Wearing the yellow vests was a stroke of political genius. The protesters were saying, in effect: “We have been forgotten or ignored by the insolent, thriving France of the big cities. From now on, we will be highly visible.” The bib — which French motorists have to carry by law in their cars — gave the protesters a uniform and a sense of camaraderie. Like almost everything about the Gilets Jaunes, that proved to be misleading.

The protesters quarrelled from the beginning. France would be a better place, they said, if there were no politicians. The people would govern directly through perpetual referenda. Anyone who emerged as a Gilets Jaunes leader was suspected of wanting to be a “politician” and insulted and rejected. They tried to invent a kind of non-ideological anarchism but could never agree what that meant.

Protest became insurrection. At the movement’s peak, in late 2018 and early 2019, the Gilets Jaunes briefly threatened the institutions of the French state. The Elysée Palace was besieged. The Arc de Triomphe was vandalised. A ministry was attacked by a mechanical digger. There was also a rash of attacks on town halls, politicians’ houses and motorway toll stations.

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The state responded to their violence — mostly initiated, in my experience, by the militant wing — with violence. Five demonstrators lost hands and 24 lost eyes to police plastic bullets or stun grenades. Some of the victims were peaceful protesters.

This disappointed many of the original Gilets Jaunes supporters. All the same, the movement continued. There were more than 70 actes — or weekend putsches — of decreasing size before the Covid pandemic brought them to an end. At that point, few of the original Gilets Jaunes remained.

It had begun as a provincial rejection of Paris, politicians, parties, trades unions, the media and all ideologies of the Left, Right or centre. It was simultaneously Poujadiste, demanding less state and less taxes, and state-interventionist, demanding more services and subsidies for the peripheral France of the countryside and outer-suburbs. By the end, however, it was largely urban and Leftist.

Their profile changed bodily, not just demographically. A typical Gilets Jaunes march in the early days was full of wide-bodied provincials — left-behinds with big behinds. By the end, they were mostly slender, metropolitans in their twenties, thirties and forties. Their slogans were not just anti-Macron but anti-capitalist. A typical banner at one of the last Paris marches read: “Capitalism is organised crime.”

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The French media was oddly reluctant to recognise this gradual capture of the movement. It was quicker to seize on the fact that some of the original “personalities” (never say leaders) were connected to the far-Right. They were dismissed as racists. They were portrayed by commentators on the Left as a working-class revolt against globalism, which was brutally suppressed by “Macron’s militias”. They were dismissed by the pro-European, liberal centre as Putin’s poodles, manipulated by lies online. All those portraits are misleading; all contain an element of truth.

In the beginning, it was about pump prices. But that fury set ablaze other provincial grievances: the erosion of public services; low wages; the high cost of living; a new tax on some pensions; Macron’s decision to partially abolish a tax on wealth. On top of this came a decision to reduce the speed limit and country people believe that speeding fines are a crafty way of taxing the ploucs or péquenauds — yokels or rednecks — to subsidise the cities.

One of the central beliefs of the Jaune “philosophy” could be summed up as follows: “All politicians are corrupt and they steal our money. We finance the success of the Bobo (Bourgois Bohemenian) elites in the big cities. They do nothing for us.” But in a recent book, the economist Laurent Davezies dismantled that founding Gilets Jaunes mantra. In fact, he calculated, French cities hugely subsidise the countryside and small towns. The greater Paris area, the Ile-de-France, creates 31% of the nation’s wealth but pays itself only 22% of national income. The rest goes in state transfers to rural or provincial France. In the poorest rural communes, state spending is 36% higher than the national average.

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All the same, it is undeniable that life, jobs, and local sources of pride and wealth have drained from large tracts of provincial France in recent decades — as they have from similar parts of Britain and the United States. Simultaneously, middle- and lower-income people have been squeezed out of the booming cities into unlovely, distant suburbs. They rely on cars to commute to work as outer suburban public services are often, by French standards, poor. These were the twin breeding grounds of the Gilets Jaunes: the small towns outside the glow of France’s booming Metro areas; or the featureless outer ring of conurbations (Paris, Toulouse, Bordeaux, Montpellier) or large towns (Rouen, Caen, Rennes and Nantes).

José-Edouard, a 61-year-old retired building contractor, spoke to me beside a roundabout in rural Calvados on the second weekend of protests on 24 November 2018. “We’ve been betrayed by every president and prime minister for 40 years. Everything has been for big finance, for the banks, for the wealthy and nothing for the people in the middle or at the bottom,” he said. “Every local source of wealth in provincial France, every local economy (bassin d’emploi) has been drained. People can no longer live on what they earn… They are crushed.”

As the movement bounced from anger at petrol prices to attempted revolution, allegations ranged from the reasonable to the lurid and absurd: France was being sold to the UN; taxes were almost all wasted on the gilded lifestyles of politicians (in reality, less than 0.1% goes to them); Brigitte Macron had a de facto state salary of €500,000 a year (in reality, zero). My local roundabout became microcosm of the fragmented, yellow-clad anti-politics nationwide.

José-Edouard soon broke away with a group of followers. Those who remained — including a home-carer, a warehouse worker, an unemployed father of two — made unflattering remarks about him. He wanted to impose his own political line; he had decamped with their €500 cagnotte (kitty) collected from motorists.

Yet they remained as determined as ever. The movement was not just a protest, they said. It was an uprising. All governments would be controlled in future by popular votes online or Référenda d’Initiative Citoyenne (RIC). There would be higher pensions, lower taxes, better services and better welfare payments. All would be financed from the billions saved when the salaries and expenses of politicians were abolished. In a few weeks, however, they had reduced their roundabout picket to Saturdays only. In a few more weeks, they were all gone.

There was a triple paradox at the heart of the original Gilets Jaunes movement. The first was that, while it started and spread rapidly online, it also rescued people from the rural-suburban isolation of their homes. It became a social club as well a social movement. The second is that, although the absence of leaders attracted broad early support, the lack of direction allowed the movement to be hijacked by organised forces, initially from the far-Right, finally by the Left. There were street battles in Lyon, Paris and elsewhere in the New Year between hard-Right and hard-Left urban guerrillas, both groups wearing yellow vests. The Left, partly in the nebulous shape of the Black Bloc movement, eventually won.

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Then there was the fact that the movement, despite its grandiose threats, never had enough support or any remotely workable plan to bring down the French state. President Macron, after a shaky early response, responded skilfully. His Great National Debate allowed people to express and relieve some of their anger. And €10 billion in tax cuts for low and middle incomes and a boost to the minimum wage blunted the edge of fury in Middle France.

Apart from this, the Gilets Jaunes achieved little. They ruined their case by overstating it. They said that leaders were not necessary, but they proved that they were. They were determined to bring down Macron, but he was re-elected last year. While Macron has adopted their demand for more direct democracy and wants to simplify the rules for popular referenda in France, his plan will not look anything like the laptop governments proposed, but never defined, by the Gilets Jaunes.

All the same, the movement revealed a profound animosity towards the ruling elite which cannot be easily dismissed and remains unappeased. The origins of that animosity — even hatred — are rooted in a crisis of distrust, disinformation and dislocation that confronts all 21st-century representative democracies. In France, mainstream parties, the media, the church and the trades unions have lost respect.

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The Gilets Jaunes detested Macron because, they said, he had claimed to be a different kind of politician, but he was the same as his predecessors. In a sense, they were Brexiteers without Boris, or Trumpers without Trump. If they had found and accepted a charismatic leader, they might have gone further.

Will they rise again? I doubt it. A small number of die-hard, rural Yellow Vests remain, but they are marginalised and discredited. Some time ago, I tracked down José-Edouard again (although it turned out that he had given me a false name). He lives in a rather grand converted water mill. He denied he had run away with the “kitty”. He said he left because the others were making racist remarks and that he donated the money to the benevolent fund for fire-fighters. “José-Edouard” still blamed banks, globalism, the European Union and corrupt politicians for the ills of provincial France. Like so many of his former comrades, he has stopped believing that he can do anything about it.

In both cases, the principal focus of the anger was President Emmanuel Macron, accused of being arrogant, monarchical, aloof, cruel, sinister, brutal and unjust. Between the two revolts, Macron became the first French president to be re-elected for two decades.

The two rebellions inevitably tell us something about the young French head of state. To preside over one revolt may be regarded as a misfortune; to provoke two in the space of six years looks like carelessness. And yet the present crisis in France is not just Macron’s crisis. It is the culmination of a failure of French governance over four decades. It exposes the child-like refusal of the majority of French people, and most political parties, to confront simple demographic and economic truths.

The postponement of the state visit of  King Charles III, which was supposed to start last night, is not just a humiliation for the President. It is a serious blow to France toute courte. One of the world’s largest and richest countries could not guarantee a safe visit by the head of state of its neighbour and ally because of an incendiary row over a modest reform.

The twin rebellions of the Macron era — the Gilets Jaunes revolt of 2018-9, and the pension reform revolt of 2023 — have different origins but the same underlying causes. The Left-Right pattern of French politics has broken down and debate has been hystericised. The country has a political system and culture which at once demands, and detests, a supreme leader.

The protests in both cases have been piggy-backed by a tiny, violent minority of the priggish ultra-Left which seeks to overturn the state by injuring “flics” (cops) and smashing bus-shelters. The violence on Thursday night — 903 acts of arson in Paris, 441 police injured nationwide, 1,500 young, black-clad rioters — was significant. But not motivated by the prospect of working two years longer in the 2060s for a state pension.

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The pension revolt is more conventional in its origins and its protagonists than the Gilets Jaunes rebellion as well as being more threatening and more dangerous — and not just for Macron. The Gilets Jaunes protests began as a violent awakening of a peripheral, rural and outer-suburban, France which demanded “change” because it felt ignored and despised. They detested all politicians and political parties and all trades unions. The tone was Poujadiste or populist Right-wing — anti-elite, anti-government, anti-state, anti-parliamentarian, anti-tax.

The pensions revolt is a more typical, latter-day French revolution: a conservative Left-wing rebellion against change by people who constantly demand Reform with a capital R but resist all reforms. It has been led by all eight trades unions federations and by the political parties of the Left. Marine Le Pen’s Far Right opposes the reform but remains cynically silent, hoping eventually to benefit from the chaos.

The one thing that does unite the rebellions is an exaggerated contempt for Emmanuel Macron. His predecessors — Messieurs De Gaulle, Giscard, Mitterrand, Chirac, Sarkozy and Hollande — were detested in their day. There is, however, something about Macron which provokes a deep and unreasoning hatred among many French people.

He is accused of being both an elitist and an upstart; a president for “the rich”; an autocrat; someone who despises ordinary people and has no understanding of their lives and how to speak to them. But every French president for half a century has failed. Macron has failed less than most of the others. He has reduced unemployment from 9% to 7%. He has started, tentatively, the re-industrialisation of France after two decades of rapid decline. The French economy recovered from the Covid pandemic more rapidly than almost all other rich nations.

The President’s insistence on pension reform, at a time of war in Europe, soaring inflation and Post-Covid exhaustion, was ill-advised. His decision to override a normal parliamentary vote to impose the reform (though perfectly constitutional) was courageous — but, in the circumstances, foolish. His reform, though, is neither. It is modest and sensible.

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France’s life expectancy is among the highest in Europe. It works less – in terms of average hours worked by all adults – than other large industrial nations. The country has not balanced its state budget for half a century. Its accumulated public deficit of 113% of GDP is well above the eurozone average at a time when interest payments are surging.

The state pension system — actually 42 different regimes — is supposedly funded by the monthly payments of workers and employers. Its permanent deficit in the state sector is disguised by a 30bn euros a year “bung” from general taxation. And it is unjust. Generous early retirement schemes for rail, Metro and other state workers are co-funded by taxes paid by private sector workers who retire later on poorer pensions.

Macron argues that pension reform is the “mother of all reforms” — a first step towards increasing France’s capacity to generate wealth and to fund its generous welfare state without permanent, swelling deficits and debt. But the Unions and Left-wing parties and Marine Le Pen’s Far Right – and an opportunist section of the supposedly fiscally responsible centre-right – describe it as “brutal”.

Brutal? If the reform goes ahead (as it may) the official French retirement age will rise from 62 to 64 by 2030 — it will still be lower in seven years’ time than it is in most European countries now.

Unfortunately for Macron, democratic politics is not about being the cleverest boy in the class. You must not only have the right answer but also convince a majority of people that the answer is right. Macron and his prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, have failed to sell their reform. They have alternated between saying that the changes are “just and fair”, and saying it’s a painful necessity to prevent the state pension system from collapse. Only recently has Macron confronted the French with the most urgent reason for reform: the need to give France’s international creditors proof that deficits and debt are under control.

The UK Right will hate the comparison, but there is much of the Margaret Thatcher about Emmanuel Macron. He has set out to reform the country for its own good and against its will. Thatcher, admittedly, had much of the media and the House of Commons on her side; Macron, however, attempted to impose pension reform without a parliamentary majority and with little support in the French media. (The centre-Right Le Figaro is an exception.)

It is doubtful whether Thatcher — or Abraham Lincoln or Cicero or John the Baptist — could have convinced the French public that it needs to work longer to preserve its social model and its way of life. But Macron’s failure is striking all the same. In January, 66% of the public opposed retiring at 64; according to recent polls, the figure is now 73%.

That is Macron’s failure but it’s not just Macron’s fault.

There is a systematic refusal by a large part of the French public to accept that the country is living beyond its means. Macron reinforced their illusions by spending “all that it takes” to sustain businesses and individuals through the Covid pandemic. He spent another 100bn euros on softening the impact of energy inflation last year

The French economist, Philippe Crevel, says: “The French seem convinced that public expenditure has no limit. If Macron can spend 100bn euros on defence, why can’t he spend the same on pensions?”

This irresponsibility has been reinforced by the break-down of the old Left-Right framework of French politics. There is now an unstable, three-way division between a reformist centre, a populist-nationalist Right and a radical, anti-capitalist Left (incorporating the Greens). The parliamentary elections last June split almost precisely along these lines, giving Macron the biggest bloc of seats but no overall majority.

Both the radical Left and Le Pen’s far Right have incoherent economic programmes. Both campaigned last year for the official pension age to be reduced to 60. The Left believes all can be solved by “taxing the rich” and “taxing business” in one of the most taxed countries in Europe. Le Pen wants simultaneously to spend big, to reduce taxes and to cut deficits. All will be made possible she says, by spending less on migrants.

Macron and Borne had planned to push through their pension reform with the help of the rump of the centre-right Gaullist party (Les Républicains or LR). They might have succeeded. They constantly altered their reform to suit centre-Right demands. The party leadership promised its support. But in the end, almost half the 61 LR deputies refused to go along, motivated by opportunism or fear of their constituents.

Macron had to then use his constitutional power to impose the legislation without a “normal” vote. This special power under Article 49.3 of the Fifth Republic constitution has been used 100 times since 1958 by governments of all persuasions. So why the outrage and outbreak of violence?

