On Friday evening, with France braced for more of the protests that have violently disrupted the nation, Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte were otherwise engaged: swaying to the music of Céline Dion in the VIP section of a sold-out concert hall in Nanterre, west of Paris, where they were captured on camera. It was a Macron Antoinette moment that has dominated social media as the world watched chaos spread through the country.
Unrest had been brewing for a month, starting with firm but polite protests by schoolteachers at Lycée Saint-Exupéry in Créteil, south-east of Paris over grievances shared by teachers and families across the country. Three-quarters of French lycées are over 50 years old, and many are in a dire state of disrepair. Staff are thinly stretched, poorly remunerated, and often paid late.
Within two weeks — lightning-fast for the cumbersome, centralised Ministry of Education — some of the Saint-Exupéry demands were met. But a torch had been lit, and across the nation, further protests stirred.
The French secondary school system was long one of the best in Europe. Forty years ago, unless you were a devout Catholic, you would only send your child to a private school if they had flunked the state lycée. Yet standards have now slipped so catastrophically that, at baccalauréat level, when students are typically 18, many pupils make egregious spelling and grammatical mistakes, have not attained a high level of numeracy, and cannot understand novels or plays written half a century ago, let alone at the time of Molière. The teenagers who were soon to be marching in towns across the country knew they would struggle to find jobs, let alone homes of their own.
- The Macrons at a Céline Dion concert, dancing while Paris was looted. (TikTok)
This generation has many more reasons to worry: not only today’s cost of living, but threats to France’s generous and unsustainable pay-as-you-go pension system, as well as the expensive ground war at the edge of a declining continent, the politics of resentment fostered by populists of the Right and the Left, and the ballooning national debt. Viewed by creditors as an increasing default risk, France is now borrowing at higher rates than even Italy. All these problems have whipped up a nation that was already fractured.
It was fracturing when, in 2017, Emmanuel Macron became president. He had appeared practically out of nowhere, brought into the cabinet of Socialist president François Hollande, despite not being an MP, to serve as economy minister. Macron then betrayed Hollande, running for the presidency as a charismatic wunderkind, but also a mandarin — as a graduate of the École nationale d’administration, he was perceived as someone who could fix things the French technocratic way. But, as it turned out, he couldn’t.
During the presidential campaign, Macron faced Marine Le Pen in a televised debate. She waded through binders of notes, lost in the hail of figures he was mercilessly lobbing at her. Macron destroyed her and won the election, thus overcoming, if only temporarily, the French public’s dislike of elites. Having created his own party, he found himself with a houseful of novice MPs who gloried in being “amateurs”, leaving him a free hand.
Macron has since been described by the commentator Daniel Foubert as “a man who thinks he’s Jupiter but governs like a McKinsey intern who accidentally became emperor”. In a crucial decade, this was exactly what the nation did not need. He spent time lecturing Europe from the grandest lecture hall at the Sorbonne, promising to turn France into La Start-Up Nation and birth a new generation of French tech “unicorns”.
It took barely 18 months for the first mass protests to erupt. They were led by the Gilets Jaunes, who objected to fuel taxes and new speed limits on the roads they used for work commutes and school runs. By the autumn of 2018, Macron’s effigy was hanging from roundabouts across the bleak industrial areas of a country he didn’t seem ever to have visited.
His response was more long speeches. He delivered them to the nation on television, and to halls of “representative citizens” (assemblies weeded to exclude known troublemakers). He had also told an unemployed youngster that he, Macron, could “cross the street and find [him] a job immediately”; a remark as infamous as the occasion when, as economy minister in 2014, he told a group of textile workers from a factory in receivership that they were illiterate and therefore unemployable.
Increasingly violent marches threatened both provincial préfectures and the Elysée Palace in Paris. But in 2020, Covid froze the entire situation for long enough that people’s grievances were refocused on the new rules introduced to stop them spreading the virus. Eventually, the pandemic passed. Facing Marine Le Pen a second time, Macron won re-election in 2022.
But this background noise never disappeared, and that is what explains Saturday’s terrifying breakdown. Macron thought he had sailed through one storm after another: in fact they added up to a reckoning. The more he considered himself TINA — There Is No Alternative (to moi) — and cooked up the concept of the Front Républicain designed to prevent Le Pen (l’horrible fasciste) from ever coming to power through alliances between his party and just enough of the soft Left, the more he believed himself invincible.
Like every politico heady with the sound of his own voice, and bored with thankless domestic affairs, he recast himself as a foreign policy maven. But all his posturing on the world stage only broadcast to French voters that they had never really interested him. And it also signalled to France’s disenfranchised minorities that there was no man of iron will in the Elysée palace, only one of passing fancies.
The violence that erupted on Saturday was predictable; what was shocking was its concentrated intensity. Ever since a 22-year-old student of Algerian origin called Malik Oussekine died after a police beating during student protests in Paris in 1986 — triggering peaceful marches across France as well as violent demonstrations — every interior minister, Left or Right, has restrained police action for fear that a fatality might trigger race riots.
It didn’t always prevent them. In 2005, when Nicolas Sarkozy was President Chirac’s interior minister, he had to contend with three weeks of riots after two adolescents from the banlieus, trying to escape the police, hid in an electricity substation and were electrocuted. In 2023, an adolescent driving without a licence tried to evade a police check and was shot. The same banlieues erupted once more.
French judges and civil servants, Left-leaning by habit and inclination, have learnt little. They often refuse to sentence offenders, arguing the grotesquely overcrowded French prison system doesn’t “rehabilitate” anyone. They, like Macron, have read Michel Foucault, and can blame him for their skewed view of incarceration. The rioters and looters, who have not read Foucault, have been much cannier. They have learnt that, by and large, they will be spared real punishment if they can pass themselves off as victims. The many shopkeepers and workers whose livelihoods were destroyed or stolen on Saturday are conveniently forgotten, wreathed in a cloud of compensation promises that can take years, and lawsuits, to materialise as actual payments.
Last night, both Marine Le Pen and Emmanuel Macron spoke to the nation once more. She stole a march by going first, at 6pm. Gone were her binders of notes and her fluster: she sat behind a desk, a French flag behind her, president-like, and spoke with authority. She didn’t offer solutions, but she didn’t have to. While looting was still taking place on city streets, she talked of a “profound crisis of trust and authority posing a threat to democracy”, which was both true and deeply ironic (Macron had kept her out of power by portraying her as the threat to democracy). Then, two hours later, Macron began his personal struggle session, managing to sound utterly unrepentant, while promising to create an online “platform” where students and teachers could express their grievances — which rather suggested that he hadn’t really been listening to them at all.
While Le Pen called out Jean-Luc Mélenchon — he and his France Unbowed party had repeatedly told crowds of supporters in the very banlieues where they had been cultivating the ethnic vote that violence “could be legitimate” — Macron would speak only vaguely of “unrestrained violence”. Le Pen was the one sounding decisive and presidential, while he could only deploy that peculiar hollow diction of his, better suited to the Comédie-Française. After a decade of long and empty speeches, how appropriate that he should take his bow with another one. With only six months of this dilettante’s presidency left, he leaves France in flames, her streets echoing with the sound of shattering glass and the hooting of the mob. Emerging from the ruins, others are preparing to claim the future.
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