towards the end I could not resist asking him how the sort of people who form the base of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally—or MAGA, for that matter—might react to his manifesto. Wouldn’t they simply dismiss his talk of limits as a hoax, his warnings about authoritarianism as a lie, and his vision of the future as a fantasy, all designed to keep people like them subservient to elitists like him? Here, in a lecture hall in one of the country’s top educational institutions, he had a favorable audience. But how would he speak to people in a “zinc du Pas-de-Calais,” a neighborhood bar in the heart of Le Pen’s constituency? His response, essentially, was that there was no talking to people there. They had substituted “la politique identitaire” for rational debate. He then quickly added that the important point is to show them, with policies that actually helped them, that the existing system is not their enemy. They can be brought back into the fold. That second part of the answer was inspiring. But the first part reminded me uncomfortably of Hillary Clinton’s remark about Donald Trump’s “deplorables.” It is too easy to dodge debate with people you don’t like by calling their position “la politique identitaire.” Just a little too easy to use that label, while insisting that you, by contrast, are speaking from your heart and your experience (nothing identitaire about that, surely). The effort to talk to people who vote for the extreme right has to be made, as politicians like Bernie Sanders have shown in the US, with some success. Plus, not doing so simply increases resentment against the social and educational elites of which Villepin is himself such a classic representative.

Could Villepin make a strong run for the French presidency? My guess at this point would be no. His old allies in the party descended from the Gaullists (the Republicans) mostly see him as having moved too far left, while the progressives drawn to his stances on the environment and the Middle East probably see him as still too fundamentally conservative and old school. And he is, again, widely viewed as an ultra-elite product of the École Nationale d’Administration at a moment when loathing of another such figure, President Emmanuel Macron, remains close to an all-time high. But strange things happen in politics. And, at 71, Dominique de Villepin is seven years younger than Donald Trump.