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Partly because imposing the vote fits the “autocratic Macron” narrative. Partly because leaders of the radical Left have been encouraging — and then partially disowning — violence for weeks. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the biggest Left-wing party, La France Insoumise, spoke of defeating the pension law by “force”. Another radical Left leader compared Macron to the Emperor Caligula (whose interest in Roman state pension systems has yet to be confirmed).

The worst street violence in France comes from the shadowy “black blocs” of the ultra-Left but its dynamics are curious. Mélenchon and other leaders on the Left vaguely condemn it, but delight in the sense of national crisis that it creates; governments condemn it, while hoping that it will scare the peaceful majority and reduce turn-out at demonstrations.

Violence — from the black blocs, from a radical wing of the Gilets Jaunes and from the police —  eventually ruined the Gilets Jaunes movement. It may also deflate the pension protests but defeating them will be much harder.

Macron could see off the Gilets Jaunes because they had no leaders and no clear demands. The anti-pension reform movement, by contrast, is well-organised and has a single clear objective: to kill the reform. In the past couple of days, moderate unions have offered Macron a route of honourable retreat. If he “pauses” the reform for six months, they will enter negotiations on wider reforms, including pensions.

Macron is unlikely to back down. If he did, the remaining four years of his mandate would probably be (international diplomacy apart) a wasteland. If he persists, it may also be a wasteland but at least he will have achieved his pension reform.

But, truce or no truce, the real French crisis will not be over. The underlying causes of Marcon’s twin rebellions will remain. The French political system is distrusted; there is no majority in the country for any clear course of action; the people are unwilling to be accept even a modest degree of pain or sacrifice to confront reality.

That is not just Macron’s failure. It is France’s failure.

How many French people does it take to re-write the lyrics of a Beatles song? Answer: One million.

That was the combined size of the crowds which filled the streets of towns and cities across France last Thursday. Their message to President Emmanuel Macron was roughly as follows: “Do you really still need me (to work), will you still bleed me, when I’m 64?”

The size of the demonstrations took the government and its internal security services by surprise. The marches were especially large in the mid-sized, provincial towns where trades’ unions appeals for “manifs” (demos) and nationwide strikes usually go disregarded.

Unlike the atypical and unstructured Gilets Jaunes protests of 2018-9, this was an old-fashioned revolt led by the trades’ unions. Unlike any such protest for more than a decade, all eight of the French trades’ union federations took part.

Another day of nationwide strikes and marches has been called for a week on Tuesday. Battle-lines are being drawn for the biggest and most disruptive government versus union confrontation in France since 1995.

The issue back then was broadly the same as now — social security and pension reform. The unions triumphed. President Jacques Chirac capitulated after three weeks. Will President Emmanuel Macron also be forced to back down?

Some of his officials and supporters have been rattled by the size of Thursday’s marches. The President is right, they whisper, but he has failed to persuade the country. You cannot change a querulous nation like France against its will — even if the change is for its own good. Au contraire, say others close to the President. France is always reformed against its will. Protest is a national ritual. Future generations will thank Macron for leaving the country stronger than he found it. Maybe. In the meantime, grinding confrontation is inevitable. Compromise appears impossible; neither side can afford to lose.

Defeat for Macron would leave him, aged 45, a domestic lame duck for the remaining four years of his second mandate and the last four years of his political career. Defeat for the union federations, after years of declining membership and influence, would mark the end of their power as an organised — or even disorganised — force in French life. What displaces them might look more like the Gilet Jaunes movement: angry, chaotic and violent at the edges.

But was this confrontation really necessary now, when war is raging 1,500 miles to the east and Scholz is in town to dicusss it, when inflation is booming, and when tempers are still stretched by the Covid pandemic?

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Macron has good reason to want to reform the muddled and often unfair French pensions system. He is right that French people must work longer if they want to maintain the strength of their economy and their generous (for some) welfare system, pensions included. One in four of France’s population of 68,000,000 is retired. Unless the state pension system changes, there will be only six French workers to support five pensioners by the middle of this century.

To face this challenge, most other developed countries have raised the legal retirement age to 65, even to 67. Macron is publishing detailed legislation to shift France’s official retirement age from 62 to 64 over six years. It is due to be enacted in March and go ahead from September. If the reforms go through, French people will still retire earlier in 2030 than Britons, Germans, Belgians, Italian, the Spanish or the Americans do now.

But while the argument for reforming the pension system is strong; the argument for doing so immediately is weaker. The Covid pandemic killed so many old people that the system is, for the time being, in reasonable balance between pension payments and monthly contributions by workers and their employers. That balance will be lost in the years ahead but only gradually.

Macron’s reasons for pushing ahead now are partly political. He promised a radical but painless pension reform when he was first elected in 2017 but withdrew his complex and much-hated package of changes when Covid struck in 2020. A second attempt at pensions reform was the headline proposal of a mostly unmemorable Macron re-election platform last year. He won in April but lost his parliamentary majority in June. If he abandons pension reform again, what will he do in his second term?

There is also another reason for rapid action which dares not speak its name: money.

The reform should save Euros 100bn in state or tax-payer top-ups to a loss-making state pension system over a decade. Without the changes, it will be difficult for Macron to reduce France’s annual budget deficit to the 3% of GDP which is the official limit for countries which use the Euro. France’s deficit will be 5% of GDP this year. Macron has pledged to hit the 3% target by 2027. But this is not an argument that is used publicly. Increasing the pension age to please Brussels does not play well through the country.

In fact, there is even more taxpayers’ money at stake.

France has no private pension schemes or individual pension pots. All but the very richest people depend on the state pension system for their old age. In theory, payments to the retired are matched by the contributions of active workers and their employers in each of 42 different state regimes — whether for rail workers, the self-employed, farmers, lawyers, Paris Opera ballet dancers etc.

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Some of these regimes are roughly in balance. But the generous pension provisions for state employees – including retirement in their late-50s for rail workers and pensions of 75% of final year pay for all state-sector workers – are catastrophically and permanently in the red.

The shortfall of around Euros 30bn a year is paid by the national government (ie the taxpayer) on top of its normal contributions as an employer. This has become so accepted that it is never mentioned as part of the overall, annual pension “deficit”.

This permanent drain on French state spending is equivalent to more than half the country’s annual defence budget. Macron’s reform would not end such losses overnight but would free a few useful billions for more constructive spending and for deficit reduction.

As a political argument, though, it’s pretty taboo. Reducing taxes is always portrayed in France as a “policy for the rich”. So the President is peddling another line. France can no longer afford to work less than its EU partners or international competitors. According to an OECD study, France worked 630 hours a year per inhabitant in 2018, including children and the retired. Germany worked 722 hours per inhabitant; the UK 808 hours, and the USA 826. This is partly because of the 35-hour-week and unemployment but also because of the early retirement age.

The trades’ union response to these arguments is a mixture of reasonable fact and obfuscation. France’s real average retirement age is already 62.9, they point out (true). Some people already have to wait until they are 67 to claim a full pension (also true). Any increase in the official retirement age would disproportionately punish working-class people because they start work young, while the middle classes are studying (true but addressed in part in the small print of the reform).

The pension deficit could be made up in other ways, the unions say, by higher monthly contributions from workers and their bosses or by a levy on high pensions. That would work, for a while. It would also increase the jobs-destroying, pay-roll tax burden in one of the highest-taxed countries in the world

The present system is often unjust to women, farmers, the self-employed and to the employees in the private sector generally. If you work for a private company, rather than the state, your pension is 50% of average earnings in your best 25 years, compared with 75% of final salary for state employees.

And private-sector employees pay not only their own pension contributions but, as already mentioned, subsidise the pensions of state worker through their taxes.

Obviously, the unions have no reason to draw attention to this anomaly. Their waning support is heavily concentrated in the state sector. And the big marches and strikes last week were dominated by public employees, from rail workers to teachers. There were few big strikes in private enterprise — but a surprising number of private industry employees joined the provincial marches.

Macron and his government for some reason have chosen so far not to try to exploit this potential private-public divide. Perhaps they would rather sell it as something uniformly positive, rather not divide and rule. That may yet change.

The unions also have to be careful what they do next. Militant voices are calling for open-ended rail strikes, cuts in electricity supplies and blockages of petrol refineries. But the national union leadership fears that such a hard-ball strategy would turn public opinion against them, not against Macron.

Seen from abroad, there is something demographically and economically irrational about the French aversion to an advance in the retirement age from 62 to 64 by 2030. Irrational or not, the opposition to pension reform is deep and passionate. Up to 70% of people tell pollsters they see no reason to work longer. And as the pro-government politician Jean-Louis Bourlanges points out: “Opinions may be mistaken but the fact that millions of people hold those opinions remains a political fact.”

French people are not lazy. Those who work do so very productively. But much of the country has a kind of teenaged relationship with the state — a blend of petulant rejection and needy dependency. There is a constant demand for “change” but an opposition to all changes. Presidents are elected to get stuff done but, once elected, are resisted. The “street” counts more than in almost any other large democracy.

So what next? Despite his lack of a parliamentary majority, Macron has a reasonable chance of pushing the reform through the national assembly in March. The centre-right Les Républicains, who hold 62 swing votes, are, in theory, in favour. The final version of the proposed reform, with 64 as the new retirement age, not 65 as originally suggest by Macron – was partly shaped by them. However, the prospect of a two-month long battle with the “street” and unions is causing some centre-right deputies and even some pro-Macron parliamentarians to have cold feet.

Macron and his Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, could use their emergency constitutional power to ram through the reform by decree if necessary. But that would doubtless cause more strikes and, possibly, street violence.

Macron has the casting vote. The decision on whether or not to bow to public anger will be his. He is, by all accounts, determined not to be a “second Chirac”.  And paradoxically, the intensity of the opposition could allow him to appear (abroad at any rate) as a courageous and resolute leader after enacting what is, in all truth, a modest reform.

He knows that if he blinks he faces a lonely and empty final four years in the Elysée Palace.

So will he blink? Probably not.

A “tale of two crises” has unfolded in the last few days on the southern and northern shores of the English Channel. Both crises flow, in part, from the high rates of inflation caused by the Ukraine war and the retreat of the Covid pandemic.

In Britain, where inflation is just over 10%, a political crisis wrapped in a financial crisis has threatened to destroy the private pensions system on which millions depend. A chancellor was ejected after a few weeks in office; another prime minister has gone. Britain, though, has so far escaped civil unrest.

On Tuesday in France, however, (with inflation running at “only” 6%) there were around 200,000 people on the streets. A strike for higher pay by oil refinery workers has made petrol and diesel scarce and have spread to the railways, the Metro, schools and other public services.

Some have suggested this could be the start of a “new May 1968” or the “Popular Front” rebellion of the Thirties which gave French workers higher wages and paid holidays. It could mark the beginning of a generalised revolt, both in streets and in parliament, which could destroy President Emmanuel Macron’s second term. His Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, was obliged this week to resort to emergency powers to push her government’s 2023 budget through the National Assembly. Losing his parliamentary majority in the legislative elections in June (two months after winning presidential re-election) is coming back to haunt him.

But there’s a fundamental difference between the crises afflicting France and Britain. What has happened in the UK in the last few days is bizarre and unprecedented. What is happening in France is more or less normal — for France — after three years in which social unrest has been largely paused. Macron’s first term was littered with such protests, first by the Gilets Jaunes and then by union marches and strikes against pension reform.

The Gilets Jaunes rebellion of 2018-9 was very unusual — at first. It started in the apolitical, lower-middle and working classes of the countryside and outer suburbs. It was eventually hijacked by the metropolitan anti-state and anti-everything far-Left. “Fake” Gilets Jaunes and their anarchist allies dressed in black were active once again on the margins of the Paris marches this week, vandalising “capitalist” banks and burning “capitalist” litter bins.

The bulk of this week’s protests came from equally predicable sources: the militant trades union federation, the CGT (Confédération Générale du Travail ) and, before that, in a Paris march on Sunday, the hard-Left party, La France Insoumise (LFI). The CGT leader Philippe Martinez spoke of creating that perpetual fantasy of the French Left: une convergence des luttes — a merging of disparate protests and social conflicts into a single anti-government and anti-boss rebellion. He hoped that a decision by the Macron-Borne government to break, or bend, the oil strike by requisitioning key workers would produce a powerful reaction in defence of the right to strike.

The leader of the LFI and Macron’s one-time presidential rival, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, even predicted the beginning of a new “Popular Front” — a “conjunction” of Left-wing and environmental causes to create a “cycle” of revolt “never seen before in our country”. Both predictions fell flat on their faces. Mélenchon forecast 300,000 marchers on Sunday and claimed 140,000. An independent survey for the main French media organisations counted 29,500.

The day of strikes on Tuesday was somewhat more effective but not much. Only one in four rail workers stopped work. The great “convergence des luttes” was supported by 6% of teachers and 4% of public employees. The biggest French trades union federation (there are at least eight of them), the CFDT (Confédération Française Démocratique du Travail), refused to join in. The CGT oil strike, already fading, has since fallen apart. Only two out of seven refineries are still blocked and filling stations are slowly returning to normal, and the CFDT and other moderates had already signed pay deals with Total and Esso.

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It’s not all over yet. There is a dangerous challenge to Macron from CGT-affiliated workers in the nuclear industry. Just under half of France’s 56 nuclear reactors are already closed for emergency repairs and routine maintenance and the strike is delaying their re-opening. If it persists, there could be widespread black-outs this winter. In sum, the hard Left overplayed its hand this week but they will threaten Macron again later in the year.

Macron and his government acted earlier than any other country in the European Union to soften the impact of inflation. They spent €100 billion this year and plan to spend another €45 billion in 2023 to keep down the price of petrol, diesel, domestic gas and electricity. France has the lowest inflation rate in the EU — an annual rate of 5.6% in September, compared to 9.9% in the Eurozone as a whole. Unfortunately for Macron, the French do not shop or fill their petrol tanks “elsewhere”. They shop in France. Even a softened inflation rate has left many people on low to medium salaries struggling to get by.

Because of arcane government rules, those on the statutory minimum wage — Le Smic — have enjoyed a cumulative rise of 8% this year. This has squeezed margins with workers on slightly higher, but still low-to-medium wage levels, leaving them feeling devalued, financially and socially. Both Macron and Élisabeth Borne have been slow to grasp this problem. They were also slow to realise that the vast windfall profits of the oil industry would permit the well-paid refinery workers to become an unlikely symbol of social injustice (to some).

Macron had wanted to keep down wages to prevent an inflationary spiral which would damage France’s competitiveness. Instead, he subsidised energy prices and offered tax breaks for one-off bonuses, hoping that would blunt the demands for higher pay. In recent days, his Prime Minister and other ministers have been belatedly urging all employers to consider wage rises — on top of the bonuses and the splurge of state-spending to dampen inflation. In other words, long-term, economic policy has been jettisoned in an attempt to calm the social unrest.

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By a quirk of the political calendar, Macron and Borne also collided head-on this week with the scattered, but numerically greater, opposition in the National Assembly. Opponents of the Left, Right and far-Right had been picking apart the 2023 draft budget, trying to add billions in pet spending plans. Events in Britain might have warned them of the market dangers of messing with debt and deficits, and France’s overall national debt is much higher than Britain’s — 114.6% of GDP, compared to just under 100%.

The opposition was only playing games. They knew that the government would eventually blow its playground whistle and use its emergency constitutional power to impose something close to the original budget. Borne did so on Wednesday night, using a clause of the constitution inserted by Charles de Gaulle for exactly this purpose. Every previous president of the Fifth Republic has used 49.3 at some time — even those with friendly majorities in the Assembly.

Cue, nonetheless, fake indignation on the part of Left, Right and Centre-Right, accusing Macron of “riding roughshod over democracy”. In fact, the opposition, if it cared to work together, could overturn Article 49.3, the budget and the Borne government by passing a censure motion. An absolute majority of the 577 deputies is needed or 289 actual votes in favour. Macron and Borne have 250 centrists; “the rest” have 327.

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Two censure motions have been tabled. The Left refuses to vote for the far-Right motion and the far-Right refuses to vote for the Left motion. The centre-Right will not vote for either, fearing wipe-out in an early election. In other words, the government has called the opposition’s bluff, as everyone knew they would. Just like the day of inaction on Tuesday, Borne’s use of 49.3 is a faux crisis. Like the day of inaction, however, it presages a proper crisis later this winter or early in the New Year.

Emmanuel Macron insists that he will push ahead by March with his plans to increase France’s minimum retirement age from 62 to 64 by 2027. He warns that he will use 49.3 again, if necessary. He will call new elections, if he loses a vote of confidence (as, on this issue, he might). There are good arguments why France should work longer. Its minimum retirement age is the lowest in the EU. Politically, it is hazardous and even foolhardy to insist on it now. The government has no majority. The national mood, always fractious, has been darkened by two years of pandemic and the resurgence of inflation after years of low or no wage rises.

Macron has bound himself to the pensions mast. The deficit of 5% of GDP promised to Brussels and the markets next year depends on the enactment of pension reform by July. As Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng found out, it’s not a good idea to disappoint (or excite) the markets when you are already hugely indebted to them. On pensions, most French people, including the moderate unions, are united in fierce opposition to Macron. For now, the President remains determined to go ahead. The true “crisis”, both on the street and in parliament, did not happen this week. It is on its way.

Macron’s centrist alliance no longer had enough seats in the National Assembly to impose its will. No other group, or likely alliance, was large enough to dictate policy to the President. The result: stalemate. Or so it seemed. Two months on, no grand coalition has been formed. But nor is there a complete deadlock. Fears of instant chaos and early snap elections have proved exaggerated. France, after more than half a century of presidential, top-down politics, has rediscovered the messy joys of parliamentary democracy and verbal brawling.

Despite having 39 seats fewer than an overall majority, Macron’s prime minister, Elisabeth Borne, has managed to push through a €44 billion package of measures to blunt the impact of inflation. She may lack political experience, but she has proved to be a more effective parliamentary operator than many had predicted.

However, nothing difficult or truly controversial has yet been attempted. Deputies have been asked, in effect, to give away goodies to their constituents, including extending the price ceilings on gas and electricity, and subsidies on petrol and diesel prices. The unpleasant, uphill part of Macron’s second term is about to begin. September will see street marches for higher wages, as well as strikes and protests against the President’s proposed extension of the French retirement age to 64 and tougher rules for employment pay.

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France is not a patient country: politics goes to the street more rapidly than in any other democracy. Macron’s opponents on the extremes of Right and Left now tell their supporters that his government is “illegitimate”. They say that the President does not represent a majority in parliament, let alone the country.

France is weathering the threat of Ukraine-war-generated stagflation reasonably well. Inflation is running at 6.1%, which is substantially less than in the UK and most other EU countries. Domestic power bills have been capped at 2021 levels or just above. Unemployment is still falling. But how long can Macron shield his nation from international inflationary forces? And what will it cost? Both the far-Left and far-Right are already pushing for the removal of sanctions against Russia. If Moscow cuts off EU gas supplies, the real cost of gas and electricity in France — and the cost to the state of subsidising them — will explode.

So far, some of the cost of France’s energy price gap has been concealed by imposing record losses on the largely state-owned power company, EDF. That cannot continue forever, even if the government carries through its plan to buy the remaining 16% of the company.

All this comes during a Sahel-like summer in which French forests burned and farmland across the country turned yellow. Yet Macron will struggle to rectify his patchy record on climate change in such a fragile economic environment. His government is due to present a grand strategy for moving to renewable energy next month: it will be dismissed as by the Left as too timid and the Right as too painful.

Macron knows that he is facing a winter of discontent. In a would-be Churchillian speech last Friday, he asked the French people to view their coming difficulties as “the price of liberty”. “I am thinking of our people,” he said, “and the strength of spirit they will need to… confront uncertainties, misleadingly simple responses and adversity and unite to accept that they must pay the price for our liberty and values.”

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In other words, the President hopes to frame the autumn and winter protests as a narrow-minded refusal to accept that the West is in a prolonged state of economic war with Russia; and that the war is as much about protecting the future of France and other Western countries as it is about helping Ukraine. For this strategy to succeed, Macron needs to be consistent. It was foolish of him to be seen riding a fuel-guzzling jet ski on his summer break, while asking the French people to put up with energy shortages for the greater national good.

Macron and Borne face this tangled cat’s cradle of crises in the weakest position of any French government in half a century. Apart from a brief period in 1988-93, every president since 1965 has had a clear majority in the lower house of parliament.

Much depends on whether Macron and Borne can continue to form majorities in the National Assembly on an issue-by-issue basis. The signs are not encouraging: the centre-Right Les Républicains, who have propped up the Macron coalition so far, have already warned that they will vote symbolically against next year’s budget when the Assembly resumes in October. Borne could use emergency powers to push the budget through, but that would trigger a vote of confidence.

The present Assembly is split four ways, with fissures and tensions within each camp — including Macron’s own. Les Républicains, successors to the parties of Charles de Gaulle, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy, have been reduced to a rump of 62 seats out of 577. They have refused to join Macron’s centrist alliance — but have, however, supported the government in key votes, in return for Right-leaning shifts in policy, including a large, new breach in France’s 35-hour working week.

Members of the Left-wing alliance, Nupes (Nouvelle Union Populaire Ecologique et Sociale), the second-largest force in the assembly with 151 seats, have voted systematically against the government — albeit with one or two exceptions. They shout insults and wave their arms a great deal.

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Meanwhile, Marine Le Pen’s unprecedented 89 deputies are under strict orders to appear calm and respectable. Some of the new Rassemblement National deputies find this discipline irksome. If Le Pen herself is absent, they too take the opportunity to hurl insults at Macron’s government. The RN has attacked the government on all its proposals but abstained this summer for fear of being seen to vote against inflation relief. Le Pen’s troops will not abstain this autumn and winter.

It’s clear that Les Républicains are the pivotal force in the new assembly, wielding power beyond their numbers. But they face an existential conundrum. They could either support Macron’s crisis-management policies and proposed reforms, giving him an against-the-odds triumph, or they could refuse to work with him and ensure that his second term is a failure. Some senior voices in the President’s camp are still hopeful that all or part of the centre-Right will agree next year to join a broader coalition. That is probably wishful thinking. There is a group of Républicains deputies ready to act as a rudder steering the government to the Right, on the economy, migration, and security. But others believe that helping Macron would destroy all hope of resurrecting the once dominant centre-Right and winning the 2027 presidential election. If they condemn the President to five years of muddle and drift, they say, they could bury Macronism and its would-be successors forever.

Much depends on who wins an internal election for Républicains party president in December. At its grassroots, the party is riven between its Macron-compatible, pro-European wing and the Macron-detesting nationalist-populists. The latter are almost certainly in the majority. The three leading candidates are likely to be Eric Ciotti, the Macron-hating, hard-Right deputy for Nice; the former European Commission Vice President, Michel Barnier; and a young, pragmatic deputy, Aurélien Pradié.

If Ciotti becomes the Républicains president, any alliance or systematic cooperation with Macron will be impossible. The Républicains parliamentary party might then split but that would not yield the 40 or so seats needed to create a stable, governing coalition.

By the end of the year, we will know whether the majority of the Assembly will support Macron’s flagship pension and employment law reforms. It will also be clear whether Macron and Borne can command ad hoc majorities to manage the triple interlocked crises of inflation, global recession, and war on the European continent.

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If he cannot assemble the support, Macron will face a career-defining decision. In his first mandate, his reform agenda was overwhelmed by the Gilet Jaunes and Covid. Should he now accept a place in history as the young President who promised a great deal and achieved little? Or should he take the risk of dissolving the National Assembly and calling a new election?

Nothing in recent French politics suggests that Macron could expect a better result next year. French politicians rarely gain popularity while in office. One poll at the weekend showed the President sinking to 37% approval while his Prime Minister rose to 41%.

With an energy and inflation crisis, stretching into next spring, it is not the most obvious time to call an election. Asking French people to vote to work longer is unlikely to be a winning hand. Yet Macron is a young, energetic, and impulsive man. He will not easily settle for four years of posturing, drift and domestic and international firefighting.

His Blood, Sweat and Tears speech last week can be read in two ways. It could imply that he recognises that his only role in the next four years will be crisis-management — to prevent a deeply divided France from falling apart. Or it could suggest that he sees the coming multi-layered crises as an opportunity to assemble a broad, consensual centre against the extremes of Left and Right. Some senior Macron supporters believe that he will be tempted by next June to call an election in which he would campaign — to quote his speech — for “unity in adversity”. I can only say: good luck with that.

The young parliamentary candidate strides down the street looking for people who are local and over 50. I follow. We meet mostly Americans, Germans, Italians, Dutch, Britons.

“See, we have been invaded by foreigners,” jokes Ladislas Vergne, 30, the local candidate for the centre-right Les Républicains. When we do identify local people, they make bored or angry faces and dart away. Only one or two are prepared to chat — mostly to complain about all politics and all politicians.

“You’ve been rifling through our pockets for years — all of you,” says a well-dressed woman in her 70s. “Nothing ever changes. What’s the point in voting?” She concedes that she voted for President Emmanuel Macron in the presidential election in April. “What choice did we have?” Yet she insists that she will not vote in the first round of France’s parliamentary elections on Sunday — not even for Macron’s centrist alliance.

“I’m afraid this is rather typical,” says Vergne. “I don’t let it get me down. Younger people aren’t going to vote on Sunday — that’s clear. With people over 50, there is always a chance they will vote, whatever they say. Seeing the candidate, and exchanging a few words with him, can make all the difference.”

Vergne is one of a handful of young, dynamic, first-time parliamentary candidates standing this weekend for the once powerful but much-diminished, centre-right party, Les Républicains (LR). He is, in other words, the future of a party which may have no future.

Chartres — the beautiful cathedral town 50 miles south-west of Paris — is as good a place as any to take the temperature of France before the two rounds of legislative elections this weekend and next. The first constituency of the Eure-et-Loir département contains a chunk of urban France, a ring of suburban France, and a large swathe of rich, cereals-producing countryside. The early 13th century cathedral is visible for many kilometres around, floating like a limestone ship on a sea of wheat and barley.

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Provincial towns such as Chartres (population: 40,000) will largely decide whether Macron will win another parliamentary majority this month. The Left-Green alliance Nouvelle Union Populaire Ecologiste et Sociale (Nupes) will do well in big cities and in multi-racial suburbs. Macron’s centrist alliance, Ensemble!, needs to win the towns.

The incumbent in Chartres is a senior Macronist, Guillaume Kasbarian, a member of the executive bureau of Macron’s party, La République en Marche (LREM). The seat was held for decades by the ever-changing brands of the centre-Right — Gaullistes, Chiraquiens and Sarkozystes. In 2017, when Macron turned French politics inside out, it fell like many similar seats to the centrist LREM.

Kasbarian is favourite to be re-elected, just as President Macron was once favourite to retain his overall majority in the National Assembly. However, doubts about the outcome of the election are growing — both here and nationally.

The most recent polls and projections suggest that Macron’s centrist alliance will win the biggest bloc of seats but will struggle to reach the 289 seats that it needs for an overall majority in the lower house of parliament. Without such a majority, Macron’s second term will be even more troubled than the first and less likely to complete his promised reforms of pensions, hospitals and schools.

“It’s a very tricky election to read,” Vergne tells me. “If I can get into the second round against the Macronist candidate, I can unite the anti-Macron vote and I can win. In fact, I am convinced that I would win. If the Left-Ecologist alliance candidate (Quentin Guillemain) gets into Round Two, he will be defeated by a big, big margin.”

“The question is: ‘can I get into the second round?’ With so many saying they won’t vote, I’ve genuinely no idea what score I might get on Sunday. 10%, 15%, over 20% — all are possible. To beat the ecologist to second place, I need to be in the low 20s”.

More than two candidates can, in theory, reach the second round in French parliamentary elections. To qualify in third place, you need 12.5% of the registered vote. Since the national turnout is predicted to be around 47% (a record low), that means 30% of the actual vote in many constituencies.

There will therefore be very few three-cornered contests in the second round next Sunday — perhaps none. This could favour Macron. The leader of the Left-Green alliance, the anti-Nato, anti-EU Jean-Luc Mélenchon, is feared by voters of the centre-Left and moderate and hard-Right. If presented with only two choices, they are likely to vote anti-Mélenchon in round two rather than anti-Macron. If they vote at all, that is…

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Macron has been accused, including by some in his own camp, of playing a dangerous game since his victory in the Presidential election on 24 April. Far from stoking interest in the parliamentary elections, he vanished from the domestic scene and took an unprecedented four weeks to choose what was mostly a predictable new government and Prime Minister — the former employment minister, Elisabeth Borne.

His strategy was to preserve the momentum from his presidential victory and prevent an anti-Macron counter-movement from developing. But how can you freeze-frame momentum? The effect has only been to deflate interest in a parliamentary campaign which was already regarded by many people as either a “done deal” or “one election too many”.

If Left-wing voters turn out in large numbers on Sunday and the Macron voters do not, the President’s camp could be in trouble. An outright victory for the Left in the second round — forcing Macron to appoint a Left-wing prime minister — may look unlikely. But an awkward, hung parliament in which the Macron alliance has most seats but no working majority is still possible.

The centre-right LR are also disturbing Macron’s calculations by showing more signs of life than expected. The party was pronounced defunct by many commentators after their candidate Valérie Pécresse scored only 4.8% in the first round of the presidential election on 10 April. However, LR candidates have been putting up a spirited fight in the parliamentary campaign. In the latest polls, the party is projected to win up to 55 seats — more than Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement National, which has a much bigger share of the first-round popular vote.

I watched Vergne film a social media appeal in front of Chartres cathedral. He went through five or six takes. (You can see the results here.) His pitch was simple. You can choose Macron and “change-nothing-all-is-fine”. You can choose Mélenchon and “lets-turn-everything upside-down”. Or you can choose concrete action on inflation and insecurity with Les Républicains. Vote for a candidate like me who wants to work for Chartres rather than Paris.

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Vergne, although only 30, is a very old-fashioned kind of French politician. In the new “Macronworld”, ambitious young people prefer to skip local involvement and parachute themselves into national politics (as Macron did in 2017). But Vergne has adopted the traditional French approach employed successfully by the likes of Jacques Chirac, François Mitterrand and François Hollande. He has implanted himself in a part of provincial France where he has strong family connections. He studied at two of the finishing schools of the French political elite, Science-Po and the Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA), before winning a council seat in Chartres and then becoming assistant mayor.

“It’s an unfashionable approach these days but that’s not what worries me,” he explains. “Having roots in provincial France — understanding the way that things look from outside Paris — is as important as it ever was. What worries me is the future of centre-right politics in France. Can Les Républicains survive? Nobody can be sure of that. But I think the centre-Right, in some form, will thrive once again once Macron vanishes from the scene in 2027. There is no long-term future for Macronism without Macron.”

But after a day on the campaign trail, something else worries me. Why should so many people in a town like Chartres — with local problems but prosperous enough — refuse to engage with a young man who is willing to commit his life to moderate, democratic politics? The number of people who avoided political conversation was, frankly, unsettling. Most were over 50-years-old, in other words, from the generations who do vote.

The blame for such attitudes can be shared around: on the older generations of politicians, on the collapse of the old party allegiances, on social media, on mainstream media, on steeply rising prices, on exhaustion after two years of the Covid pandemic. Perhaps some blame should also be attached to the voters themselves.

But the plague-on-all-your-houses mood in a typical Macron-supporting medium-sized town seven weeks after he was re-elected was disturbing. Whether or not Macron wins a majority in parliament over the next two Sundays, he faces a tormented second term.

I happened to be standing beside a young man distributing leaflets when Elisabeth Borne, France’s new Prime Minister, and several TV crews approached. You don’t see many TV cameras in Thury Harcourt, in the hills 30 kilometres south of Caen. You don’t see many prime ministers either.

The young man began to berate the PM. Why was she scared to debate with him in public, he asked? Madame Borne put him down politely. “I am very pleased to meet you and I hope that we’re all going to campaign nicely,” she said.

It was only then that I realised that the young man was Noé Gauchard, the local candidate for the Left-Green alliance Nouvelle Union Populaire Ecologique et Sociale (or Nupes for short).

Madame Borne became France’s second female prime minister last week. She is running for election — for the first time in her long career as a public servant — in my home constituency, the sixth circonscription of Calvados. After becoming boss of the Paris Metro, after becoming a regional Prefect in uniform and white gloves, after becoming three kinds of minister during President Emmanuel Macron’s first term, Elisabeth Borne has decided that it is time to get herself elected.

You have to give her credit for that. She doesn’t have to be a member of parliament to be the PM in France. If she wins, she will have to resign the seat and allow her running mate to become the local MP. If she loses, she will have to step down as Prime Minister — not for any legal reason but because Macron has made that the rule for all members of his government who are running in the parliamentary elections on 12 and 19 June. So here, down my way, came an event which could only happen in France: a Prime Minister campaigning for votes for the first time in her life.

How would Elisabeth Borne, a classic product of the French technocracy, take to being a stump politician? She is a fiercely competent and hard-working woman, but is reputed to have little charisma. Her nickname when head of the Paris Metro was “Borne-Out (because she burned out her staff). “She is not a barrel of laughs,” one Macron ally says. “But, then again, government is not the Club Med.”

The Prime Minister spent 45 minutes at the Thury Harcourt Vide-Grenier (attic-clearance sale), which is an occasional opportunity for local people to exchange their unwanted rubbish for other people’s unwanted rubbish. You could buy Johnny Hallyday’s Greatest Hits, Volume 12. Or a casserole with no lid.

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I thought that, for a first-timer, she did pretty well. She came over like a hospital matron of the old school doing the rounds of the wards. She has a lovely smile, which is rarely seen on television. She listened for longer than was strictly necessary to complaints about high pump prices or Emmanuel Macron. She was able to connect with people — especially, it seemed, the women. She allowed selfies to be taken with children.

Borne made one beginner’s mistake, however. She didn’t buy anything. A practiced French stump politician visiting a market would always buy something. It doesn’t have to be Johnny Hallyday’s Greatest Hits Volume 12.

***

Borne’s mother was a pharmacist who came from Livarot, a little further east in Calvados. Her father was a Holocaust survivor and resistance hero who never recovered from his wartime trauma and committed suicide when Elisabeth was 11-years-old.

She was brought up in Paris and rose through the ranks of the French meritocracy. She trained as an engineer at France’s premier engineering school, Ecole Polytechnique, whose students — still almost all men to this day — have uniforms and ceremonial swords. She then worked, in increasingly senior roles, in the private offices of a series of Socialist politicians: the culture minister Jack Lang, the Prime Minister, Lionel Jospin, President François Hollande, the mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe. She regarded herself as “of the Left” but never joined the Socialist Party.

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She was one of the first women to become a Prefect of a French region, in Poitou-Charentes. During the first Macron presidency, Borne was successively transport, environment and employment minister. She is credited by some (and blamed by the unions and part of the Left) for pushing through two of the most important reforms of the Macron era: the opening of the state French railways to competition and making the terms for unemployment pay tougher (but still more generous than most other EU countries).

Fast forward to Macron’s re-election on 24 April, and she is reported to have been his first choice as Prime Minister. He then spent three weeks looking at other options, all of whom were women. He had decided that, 30 years after the brief and disastrous term of Edith Cresson in 1991-2, it was time for France to have a second female PM.

Macron was torn between choosing a woman with proven experience in national government and one with deep roots in local or regional politics. He is reported by the French media to have almost made another choice, Catherine Vautrin, the centre-right president of the Greater Rheims area in eastern France. But several of his closest aides pointed out that Vautrin had once been a vocal opponent of the legalisation of gay marriage in France. Macron backed away rather than offend his supporters on the centre or the centre-left.

After three weeks, the President returned to his original choice: Elisabeth Borne. This stuttering process — the longest delay before the appointment of a new PM since the present doubled-headed French government system began in 1965 — reveals two things: one about Macron, the other about the changing status of French Prime Ministers.

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The first is that Macron, who appears confident, even arrogant, can be indecisive, especially when it comes to choosing people. He is often torn between doing what he thinks will be the right thing and what will be the clever thing.

The second is more profound. It used to be that the Prime Minister was a disposable front-bumper or a fuse to protect the President from being damaged by random events — especially during domestic crises. All the same, the PM used to have a certain amount of autonomy. They were often senior politicians from the President’s own ideological family. They ran the country while the President presided.

But since the seven-year presidential term was reduced to align with the five-year parliamentary term from 2007, the role of the French Prime Minister has become uncertain, even problematic. The semi-detached status of French Presidents is no longer tenable in the age of Twitter and 24-hour TV news. If the President leaves too much to the PM, he is accused of being aloof; if he takes all the decisions, he is accused of being overbearing.

Macron is frequently accused of both. He resented the popularity of his independent-minded, first Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe. He had a much better working relationship with his successor, the hard-working, unassuming but effective Jean Castex. Any French Prime Minister now risks being Prime Minister only in name. He or she no longer leads the majority party in parliament because French parties have all but vanished and have been replaced with permanent or shifting alliances.

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In theory, Borne — with zero experience as an electoral strategist — will spearhead Macron’s forces in the parliamentary campaign next month: the half-dozen parties and factions which make up his centrist alliance, Ensemble. The campaign will actually be led by a committee of  more experienced stump politicians with Macron (officially banned from campaigning as head of state) directing operations in the background.

All of which means that the French Prime Minister, whatever the constitution may say, has become a kind of Super-Chief-of- Staff or a Grand Vizir. Castex was well-suited to that role. Elisabeth Borne — demanding, tough, intellectually impressive — should also be in her element.

But like her more successful predecessors, she has to find a way of connecting with the French without making Macron jealous. And she has to win her first election in the sixth circonsciption of Calvados. If my own little patch of France rejects her on 19 June, she will be the shortest-serving prime minister of the Fifth Republic. I suspect, however, that it won’t reject her. Macron came first in this area in both the first and second round of the Presidential elections in April. In any case, the words “Prime Minister” may be devalued in Paris but they still mean something in rural France.

In the Thury Harcourt market, I spoke to Patrick, 58, a local beef farmer and village councillor just after he had chatted to Madame Borne. “I was surprised,” he said. “She was easy to talk to and seemed genuinely interested in farming. But even if she is as dull and cold as people say she is, she would win. How often do you see prime ministers in Thury Harcourt? Never. It will be a great and wonderful thing for this area to elect a Prime Minister.”

A month ago, the opinion polls suggested that Marine Le Pen and the far-Right had an outside chance of taking power in the presidential election. Either the polls were wrong or French voters gave themselves a pleasing frisson of fear and then drew back: President Emmanuel Macron, a reformist apostle of the French-European status quo, won by 17 points. Now some suggest that the hard-Left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon — anti-EU, anti-Nato, anti-market, long-time defender of Vladimir Putin, admirer of Maximilien Robespierre — could become prime minister after the parliamentary elections on June 12 and 19.

Could he? In theory, yes. Will he?

The overwhelming probability is that French voters will do what they have always done since the present electoral system began in 1965. They will give a working majority, or at least the biggest bloc of seats in the National Assembly, to the newly elected, or re-elected, President of the Republic.

All the same, something new and strange is undeniably happening in French politics. The anti-establishment Mélenchon has surged to a position of apparent strength one month after the rise and fall of the anti-establishment Le Pen. This is not an aberration. It is a logical consequence of the redrawing of the political frontiers in France which began with the last election, in 2017.

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After seven decades in which broad blocs on the Right and Left alternated in power and governed in roughly the same way, France has split into three internally quarrelsome political tribes. There is a consensual, reformist, pro-market, pro-European, pro-Nato “Centre”, dominated by Emmanuel Macron but embraced by moderate parts of the old governing parties of centre-Right and centre-Left. There is a nationalist-populist, Eurosceptic and Islamophobic Right, divided between supporters of Le Pen, her unsuccessful challenger Eric Zemmour, and the harder end of the collapsing Gaullist or centre-Right party, Les Républicains. And now, on the Left, four tribes long poisonously divided have been brought together by Mélenchon under a single radical banner to fight the parliamentary elections and — he insists — form the next government.

This alliance is called Nouvelle Union Populaire Economique et Sociale, or NUPES. It embraces Mélenchon’s hard-Left movement La France Insoumise, the Greens, the Communists and what remains of France’s other collapsing former “party of government”, the Socialists. Rather than idealism or any deep, common conviction that they can form a government next month, the cement which holds these mutually loathing groups together is financial need and cynicism. French political parties are financed by the taxpayer to the tune of about €66 million a year. Those state subsidies are doled out according to the number of votes and seats won in parliamentary elections (€1.42 a year for each vote and €37,280 for each deputy).

In the first round of the presidential election, the Socialists, in power until five years ago, won less than 2% of the vote — meaning they now face parliamentary and financial extinction. Mélenchon came third with 22% of the vote, putting him in a position to achieve something unprecedented in French political history: uniting the Left around one of its extremes rather than the moderate, market-friendly centre of, say, François Mitterrand or François Hollande.

And so to the fury of many of their big names, including ex-President Hollande, the Europhile Socialists decided last week to sign up for the radical, Eurosceptic and frankly incoherent  NUPES “left and green” alliance. The platform speaks of “disobeying” or “derogating” (i.e. temporarily withdrawing) from European Union rules on the economy. It also insists that a future NUPES government would never break national or EU law.

How can both of those things be true? They can’t. The Mélenchon programme, like that of Marine Le Pen, implies leaving or destroying the EU through disobedience: a Frexit which dare not speak its name.

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Much of the rest of the programme — including returning the standard retirement age to 60 and freezing fuel and food prices — is equally incoherent. The climate-friendly Greens have signed up to freeze prices on fossil fuels; the fiercely pro-nuclear Communists have agreed to abandon nuclear energy, which provides 80% of France’s electricity. It’s hard not to conclude that both the Communists and the Greens assume that Mélenchon will never be prime minister and the programme will never be applied. Both know that an alliance with him is their only chance of retaining a few deputies in the National Assembly (the Communists) or gaining some again (the Greens). Like the Socialists, both have joined NUPES for state funding and political survival.

In theory, Mélenchon could come to power without winning the presidency. The French political system is presidential by custom and practice but the real power remains with parliament. If the Left wins 289 seats or more in the National Assembly, Mélenchon could force Macron to appoint him as head of government. The new assembly could then reject all of Macron’s other choices until he gave way. This would leave Macron with limited influence over foreign and defence policy. He could call a new election (or several new elections), but in all other respects, the real leadership of France would shift to Mélenchon, as it did to the Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, from 1997-2002.

If the Left had a more moderate programme and a less divisive leader, such a “cohabitation” might be possible. In one recent poll, 56% of respondents said that they would welcome a split government of some kind. With Mélenchon as leader, however, the Left has no chance of assembling a parliamentary majority of its own. Posters have already been distributed by La France Insoumise carrying the slogan “Mélenchon Premier Ministre”. They are an effective campaign tool — for Emmanuel Macron. As the French political scientist and author Chloe Morin says: “Jean-Luc Mélenchon is the principal asset of La France Insoumise. He is also their principal handicap. He is a great orator, a matchless tactician but also a deeply divisive figure.”

In practice, this means the parliamentary election is likely to be a reverse mirror image of the presidential election last month. Macron triumphed because many, though not all, Left-wing voters supported him in round two to keep out Le Pen and the far-Right. His parliamentary allies will win many seats next month because many, though not all, Right-wing voters will support them in round two to keep out Mélenchon and the hard Left.

There are, admittedly, a number of possible complications. This is, after all, not one election but 577, with local issues and local personalities. And unlike the presidential election, more than two candidates can, in theory, fight the second round. To qualify from third place (or even a fourth), a candidate has to attract 12.5% of the local, registered vote in round one. Since the turnout is expected once again to fall below 50%, the bar for third place qualification will be around 25% of the people who bother to vote.

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Five years ago, there was only one “triangular” contest. If this pattern is repeated, the avalanche of two-way contests in round two will favour Macron, as it did then.

A recent Harris Interactive poll suggested that the NUPES alliance could win just over one third of the votes in the first round of the parliamentary elections. The alliance of four or five centrist parties supporting President Macron — called Ensemble (together) — would get somewhat less. The Right would also receive around one third of the votes, but divided in each constituency between Lepennists, Zemmourists and Les Républicains, who have refused to make a nationwide alliance. In the second round, the Harris poll calculated that Macron’s allies would win well over 300 seats (the majority is 289), while the Left alliance would win fewer than 100.

This figure is probably too low. If Mélenchon is able to turn out unusually high numbers of the urban young and in the multi-racial suburbs, as he did in the presidential election, he has a slim chance of reducing Macron to a plurality of seats rather than an outright majority. It is more likely that Macron’s allies will win a comfortable majority: another scare for the consensual centre will have come to nothing.

And yet if this happens, Macron’s parliamentary majority, like his presidential victory, will have been won partly by default. He will enter his new five-year term with the whole-hearted backing of, at most, one third of the electorate.

All of which means the centre cannot afford to be complacent. In the longer term, supporters of the French and European status quo have good reason to be scared. The tripartite division of France — radical Left, moderate Centre, nationalist Right — is here to stay, and it is inherently unstable.

France is a querulous country: its instinct is to boot out incumbents at each national election. How long can the pro-European “centre” expect to survive with tactical support from its enemies, whether from the Left against the nationalist Right or from the Right against the radical Left? We will know the answer in five years’ time.

Nationally, the polls suggest that this strange, long-frozen election will be a close-run thing — much closer than seemed possible two or three weeks ago. New survey data even suggests Le Pen could sneak victory, though Macron probably still has the edge.

My village Culey-le-Patry has no crime, no obvious suffering and no immigrants apart from myself and a couple of other Britons. Nonetheless, Marine Le Pen — far-Right, anti-migrant, anti-EU, enthusiastically pro-Putin until February — will sweep to local victory here in both rounds of the election. The same thing will happen in thousands of villages across France.

Village by village, that vote is tiny. Culey only has 280 electors, and a population of 355. There are, however, 30,000 angry villages in France: angry at petrol prices; angry at poor services; angry without really being able to explain why they are angry.

Yet this anger is nothing new — nor is it entirely Macron’s fault. In the second round in 2017, Le Pen got 34% of the vote across France; in my village, she got 44.7%. In the first round, Macron led the poll nationally; in Culey-le-Patry, he came fourth, while Le Pen came first with 29% of the votes. She may get over 50% this year.

Historically, Normandy is not fertile territory for the far-Right — unlike, say, the struggling parts of the industrial North or the Paris-hating South-East. And yet rural Normandy has been swinging gradually towards the Le Pens, father and daughter, for two decades. The smaller the village and the greater the distance from a large town, the bigger the Le Pen vote.

Little by little — it started long before Macron and the Gilets Jaunes — villages like Culey-le-Patry have changed political sides. They used to be the bedrock of the centre-right, Gaullist and soft-Left status quo in France. They have become, almost without realising it, a breeding ground for a tear-it-down populism which seeks to destroy France’s outward-looking, pro-European post-war consensus.

And yet few people in Culey or similar villages care about politics or follow political events from day to day. Several people I spoke to were unaware that the opinion polls had shifted dramatically in recent days. They assumed Macron would win but intended to vote for Le Pen. I did not find a single person who said they would vote, or had ever intended to vote, for her far-right rival Eric Zemmour. His rise (and fall) was largely a metropolitan/suburban phenomenon.

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Zemmour’s decline was partly fuelled by his long history of enthusiasm for Vladimir Putin. This is something shared by Le Pen, but she has soared in the last three weeks, mostly at Zemmour’s expense, by focusing on high prices and low wages. The overall far-Right share of the vote (32-34%) has scarcely changed.

In my conversations, not one person brought up the war. They spoke of the high petrol and diesel prices caused partly by Putin’s invasion without mentioning it directly. An exception was our mayor, Marie-Christine Danlos. “I think people here do care about Ukraine,” she said. “Certainly they do. We are surrounded by the memories and scars of war from the summer of 1944. I certainly hear no pro-Russian feeling. None at all.”

“But in the end most people here are tightly wrapped in their own lives. They live for today and tomorrow. They feel sympathy for Ukraine but they are very, very angry about petrol and diesel prices. They are angry and worried about rising food prices. Who do they hear on TV talking most persuasively about the cost of living and purchasing power? Marine Le Pen.”

Mme Danlos, 70, is a retired social worker. She has always voted for the Left. This year she will vote for the hard-Left candidate, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, not because she likes his extreme positions against the EU and Nato, but because he is the only Left-wing candidate with a slim chance of reaching the second round.

“I’m afraid of Le Pen,” Mme Danlos said. “And do you know why? Because I find myself nodding in agreement with her when I see her on TV. She speaks good sense about prices and low incomes. She comes over these days like a traditional candidate of the Right, not the far-Right.

“I fear that it hides a great deal. None of it will be good for this country or the people of Culey-le Patry. And yet she will get a lot of votes here and in the surrounding villages. A lot.”

***

Culey-le-Patry is in the valley of the river Orne, about 40 kilometres south of Caen. The commune, including a main village Le Bourg and ten hamlets, stretches five kilometres from the western bank of the river to the ridge of the highest hills in Calvados. The whole area was mistitled La Suisse Normande — Norman Switzerland — by a British journalist a century ago. It is more like Shropshire or Herefordshire than Switzerland.

When I first came to live here, 24 years ago, there were still 20 or so farms, large and small, including two tiny, scarcely-mechanised dairy ones in my own hamlet (population: 8). There are now just five, highly-mechanised farms in the eight square kilometres of the commune — and none in the hamlet.

Year by year, I have watched as the Caen suburbs march southwards along the main roads and climb up the hillsides. Our main village has its own small estate of a dozen bungalows, inhabited by people who drive every day to work in Caen. There is no tension with the long-time locals; there is no contact with them at all.

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One by one, many of the wonderful local characters that I got to know 20 years ago have died or moved away. There was Jean-Michel, the hippy-farmer who drove his tractor backwards because all the other gears no longer worked. He moved south and last I heard he was an agricultural inspector.

There was Bernard, a successful farmer who was delivered by an SS doctor during the height of the Battle of Normandy, in July 1944. He flew his own bright-yellow light aircraft off one of his fields until one day, after morning-milking, he failed to come home.

He is buried in the Culey cemetery, next to Sergeant Maurice “Mike” Wilson of the Royal Australian Air Force, whose Spitfire crashed in the commune in June 1944, just before the SS doctor delivered Bernard. The doctor (a resolute Nazi until the end) used to visit Bernard — calling him “my French son” — each summer from the mid-Seventies until he died in the late Nineties.

The commune used to be divided socially between farmers and non-farmers (whom the former tended to despise). It was also divided between “the people of the church” who voted centre-right and “the non-church people” who voted to the Left.

Along with the school, Culey church closed, except for funerals, in the Eighties. The bar-restaurant shut ten years ago. Of the remaining population, perhaps only 150 are Culey born-and-bred (although that includes three of the eight people in my hamlet, who have lived there for 80 years or more).

In the 20 years that I have known it, Culey-le-Patry has become younger and more prosperous but its sense of community has diminished. That may change. We have 50 local children (the highest figure for a long time). They know each other much better than their parents do. They all travel to school together on the bus.

I see no evidence of great poverty or suffering but people keep their secrets to themselves. Mme Danlos, the mayor, says several local families rely quietly on the “Restos de Coeur” and Catholic food charities.

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There are seven doctors within ten kilometres; a health centre; a council gym; loads of shops in the valley; a cheap bus service into Caen. A fast broad-band cable system, installed by hardy teams of contract workers of Polish and North African origin, will be switched on for every house in our obscure commune this month.

Neglected, rural France? Not really. Not all of it.

What is lacking is a local source of prosperity and pride — the small dairy farms on the hills and the factories and iron-ore mines which once provided jobs down in the valley. We are now a community with no clear raison d’être and no longer any real sense of community.

Other places in France may have more specific reasons for their anger with the establishment and the elites — crime, unemployment, immigration. In Culey, there is anger at high fuel and food prices. But that is a temporary phenomenon. There is also an  ill-defined feeling of marginalisation and loss: of not belonging to the successful, outward-looking France of Paris, Toulouse and Bordeaux, but no longer having any clear local identity either.

Denis, 78, a retired farmer told me: “Farming, living from the land, not just in the countryside, used to be what brought us together here. Now we farmers and ex-farmers are a small minority. People — and not just these new hoursins (incomers) from Caen — are furious if they have to wait for a tractor blocking the road.”

Denis has always voted centre-right — for De Gaulle in 1965, for Chirac in 1995 and 2002, for Sarkozy in 2007 and 2012. In 2017, he spoiled his ballot rather than vote for Macron or Le Pen in the second round. This year, he will vote for the centre-right in Round One and Le Pen rather than Macron in Round Two. “I don’t like her but she is not going to win anyway and I can’t stand Macron,” he said. “Even after five years I just don’t know who he is.”

Jean-Philippe, 28, is a plumber who drives 40 kilometres to work in Caen each day. He was very active in the Gilets Jaunes movement of 2018-9, which began partly in protest against pump prices when diesel was €1.50 a litre.

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Last month, after the Ukraine war began, diesel rocketed to €2.20 a litre but has now subsided to €1.80, partly thanks to an €0.18 a litre government rebate. Jean-Philippe said: “The price of diesel and petrol is still much too high. Sometimes I wonder if I can afford to go to work. I would be better off claiming unemployment pay. It’s fine the government blaming Russia and the war. But why don’t they cut the 20% VAT on fuel to 5.5% like Marine Le Pen says she will? The politicians would rather give the money to  migrants, or to themselves, than help rural people like us.”

Who will Jean-Phillippe vote for? Le Pen in both rounds.

One of my most eloquent guides to Culey politics had always been my next-door neighbour’s cousin, Catherine, aged 58. “It’s complicated,” she says.  “It’s very complicated. Don’t say it’s all about xenophobia and immigration because that would not be correct. If an Arab family moved to Culey, they would be treated like everyone else. No one would scrawl graffiti on their house.”

“And yet the vote for the far-Right goes up at every election. Why? There is no crime, no sense of being insecure. Most people, like me, if they go out for a few minutes will leave their door unlocked.”

“There is a kind of submerged racism here. People see brown and black faces on the TV news or in the French football team. It’s not the France they know. They feel threatened, even though there is no direct threat to them. They vote Le Pen as a kind of protest or gesture…”

As Catherine says: “It’s complicated.”

***

Macron’s rural failure is not so much to have failed to invest in La France Profonde. Whatever the Gilets Jaunes may say, successive French governments have hugely subsidised rural France from urban and suburban taxes. Rather, Macron’s rural failure is part of his wider inability to persuade the whole of France that it can share in the outward-looking confidence and prosperity of its thriving cities.

When she slipped from view during Zemmour’s rise last year, Le Pen embarked on a village Tour de France. She gained lots of positive publicity in local papers, unnoticed at the time by the Paris and foreign media, including me. Her message was always the same: “Village France is the real France. The rebuilding of the real France starts with you.”

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It was a flattering message but a deeply misleading one. There can be no future for village France if France as a whole is not prosperous. Le Pen’s policies — disconnection from Europe, discrimination against immigrants — would turn the whole of France into a village, isolated from Europe and the world.

From the ridge above Culey, you can see the flatlands of western France which stretch all the way to the Pyrenean foothills. We are just one pebble in thousands of similar pebbles on that beach, all no doubt with a similar ill-defined feeling of lost local pride and prosperity. The suffering of such places is finally more existential than economic. This is not a question of Somewhere and Anywhere. It is a sense of Somewhere-Lost.

Neither Marine Le Pen nor her 5% VAT on fuel will bring a sense of identity and pride to the many Culeys out there. They will, all the same, vote massively for her tomorrow.

*Some have names have been changed.

Colonna, 61, has been in a coma for a fortnight after being savagely beaten in France’s highest security jail by another inmate — an Islamist terrorist. Since he was beaten and suffocated almost to death, anti-French riots have engulfed several Corsican towns. If he dies, local politicians warn, the violence could explode into a “generalised revolt”.

The latest riot, in the northern town Bastia on Sunday, was the most violent event in the Mediterranean island for decades. At least 7,000 people — equivalent to one in nine of the town’s population — laid siege to government buildings.

The prefecture, the local tax office and the post office were all set alight. More than 650 Molotov cocktails, as well as pétanque balls and agricultural bird-scaring rockets, were hurled or fired at riot police. They replied with more than 4,000 stun grenades, before running out of ammunition and being forced to retreat to their barracks. One gendarme was shot in the neck with a hunting rifle.

Amid this chaos, the French interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, arrives in Corsica today for two days of emergency talks with the island’s government, which seeks greater autonomy from Paris. With the French presidential election less than a month away, with war raging in Ukraine and with the Covid pandemic showing signs of reviving, the last thing that President Emmanuel Macron needs is a violent rebellion in Corsica.

But why such violence now?

The best known of the jumble of Corsican armed separatist groups, the Fronte di Liberazione Naziunale Corsu (FLNC), gave up its “armed struggle” in 2014. Four years later, a single government for the island with expanded powers was created, run by a coalition of “autonomists” (people who want more independence within France) and “separatists” (those who want complete independence from France).

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In 2017 the Macron government offered steps towards greater autonomy (without using that word). But its proposals were blocked as unconstitutional by the centre-right majority in the upper house of the French parliament, the Sénat. Nothing much has happened since then.

So frustration has built, especially among many young Corsicans who look back to the “independence struggle” of the Eighties and Nineties as a golden age. They have embraced the identity politics of the 21^st century: unlike their parents, they reject any element of “shared” French-Corsican identity. They see themselves as the oppressed colonial subjects of France.

Many of Sunday’s protesters were students or school children — although most of the violence came from a roaming band of 100 or so older people wearing black hoods. For these younger generations, Colonna, a convicted murderer, is a folk hero — a Corsican version of Bobby Sands.

“The young feel themselves exalted by this struggle,” said Professor Xavier Crettiez, an expert on political violence in Corsica. “Nationalism has acquired an aura for many young people, which has become mythified as the years go by.”

Corsica won its independence from Genoa in 1755 and installed the first fully democratic system of modern times, two decades before the United States. The island was conquered by France in 1769 during a brutal war but reclaimed its independence during the French Revolution. In an attempt to keep the French at bay, Corsica formed an unlikely “union” with Great Britain for three years up to 1796.

Although French for over two centuries now, Corsica does not “feel French” — not for many Corsicans and not for visitors. It has its own language, related to Italian, and is controlled by a secretive family clan system, rather like Sicily or Sardinia. Although political violence has almost vanished, the murder rate remains twice as great as in France as a whole.

On my first trip, I drove away from the airport and came across a car driving around a roundabout the wrong way. A few minutes later, I came to another roundabout and another car driving the wrong way. The Wizard of Oz sprang to mind. “Toto, I don’t think we are in Kansas any more.”

To be a working shepherd and an active terrorist could happen in only a few places in the world, including the well-named Ile de Beauté. Colonna’s status as a folk hero is puzzling to outsiders, and also to many Corsicans, but says much about the attitudes of some on the island to violence, to politics and to France.

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After four years on the run, Colonna was convicted in 2006 of murdering, with two associates, the most senior French official on the island, the Prefect Claude Erignac. In 1998, Erignac was shot three times in the back while walking to the opera in Ajaccio with his wife. He had challenged the impunity of the Corsican criminal clans which were deeply entwined with — though not wholly responsible for — the mostly low-level separatist violence of the Eighties and Nineties.

Colonna has consistently proclaimed his innocence but his conviction has twice been upheld on appeal. Among young nationalists, there is widespread belief that Colonna was both not guilty and a courageous fighter for Corsican freedom. How can he be at once innocent and a freedom fighter? This contradiction is rarely addressed by his young worshippers.

Paul-François Paoli, a cultural writer and historian of French-Corsican relations, told Le Figaro: “Colonna doesn’t represent all Corsicans but that part of Corsica which sees itself as exclusively Corsican… If there was a hero in this tragic affair, it was Prefect Erignac who was doing his duty in fighting against the power of the mafia, which has since strengthened its stranglehold on the island.”

There is, however, another reason why Colonna’s near-death has caused such a furious and violent reaction. Part of the much-splintered Corsican nationalist movement is anti-Muslim. Many other Corsican separatists accuse France of being more tolerant of Muslims than Corsicans.

It was unsurprising, then, that they seized upon the fact that Colonna’s assailant, Franck Elong Abe, 36, is a Cameroon-born Islamist, who was originally arrested by US forces in Afghanistan and transferred to a series of French jails. Abe also had a record of violence against other prisoners, but was nevertheless made the overseer of the gym at the high security prison near Arles. According to French media reports, he was at one time friendly with Colonna and they played table-tennis together.

Their relationship was not to last. On March 2, Abe beat and suffocated Colonna when they were left alone by prison guards for eight minutes. His motive remains unclear, though reports suggest that Colonna may have made insulting remarks about Islam.

Whatever the truth, some of the rioters in Corsican towns accuse the French authorities of allowing Abe to kill Colonna — or at the very least of culpable negligence. The march in Bastia on Sunday assembled behind a banner reading in Corsican, “French state assassins”.

Paul-François Paoli said: “The fact that he is an Islamist poured oil on the fire… It suggests to some people that the French prison service is kinder to Islamist terrorists than to Corsican nationalists… And it’s not a big step from thinking that there was a plot to eliminate him. And those Corsicans who already made Colonna a hero now have an excuse to make him into a martyr.”

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There is another Corsican oddity to the Colonna saga. The shepherd-terrorist had three principal lawyers during his three trials. One has since been blown up in his car, in what was presumed to be a mafia hit. Another, the moderate nationalist, or “autonomist”, Gilles Simeoni, 54, has become head of the unified Corsican government which was created in 2018. The third Eric Dupond-Moretti, is Justice Minister in the present French government. Simeoni will be at the heart of the talks with the interior minister, Gérald Darmanin, today or tomorrow.

Before leaving Paris, Darmanin said his government had “heard the demands of elected Corsican politicians on the island’s institutional, economic, social and cultural future”. He was ready to launch an “unprecedented cycle of discussions” on the “evolution of Corsica within the Republic, according to the requirements of the Constitution”. Darmanin added, however, that such discussions could only happen if the violence ended.

Each word was carefully chosen. The Macron government is offering to resume progress towards a more autonomous status for Corsica, but the centralising French constitution — which speaks of “one indivisible” republic — puts limitations on what can peacefully happen.  But while polls in the past have suggested that only a small minority of Corsica’s 350,000 people want complete independence — not least because the island’s public services and transport links are heavily subsidised by French mainland taxpayers — support for greater autonomy is growing.

Gilles Simeoni, the head of the Corsican unified government, is trying to harness a volcano but also risks being destroyed by it. The violent unrest has brought the Macron government back to the table but Simeoni’s vision of a kind of Scottish or Catalan devolved status for Corsica could be swept away by an explosion of more extreme, nationalist feeling.

Simeoni said this week: “We need a political process at the highest possible level. When a logic of serious confrontation begins, as we have seen with young people (in Bastia), a grave incident could happen at any moment. We are not immune from a generalised revolt.”

Nothing much can happen before the French election is over on 24 April. Macron is heavily distracted by the campaign and by the Ukraine war. The talks, if they begin, will take months. The secular French state is praying that its former Public Enemy Number One will now do a great service to the state that he detests. All he needs to do is to carry on living.

Putin has admirers and apologists in many countries, from Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Tucker Carlson in the United States to Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn in Britain. He bought the German political establishment with gas pipelines and part of the British Conservative Party with roubles.

In France, however, the self-proclaimed, patriotic forces of anti-elite politics — on both the far-Right and the hard-left — admired Putin for free (give or take a Russian bank loan to Marine Le Pen in 2017). There is no equivalent degree of overt Putin worship in any other large, Western country — except possibly the United States.

When he held a peace summit with Emmanuel Macron just before he sent his tanks into Ukraine, Vladimir Putin humiliated the French president. But he also did him an unwanted favour: war in Ukraine has raised Emmanuel Macron’s chances of re-election in April from “pretty good” to “near-certain”.

After the first bombs fell, the Moscowteers  scrambled to distance themselves from the Russian president. Now, with scarcely a mea culpa, they have reverted to blaming the West for not giving in to Moscow on Nato expansion, and have resumed their mockery of Macron for his ill-fated peace missions to Putin last month.

This approach will appeal to part of their core support, which is viscerally anti-European, anti-American, and anti-Nato. But it is unlikely to impress the wider electorate.

Last Friday, Zemmour gave a strangely incoherent speech to a cheering and flag-waving rally of his faithful supporters in Chambéry in the French Alps: he both criticised Putin and defended him, appealing for peace and glorified war. “We know the Russians and the Russians know us. Putin’s Russia exists in the 19th century and regards war as a way of defending its strategic vision,” Zemmour said. “But the countries of the West no longer have the stomach for war… We need to consider the consequences of that.” The West, he implied, should actually be fighting “wars of civilisation” which “our elites will not accept”. In other words, he meant wars against Islam.

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Has Macron already won?

By Aris Roussinos

Perhaps more surprising is what Zemmour didn’t say: he made no mention in Chambéry of Putin’s repeated threat to use nuclear weapons. The man who presents himself as the saviour of his nation now finds himself aligned with a man threatening to destroy it. So does Marine Le Pen and so does Jean-Luc Mélenchon.

As a result, I believe that the presidential election is all but over. President Macron has until Friday to enter the race formally. Despite the failure of his peace mission, the war will freeze the campaign and swing many moderate, non-ideological voters behind him.

Macron may or may not have been too indulgent with Putin last month. But three of his main adversaries have praised or idolised him for years. Even the centre-Right challenger Valérie Pécresse — no Putin fan — represents a party whose last Prime Minister, François Fillon, was until last week a salaried Moscow ally. After enormous pressure from Pécresse, Fillon finally resigned last week from the board of the Russian petro-chemical giant, Sibur.

Of course, Macron’s opponents still have a couple of straws to cling to: most damagingly, the confrontation with Russia will worsen fuel and food inflation, which was already threatening a Macron second term. It will, however, also give the President political cover to take action, such as temporary tax cuts, to ease price rises — steps that would normally have been impossible just before a presidential vote.

Meanwhile, Moscow will doubtless turn several armoured divisions of online trolls and fake social media accounts on the French campaign. Yet a Moscow blitz of fake news against Macron was expected anyway. Its effect will also be limited: it will mostly be seen by the anti-European, anti-Nato, Macron-detesting portion of the electorate, which would never have voted for him in any case.

This raises a more fundamental question: why was Putin so popular in France in the first place?

The 2022 election may be over, but the fellow-travelling of the three leading election candidates is a stark reminder of the fragility of the French political status quo. Disaffected French cultural figures, from Gérard Dépardieu to Michel Houellebecq, are also long-standing Putin fans, infected by a variant of the pro-Soviet virus which swept through much of French intellectual life in the Fifties.

Will the surge of nationalism in French politics be damaged by its association with Vladimir Putin? In the short term, yes. In the longer term, however, the same problems will produce the same resentments and the same arguments. The key man here is Éric Zemmour.

On the Left, Jean-Luc Mélenchon is a Jurassic politician, fighting his last election. For him, defending Putin was part of the unthinking baggage of being anti-American, anti-Nato and anti-European. Ditto for Marine Le Pen. In any case, her political star is waning. Moscow certainly thinks so; she was refused Russian loans this time around.

Of the Three Moscowteers, Zemmour has the most to lose. He represents — or represented — a rising power in French politics, if not for 2022 then for 2027.

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Europe must prepare for war

By Aris Roussinos

For Mélenchon and Le Pen, Putin was their “enemy’s enemy”. Their thinking went no deeper than that. Zemmour epitomises something else: the strange attraction that Putin has come to hold on parts of the intellectual hard-Right in France and elsewhere. Zemmour admires Putin not despite what he is but because of what he is. Although Jewish himself, he has long idolised Putin as a defender of “Christian values” and “male values” against the onslaught of liberalism, feminism and gay rights.

It’s hardly surprising, then, that a new hashtag has appeared on French Twitter in recent days: #VladimirZemmour. French media and political opponents have started to trace the many links and similarities between Putinism and Zemmourism. Both men exploit tendentious narratives of national decline and national betrayal. Both shamelessly rewrite their country’s history to exaggerate past glories and nurse grudges against rival nations or the forces of “internationalism”.

For Putin, the indivisible Russian people and Russia’s natural right to be one of the world’s great powers have been betrayed by his weak or foolish predecessors and by the anti-Russian aggression of the West. For Zemmour, France’s natural superiority and right to cultural domination have been eroded over the centuries by foreign and internationalist conspiracies and by the betrayals of its own political classes. The latest betrayal is “le grand remplacement” — an allegedly deliberate plan by “international finance” and “the elites” to replace the white race by brown and black people.

In 2016, Zemmour wrote that the Russian President was “the last bastion against the hurricane of the politically correct which, starting in America, has destroyed all the traditional structures of family, religion and nation”. He is “the only European leader to defend traditional society, rooted in its own history and culture. All other Western leaders have turned the rootless, self-empowered individual into a jealous and demanding God.”

Two years later, he added: “I dream of a French Putin emerging but there is none…” Three years after that, Zemmour stopped being an essayist and TV pundit and decided to run for the role of “French Putin” himself.

In the large back-library of Zemmour’s Putin panegyrics, you will find scarce mention of the dismantlement of any semblance of democracy in Russia, and the imprisonment and poisoning of opponents. But while Western governments and businesses have ignored or chosen to live with these crimes. Zemmour has implicitly endorsed them. As recently as last September, Zemmour said that France should abandon Nato and the EU and enter a “Russian alliance…that would be far more reliable”.

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Until now, Zemmourist converts from the centre-Right — mostly very young or retired, well-educated and well-off — have brushed off such excesses. They prefer to focus on Zemmour’s energy and his eloquence in skewering the failures and evasions of the liberal, pro-European consensus. Yet they are now confronted with facts that they preferred to ignore: Zemmour’s gut instincts are authoritarian and undemocratic. His Putin-worship is not a tangential flirtation to annoy “the elites”. It is the core of Zemmourism.

As I have argued before, Zemmour’s political project was always long-term. It hoped to succeed over two election campaigns, not one. But I believe that Zemmour has been lastingly discredited by his Putin worship. In his place, another figure will doubtless emerge to pursue his vision of a strong, nationalist anti-European Right into the 2027 campaign (when Macron, if re-elected, cannot run again).

One of the likely candidates for that role is Marine Le Pen’s estranged niece, Marion Maréchal — although she is another long-standing Putin-fellow-traveller. Yet the New Right will not go away in France any more than it will in the United States. Memories fade. The core issues of identity, fear of Islamism and the need for better-shared prosperity will remain.

Part of the identity of the New Right is to mock international and European institutions, even the very idea of human rights or international law. No doubt the muddles and compromises of Nato and the EU will be mocked again and again in the coming months or even years as those flawed organisations struggle to support Ukraine without firing a shot and risking nuclear war.

It would, all the same, be pleasant to imagine that some on the new, nationalist Right — and not just in France — might start to reconsider and regret some of the Strange Gods they have worshipped in recent years. Vladimir Putin — a corrupt, violent, anti-democratic man who detests the values of the West — has been recruited as a poster-boy for French and American ultra-patriotism. Many people who, like Eric Zemmour, are sincerely devoted to the values of the past, now find themselves trapped on the wrong side of history.

As the weeks tick by, President Emmanuel Macron’s opinion poll score has scarcely moved. He has stayed within a narrow band of 23-26% of first round support for six months — eight to ten points ahead of the pursuing pack.

Below him there is an increasingly vicious scrap between three candidates of the far-Right and the right. When Éric Zemmour, the new poster-boy of ultra-nationalism, rises in the polls, Marine Le Pen, the old poster-girl, goes down. When Valérie Pécresse, the would-be saviour of the moderate, traditional Right, gains ground, Zemmour and Le Pen retreat. The Right-wing candidates expend much of their energy attacking one another. Macron remains untouched.

Below that, there is a six or seven-way scrap for the soul of the Left, whose only prize is likely to be a pointless fourth or fifth place in the first round of the election on 10 April. The Left, like the Right, spends much of its time savaging itself. Once again, Macron remains unscathed.

The campaign is frozen partly because of the Covid pandemic, whose towering Omicron wave seems finally to be abating. A recent IFOP poll found that only 52% of French voters have spoken of the election with friends, compared to 78% at this time in the 2017 campaign. The main topics of conversation in France are, according to the IFOP poll: Covid, Covid and Covid.

The campaign has been further (and deliberately) anaesthetised by President Macron. He has delayed (and delayed again) his formal entry to the race, instead preferring to campaign from within the relative safety of the presidential bubble, to the fury of the other candidates. Macron has made it clear that he will run, but intends to postpone a formal declaration for as long as possible. The deadline is 4 March.

This is especially a problem for Pécresse, who rightly sees herself as the only candidate who could beat Macron in the run-off on 24 April. She wants to make the campaign all about Pécresse vs Macron. For now, he is like a boxer dancing out of her reach.

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Is Emmanuel Macron a superman?

By Blake Smith

The Emperor Napoleon once said that he’d rather have a lucky general than a good one. Macron has not always been a lucky President but he seems to be a lucky candidate. His five-year term was troubled by the Gilets Jaunes rebellion in peripheral France in 2018-9. Almost half of his term has been dominated by the Covid pandemic.

And yet he had enormous electoral fortune in 2017, winning the presidency almost by default in his first ever political campaign. Luck is smiling on him again: just as the Covid pandemic began to fade as a reason to evade full-time campaigning, along came Vladimir Putin and 130,000 Russian soldiers on Ukraine’s eastern border.

Still, electoral considerations do not explain why Macron travelled to Moscow yesterday to try to defuse the Ukraine crisis. Macron believes that he can talk to Putin in a way that no other Western leader can.

Yes, the Russian president may well be stringing the French president along. He has done so before: Macron’s previous attempts to soft-soap the Russian president came to nothing and raised suspicions in eastern Europe that the young French president does not understand Putin or Russia.

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Yet Putin tells Macron (and Macron’s people tell the New York Times) that he finds conversations with Macron more “profound” than with other leaders. Putin spoke to the French president on the phone four times last week.

Will we shortly see Emmanuel Macron with a winged collar and a walrus moustache holding a piece of paper and proclaiming peace in our time? Some of the commentary on the French president’s visit to the Kremlin implies that Macron contemplates a Chamberlain-like betrayal.

This is misleading. For one thing, Macron does not have the power to commit Nato or the European Union to anything that other governments disapprove of. For another, Macron has consulted closely with Ukraine and his Western partners. Macron believes that he can agree with Putin the terms for a “time-out”, if not an immediate “way-out”. His approach has more in common with the views of the Ukrainian government than Washington or London’s.

Whatever the outcome, Macron can expect an electoral windfall. If he helps to broker a new détente between Putin and the West, he will be the hero of the hour. If he fails and Nato plunges into a serious confrontation with Moscow, Macron will be the nation’s independent-minded, internationally respected leader at a time of world crisis.

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Can France resist tribalism?

By Boyd Tonkin

Should the French election therefore be considered as done and dusted nine weeks before the first round? Some people are beginning to think so. Others say that the campaign hasn’t started yet; anything is still possible.

In the first of those camps, is The Economist’s data unit. They crunched the stats on recent polls last week and decided that Macron has a 79% chance of re-election. In the second camp, there is the latest in a series of unconventional polls by IFOP, which asks voters who they think will win. Only 21% of those questioned last week said that they believed in a Macron victory — a six-point drop in seven days. (Admittedly, the poll gave even lower scores to all the other candidates).

Why has the popular mood darkened? A spike in prices for food, housing, petrol, diesel and domestic gas has erased any sense of prosperity remaining from France’s economic recovery last year (7% growth, the highest in the G7). Additionally, Macron’s generally sound handling of the Covid pandemic has been muddied in recent weeks by a confusing series of rule changes on the testing of children in schools.

Conversations with senior figures in the Macron camp suggest that the President remains confident of victory. “Isn’t the The Economist’s 79% overpriced?” I asked one leading presidential ally. “Yes,” he replied. “I’d put his chances of winning at no more than 65%.”

Indeed, the President’s people believe that no other candidate has shown presidential stature; none has been able to raise themselves above the internal quarrels in their own camps. If Macron has been able profitably to delay his entry to the race, it is largely thanks to his opponents. “If there were another candidate, or two other candidates, polling at 20% or more of first round support, Macron would have been obliged to campaign more actively,” another Macron ally said. “As things stand, it’s him at 24-25% and all the rest a floor below or a couple of floors below. He has the luxury of staying out of the race for as long as he can.”

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The impotence of the French Left

By John Lichfield

The President’s strategy is to squeeze the first-round battle into as short a period as possible. He will refuse to take part in televised debates with up to 13 other candidates. He will fight a lightning campaign in which he will present himself as both a tested leader and an imaginative but cautious reformer — someone with a positive vision for France’s future but no longer the white-collar revolutionary of 2017.

To observers both in France and abroad, Macron’ electoral strength may seem odd. He attracts intense detestation, and his record is uneven. He has some legislative achievements, but his reform programme was truncated by two years of health crisis and lockdowns. His promise to make France a land of opportunity (while preserving much of the welfare state) is, at best, a work in progress. But while Macron may have failed to build a robust, centrist party, he has a strong personal following — what pollster Brice Teinturier calls a “fan-zone”.

Macron’s support still straddles, as it did in 2017, parts of both the old centre-Left and centre-Right. Its median point might be further Right than it was in 2017, but Macron still commands the allegiance of a large chunk of the old, pro-European “managerial” Left — people who once voted for Presidents François Mitterrand and François Hollande.

A BVA poll last October found that 54% of Socialist sympathisers were tempted to vote for Macron in the first round on 10 April. France’s generous Covid lockdown support programmes for businesses and individuals has convinced some moderate Left-wingers (by no means all) that the President is one of them. Macron has to expand that “fan-zone” of around a quarter of the electorate to 50% (and one vote) to win the two-candidate run-off on 24 April.

All depends on the identity of his opponent. If Marine Le Pen or Éric Zemmour reaches the second round, Macron can probably rely on reinforcements from part of the Left and from the pro-European, moderate centre-Right to keep the far-Right out of the Elysée Palace. If he is matched against Valérie Pécresse, his task becomes harder. The two-week second round campaign would be a close-run thing but not necessarily his Waterloo.

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Three ways Macron could lose France

By John Lichfield

Macron’s people are confident that he would beat Pécresse. “Some of the Left will vote for her to defeat Macron but she doesn’t have the spark, that extra quality she will need to beat him,” one Macron ally said.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. If the cost-of-living crisis worsens, she may not need much of a spark. As Teinturier warns: “Purchasing power is the one factor that can most easily destroy support for an incumbent.” In short, it’s not all over. After all, French elections often throw up an unexpected plot twist.

There is, however, a strong chance that Macron will be the first President to be re-elected by the French in 20 years. He would also be the only President of the Fifth Republic to be re-elected without having first lost de facto power to the opposition in a parliamentary election.

If he is re-elected, Emmanuel Macron will become the most powerful, experienced leader in the European Union — with ambitions to make the EU stronger. Macron-haters outside France should start bracing themselves for that possibility: he may not be running yet, but the signs suggest he is well on the way to crossing the finish line in first place.

Within a few hours, Roussel found himself under heavy bombardment, as other factions of the French Left lined up to pelt him with insults and insinuations. Why was a Left-wing politician promoting hard-Right, identitarian notions such as “French gastronomy”? What did he mean by excluding couscous? What about the ecological implications of beef-rearing? And the health risks of cheese? And wine?

Despite all the excitement, the incident will have zero impact on the outcome of the French election in April. Communist Party support in France topped 20% a half century ago; it now hovers at around 2%.

All the same, such attacks on a pleasant, rather old-fashioned “lefty” like Roussel tell a revealing story of the self-destructive tribalism of the French Left. France is now a “socialist” country which no longer votes Left in national elections: for the second presidential election in succession, no Left-wing candidate will reach the second round.

And yet, until five years ago, France had a Socialist president and a Socialist majority in parliament. Even today, most of its big, thriving cities — Paris, Marseille, Montpellier, Lilles, Nantes, Rennes, Bordeaux, Grenoble, Strasbourg — still have Socialist or Green mayors. Over 61% of French GDP is spent by the state, compared to 45% in the US, 49% in the UK and 51% in Germany. Support for what would be considered Left-wing ideas in other countries — state intervention, abortion, gay rights — is strong.

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Three ways Macron could lose France

By John Lichfield

There are at least eight Left-wing candidates for April’s presidential election. By some calculations, there are as many as 12 of them — including two flavours of Trotskyist, two socialists and several greens. None has more than 10% of the vote; none has much chance of being in the top four when France votes in the first round on 10 April. Between them they have around 26% of first round support, compared to the 43% of voters who backed a Left or green candidate in 2012.

The Left in Britain and Germany also fell to a low ebb recently, but managed to resurrect themselves — seizing the Chancellorship in Germany and topping the opinion polls in Britain. Yet no such Lazarus-like revival is likely in France for many years, if ever. Why?

The most obvious explanation is the implosion, as a national force, of Le Parti Socialiste, which was created by François Mitterrand in the Seventies to herd the scattered Left and put the shepherd (himself) into the Elysée Palace.

Ten years ago, the PS candidate, François Hollande, took 28.6% of the vote in the first round of a presidential election. Its current standard-bearer, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, is running at around 3%.

There are three reasons for the PS’s rapid decline: two circumstantial and one fundamental. The first is the emergence of a powerful centrist force in French politics: President Macron has hijacked between 8 to 10 points of the old “moderate Left” which used to vote Socialist.

The second concerns the weaknesses and personal antagonisms of a new generation of Left-wing leaders. Their jealousies and limitations will be illustrated in the next few days by the psychodrama of a People’s Primary — a well-meaning attempt by leftist academics and activists to unite the French Left behind one presidential candidate. But like all such attempts, it will only divide the Left further.

To understand why Le Primaire Populaire is doomed to fail, you have to look at the third and most important reason for the decline of the Left: the changing social and political geology of France.

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A letter from Calais

By Abdul Saboor

As in other countries, mass, blue-collar support for Left-wing parties evaporated long ago. In the first round of the 2017 presidential election, two in five blue-collar workers voted for Marine Le Pen and other far-Right candidates. In their place, the broad Left (including the Greens) is now mostly populated by an educated, middle-class and urban grouping — hence its success in big cities, like Paris, Marseille and Bordeaux. Such a Left — more intellectual than emotional; more interested in ideology than in solidarity — finds it irksome to have a dominant, pragmatic worldview or a single, respected leader.

In the absence of any unifying identity, a new French polling organisation, Cluster-17, believes that talk of Left and Right no longer makes sense in France. Rather, it divides France into 16 “clusters” or tribes of voters, seven of which include or overlap with chunks of the old “Left”.

Often, these groups are contradictory. There is, for example, a fiercely secular French Left, which is as anxious about radical Islam, as well as an anti-imperialist, anti-racist French Left, which resists attempts to curb Islamist influence. There is a pro-European Left and an anti-European Left. There is a pro-nuclear power Left and an anti-nuclear Left.

“Political allegiances in France have become much more complex and individual,” Professor Jean-Yves Dormagen of Montpellier University, the founder of Cluster-17, tells me. “Instead of large voting blocs there is an archipelago of voting clusters. Social class, education, wealth, all remain factors but so are cultural attitudes.”

The key word there is individual. In France belief in action for the common good (fraternité/egalité) is carved on every town hall and imprinted on the national DNA. But the French are also a nation of fiercely individual individuals (liberté). And the collapse of Left-wing solidarity means that those who value “common action” do so in an increasingly “individual” way. This was displayed, ad absurdum at times, by the Gilets Jaunes movement of 2018-9, which instantly detested anyone who emerged as its leader. Politics should be abolished, the Gilets Jaunes believed; everyone should run the country from laptops on their kitchen tables.

This new belief in citizen power is more pronounced on the French Left than on the French Right, where the belief in a Providential Man (or Woman) remains strong. To misquote Charles de Gaulle, how can you hope to govern a French Left which has 265 different interpretations of “solidarity”?

Enter the independent “Popular Primary”: a hopeless attempt by Left-wing academics and activists to unite the Left before April. Although called a “primary”, it is more like a giant, online opinion poll to be held on 27 to 30 January. Up to 250,000 self-selected participants will be asked to give a score between 1 and 5 to the seven candidates chosen by the organisers.

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Three of the “leading”, publicly-declared Left-wing contenders — Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the hard-left La France Insoumise, Yannick Jadot, the official candidate of the Green party and Anne Hidalgo — have been included without their consent. All have said they will ignore the result.

There are also three obscure candidates chosen by the organisers, including a socialist-ecologist who campaigned by going on a 10-day hunger strike. Finally, there is the woman who will probably win the primary, because she is the only well-known personality actively taking part: Christiane Taubira, a former justice minister, a great orator and a heroine for those on the Left pushing through a law legalising gay marriage in 2013.

Taubira said originally that she would only run if she was widely recognised as the candidate who could unite the Left. She now says that she will definitely run in April if she “wins” the primary; she may even run if she loses it. In other words, she will probably end up splitting the Left even more.

In sum, the French Left — dedicated to common action on behalf of the masses — is dominated by obsessive individuals who refuse to work together. If a great new leader of the Left were to emerge — another François Mitterrand or another Léon Blum, the Prime Minister of the Popular Front in the Thirties — it is doubtful whether he or she could impose his or her personality or programme.

And so an obvious question arises: how long can France remain a “socialist” country if the country has no Left capable of governing? The small, mostly sensible changes made by Macron since 2017 have been denounced by “the Left” as catastrophic. The French state remains — for good or ill — the biggest in Europe outside Scandinavia.

Yet three of the top four candidates in the polls talk of shrinking government; only Marine Le Pen would expand it.

Here lies the great paradox of the French Left: voters who support a babel of leftist candidates in Round One on 10 April could decide the outcome in Round Two on 24 April. The two-round French election system used to give a casting vote to centrists. It will go once again this year to voters of the Left, who face a choice between President Macron and whichever candidate of the Right or Far Right reaches the run-off with him: Valérie Pécresse, Marine le Pen or (less likely) Éric Zemmour.

Five years after the country’s last socialist President, the French Left finds itself with three options: staying at home; voting for a candidate that they abhor; or voting for a candidate that they merely hate.

Emmanuel Macron, who faces a two-round Presidential election on 10 and 24 April, has a good chance of escaping the tumbril this year. He has been running ahead of the pack with 23-25% of first-round voting intentions for months.

This may appear surprising. It has not, after all, been The Best of Times for Macron. He has had one of the most troubled presidencies of the Fifth Republic. There was the Gilets Jaunes revolt in peripheral and outer suburban France in 2018-9. There was a widespread rebellion against his flagship pension reforms in 2020. The past two years, nearly half his term, have been frozen by the Covid pandemic.

Could the most fickle electorate in the Western world re-elect a president who is detested by millions and who has, partly because of Covid, failed to deliver many of the reforms that he promised in 2017?

Yes, it is possible. Emmanuel Macron remains popular with the well-off and the highly educated, as well as with many young people and with many old people. His approval ratings are the highest of any late-term President since Mitterrand and higher than when the pandemic began.

All the same, the volatility of France’s recent electoral history should not be ignored. Many voters remain undecided. Only just over half are willing to express an opinion to pollsters. And almost one in three has changed their mind in the last three months. A Macron victory may remain the most probable outcome. But there are still three ways he could lose the Élysée…

First scenario: Omicron overwhelms France

France has weathered the pandemic better than many of its neighbours. Its economy has recovered strongly. The French vaccination programme, after a slow start, overtook Britain’s in September. Street protests against the “health pass” flared in August but fizzled out by October.

Macron has taken most of the key anti-Covid decisions himself, alternating between “strike early” and “wait-and-hope”: he has locked down France three times but he has also gambled against scientific advice on a couple of occasions to keep France open or partially open.

Faced with Omicron, he has reverted to “wait-and-hope” mode. France entered the New Year with almost half of its 7,000 acute care beds occupied by Covid patients — well beyond the 3,000 level which had triggered lockdowns in the past. Almost all of these people have been stricken by Delta. Omicron cases are exploding but the impact on severe sickness and mortality is still to be felt.

Nonetheless, France has taken the least draconian anti-Omicron measures of any western European country other than England. New partial lockdowns, curfews, and an extension of the school holidays were all rejected by Macron last week — against scientific and ministerial advice. Like Boris Johnson in Britain, Macron is fearful of the effect on public opinion of a new clampdown. Unlike Johnson, he also has to consider electoral opinion.

In a two-hour television interview in December, Macron made his first big public statement of the campaign while refusing to confirm that he would run. His pitch was revealing: the energetic young revolutionary of 2017 offered himself as a safe-pair-of-hands — a man who had learned much in office and adversity and could now be trusted to do the right thing.

Only ten days after that, Macron took an electoral gamble with the nation’s health. He hopes to harvest the credit for defying scientific advice on Omicron and refusing a curfew or lockdown. Even if the country is forced into a scrambled Omicron lockdown, he might still reap an electoral bonus from being leader of the nation in an emergency.

A presidential election “en plein pandémique”, disrupting campaigning and depressing turnout, is a scenario that Macron’s opponents fear. In the regional elections last summer, every sitting regional president was re-elected.

But all depends on how serious Omicron turns out to be. Even if it is somewhat milder than Delta, the sheer weight of infections could topple an exhausted French hospital system by February or March.

If that happens, Macron would forfeit his right to be considered “a safe pair of hands”. An election in a time of plague might help the President — but it could also destroy him.

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Valérie Pécresse won't save France

By John Lichfield

Second scenario: The Left fights back

One of the curiosities of this French election has been the implosion of the Left. Seven Left-wing and green candidates are set to receive 27% of the first-round vote. Yet as recently as 2012, 43.75% voters chose Left and green candidates in the first round of a presidential election. Where have all those people gone?

Some are sulking because they see no attractive candidate, while a further chunk of white, working-class voters has migrated to the far-Right. But a substantial section of the moderate Left vote has also gone to Macron. Their support, however, is far from guaranteed.

In the 2017 election, Macron split the centre-right but he also split the centre-left from which, in theory, he came. At the moment, the small print of the polls suggests that one third of Macron’s “base” once voted centre-left. The rest come from the amorphous “centre” or from the pro-European wing of the centre-right.

One of Macron’s great fears for this year was that a plausible centre-left or green candidate might emerge to reclaim his remaining moderate-left vote. It has not happened — yet.

The Socialist candidate, Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, is the theoretical heir of Hollande and Mitterrand. She is currently attracting 3% of voters in Round One. The Green candidate, Yannick Jadot, has around 6%. The Macron camp remains mildly anxious all the same.

Efforts are now underway to thin the field of Left and green candidates by persuading some of them to enter an independent, online “popular primary” later this month. The eloquent, much-loved (on the Left) former justice minister, Christiane Taubira, has indicated she will take part. So has Hidalgo. Could the winner gain a primary “bounce” which would reclaim centre-left votes from Macron?

It is doubtful, but not impossible. If Macron is damaged by a new Covid crisis, he might surrender three or four percentage points to a moderately competitive Left-wing candidate. That would bring him to within striking distance of the trio of far right and centre-right candidates currently squabbling on 13-17% of the vote for one of the two tickets into Round Two.

It is impossible to imagine any Left-wing candidate reaching the second round. A more competitive Left-wing candidate could, however, take enough votes from the President to allow two right-wing candidates to squeeze him out of the run-off.

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The world according to Éric Zemmour

By John Lichfield

Third scenario: the power of Pécresse

The French system of two rounds of voting was revived by Charles de Gaulle for a different political age. The intention was to allow a cacophony of choices which would be edited by the voters into a Right-Left, two-candidate final choice. But since the rise of the far-Right and the weakening of the traditional political families of centre-left and centre-right, the two-round system has become a lottery.

In the first round in 2017, Macron came top with 8.65 million votes. The following three candidates were almost neck and neck, with between 7.05 and 7.6 million votes. For the first time, neither of the traditional “governing families” of centre-right or centre-left reached the second round.

Something similar could happen in April. The opinion polls give Macron the same first round support that he had five years ago. Three other candidates are chasing the second spot and the golden ticket into Round Two.

The great difference this time is that two of those candidates are from the far-Right: Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour. The remaining candidate is from the traditional or “Republican” Right: Valérie Pécresse.

Zemmour, after a lightning rise to 18-19% in September’s polls, has slumped to 12-13%. Le Pen, who was neck and neck with Macron before the summer, stumbled and has now recovered a little to around 16%. Meanwhile, Valérie Pécresse zoomed from nowhere to 19-20% after winning the centre-right primary last month. She has now settled back to 16-17%, just ahead of Le Pen.

It is possible — even likely — that this trio will dispute the second place in the run-off round until the first voting day on 10 April. The prize may, once again, be decided by a few thousand votes.

It is also possible that Zemmour will run out of steam. Suggestions in the British media that the essayist and TV pundit could win the presidency were always far-fetched. Zemmour’s negative ratings were higher than Le Pen’s when he started campaigning unofficially in August. They have grown by 8 percentage points since then to -65%.

If the Zemmour vote melts down, it will split fairly evenly between Le Pen and Pécresse — with perhaps slightly more going to Le Pen. The outcome of that three-way battle is crucial for Macron. The opinion polls suggest that Macron would crush Zemmour if they were to confront one another on 24 April, while he would also defeat Le Pen fairly easily — but closer to 55-45% than his 66-34% landslide of 2017.

A Macron-Pécresse second round, however, would be a toss-up. Many, though not all, Left-wing voters have developed (and almost cherish) a visceral hatred for the President. Nor do they have much time for Pécresse. But they would still vote for her in the run-off to evict Macron from the Elysée.

The most recent opinion polls show Macron winning such a battle — but only just and within the margin of error. In such a scenario, a Pécresse victory cannot be ruled out.

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Macron’s advisors claim that Pécresse will turn out to be a poor campaigner and that they still expect to face Le Pen in the second round. But this will depend on two unknowns: the progress of Omicron and the manoeuvres and gesticulations of what remains of the French Left.

Here, all the same, is a confident prediction: if Macron is defeated, it will be by Valérie Pécresse. She will either snatch “his” place in the run-off (unlikely) or she will narrowly defeat him there (possible).

For one thing is clear: if the next President is not Macron, she will be a woman — and it won’t be Le Pen.

The girls were well turned-out; many of them came from the kind of well-heeled or intellectual families once called “BCBG” — bon chic, bon genre — living in the western arrondissements of Paris. Others came from Neuilly-sur-Seine, the richest commune in France, just outside the city boundary (where Nicolas Sarkozy was once the mayor).

Whenever I see Valérie Pécresse I think of those walks. She has the same cheerful, determined, understated “BCBG” look. That is hardly a surprise; she was educated at that same convent school as my daughters.

The dual aim of Sainte-Marie de Neuilly is to turn out faithful and traditional Catholics girls but also tough, intelligent young women capable of competing with men in a men’s world. My non-French daughters hated it for the most part, but it educated them well.

Pécresse, 54, now stands at the entrance to a labyrinth which could lead her next year to win a competition which no French woman has ever won: to be President of the Republic. Last weekend, she became the first woman to be chosen as presidential candidate for the French centre-right, the political family of Charles de Gaulle, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.

Ten years ago ,that would have made her one of the favourites, even the favourite, to be the next President. But life is more complicated now — and it is growing more complicated by the day: part of the centre-right has emigrated to President Emmanuel Macron, while other sections have shifted to two far-Right candidates, Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour.

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Meanwhile, Pécresse — who has been President of the greater Paris region, Ile-de- France, since 2015 — is little known outside the Paris area; and Paris is not liked in the rest of France. Before she won a closed primary of the main centre-right party, Les Républicains, on Saturday she was running a poor 4th in the national opinion polls on 8 to 10% of support for the first round of the presidential election on 10 April.

But two post-primary polls in recent days have boosted her to 14% and 17% respectively. In other words, she is already pushing for a place, ahead of her two far-Right rivals, in the two-candidate second round on 24 April.

The election is, of course, still a long way away. Opinion polls bounces come and go. Just ask Eric Zemmour, who is sinking steadily after surging from 0% to 19% in the Autumn. The only exception to this rule seems to be President Macron, who continues to float serenely ahead of the pack on 23 to 25%.

All the same, Macron and his chieftains and supporters are worried. They are confident that the President would beat either Le Pen or Zemmour if they reached the second round. They are far less certain that he would beat Pécresse.

They know fully well that she appeals to a chunk of the electorate which dislikes Macron and would like a change, albeit not too much change. The prospect of a woman as President would, in itself, appeal to the perpetual French dissatisfaction with incumbents; there has been no female leader in France since the regent Marie de Médicis four centuries ago.

Pécresse, though more socially conservative and fiscally stringent than Macron, would also be more acceptable in a run-off to parts of the French Left — simply because she is not Macron.

But can she reach Round Two? Ultimately, in the first round, some of her advantages become handicaps.

A large part of the wider French Right and even her own party want radical change on crime, migration and Europe. Pécresse may be more socially conservative than Macron: she was once a leading figure in a movement to try to block gay marriage, though she now accepts “marriage for all” should not be challenged. But the French Right regard Pécresse, correctly, as a continuation of the centrist consensus which has survived, with a few twists and turns, from Chirac through Sarkozy, François Hollande and Macron.

And unlike Le Pen and Zemmour, Pécresse is a typical product of the French political elite. After jumping two classes at Sainte-Marie-de-Neuilly and gaining the top mark in the baccalauréat at the age of 16, she went to a leading business school and to the elite civil service college Ecole Nationale d’Adminisration (ENA). She then taught at the leading political school, Science-Po. She is pro-European and pro-business. She is married to an engineer-turned-senior-businessman and has three children.

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As a result, the response by harder-line Républicains or by Zemmouristes to her victory at the weekend was brutal. They called her a “girouette” (weather-vane), “Valérie Princesse”, “Valérie Traitresse” and “Macron in a skirt”.

Perhaps anticipating this, Pécresse promised in her acceptance speech to be a new kind of President: one who would break with the past and keep promises. She also emphasised that, unlike Le Pen and Zemmour, she was capable of winning on 24 April and “turning the page on Macron”.

In truth, she will struggle in the next four months to keep her own party together, let alone unite the wider French Right. Even her acceptance speech was publicly criticised by the man she crushed 61-39% in the second round of Les Républicains’ primary.

Eric Ciotti, who represents Nice in the French national assembly, is closer in most respects to the views of Zemmour and Le Pen on Islam and migration than those of Pécresse. He complained that her victory oration omitted his most eye-catching proposal: a French Guantanamo for suspected Islamist radicals and an end to the “droit du sol” — the right to French citizenship of anyone born on French soil.

In response, Pécresse again rejected both those ideas but promised that Ciotti would be a big part of her campaign; her first visit was to his village in the mountains above Nice. It was a shrewd move and her political skills should certainly not be underestimated. Pécresse says she is “two parts Angela Merkel and one part Margaret Thatcher”. She is not, she says, une dame de fer (iron lady) like Thatcher but une dame de faire (a woman who gets things done).

Yes, she was given little chance by pundits (including this one) of winning the five-candidate primary last week. But she proved herself with talent and cunning.

The number of Les Républicains party members zoomed from 80,000 to 140,000 in the weeks before the vote as “sympathisers” handed over €30 in annual party dues. All five candidates had encouraged supporters, in effect, to buy votes. The Pécresse camp, with the enormous population of greater Paris behind it, “bought” the most (quite legally). And it undoubtedly had an impact: she beat the favourite, the former EU Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, by only 1,200 votes in Round One to go forward in second place to round two.

Yet there were other factors, too. In the four televised primary debates, Barnier looked tired and grouchy; Ciotti slick and passionate. Pécresse, meanwhile, was calm, fluent and well-drilled. She appealed to the party’s hard Right wing by proposing two constitutional changes to make it easier for France to block migration and deal with radical Islam. She shone like a beacon in a deep pink jacket among the shiny dark suits.

But now comes the real campaign. And this is where her troubles could begin.

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One way to look at this election is that France, like Gaul under Julius Caesar, has been divided into three parts. The Left — remember them? — still commands just under 30% of the votes. They are divided, irretrievably it appears, between seven different candidates: two Trotskyists, a Communist, two Socialists, a Green and the hard-left nationalist, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. None, at present, has more than 11% of the vote. They are unlikely to get near the top four, never mind the top two, in the first round.

There is then a wide band of pro-European, pro-business, centre and centre-right — in effect politics as usual — candidates, taking in Macron but also Pécresse. They have maybe 30% to 40% support.

Finally, there is a chunk of just over 30% of far-Right and hard-Right voters who want to turn everything on its head. They are anti-European, ultra-nationalist and anti-migrant. They detest what they see as a Left-tinged media consensus against strong action to reduce European power, end migration, tackle crime and shackle Islam (not just radical Islamism). They include the supporters of Le Pen and Zemmour, but also a big slice of members and voters of Les Républicains — two-fifths of them judging by the result of last Saturday’s primary.

Eric Ciotti has said that, faced with a choice between Macron and Zemmour in Round Two, he would vote for Zemmour. Yet in 2017, Pécresse voted for Macron rather than Le Pen. She left Les Républicains two years later because she said they were drifting towards the far-Right, and only rejoined just before the primary. In other words, she and Ciotti are in the same party but not in the same ideological “third” of France.

To win next April, then, Pécresse has to persuade many hard-Right and far-Right voters to take another chance on a mainstream politician who says that she shares their anger and fears. She needs, above all, the Zemmour bubble to burst, but not to burst too much; she needs his supporters who have abandoned Le Pen to stay with him. Otherwise, Le Pen will return to an unassailable first round position, just behind Macron.

At the same time, Pécresse needs to reclaim some of the moderate, pro-European centre-right voters who now support the President. That will be difficult if she is also to make a full-blooded pitch to the Ciotti-Zemmour-Le Pen third of France.

Her BCBG cheerful toughness will appeal to some voters. It will enrage others. If she can find a way to balance all those things — and that is a big ask — the race for second place in the first round on 10 April could be a three-way tie until the finishing line. It could be decided by just a handful of votes. If Pécresse has those votes, she could beat Macron two weeks later.

What would that change in France? Not much. Pécresse would bring a change of style. She would be marginally tougher than Macron on migration. She would be less ambitious about France’s role in Europe and Europe’s role in the world.

But the fundamentals would change little. The deep political divisions in France would persist; they might even deepen. The real battle for the soul of France is coming — but probably not until 2027.

The far-Right French pundit and essayist finally launched his presidential election campaign yesterday with a bizarre YouTube video which lasted for ten minutes and 11 seconds.

His chosen channel of communication was pure 2021. His method of delivery was that of the early to mid-20th century. He sat at a polished desk with a 1930s’ radio microphone in front of him and leather-bound books behind him. He read from a script in a funereal voice to the sound of Beethoven’s seventh symphony. He wore an undertaker’s outfit of black suit, white shirt and black tie. In ten minutes, he looked into the camera, briefly, on only three occasions.

Zemmour was playing the role, one assumes, of General Charles de Gaulle making his first Free France radio address from London on 18 June 1940. He, like De Gaulle, was appealing to France to resist the invader. He actually came over (except in his lugubrious appearance) more like Colin Firth playing an emotionally-strangled George VI in the movie, “The King’s Speech”.

The Zemmour declaration was intended as an eloquent paean to a glorious but disappearing France: the France “of Voltaire” of “Johnny Hallyday; “of Charles de Gaulle and Charles Aznavour”; of Joan of Arc and Barbara (an excellent French-jewish pop singer who died in 1997). France, the true France, he said to be effaced by immigration, by Islam and by the European Union.

“This country which you search for desperately everywhere, for which your children are nostalgic without ever having known… that country is in the process of disappearing,” he said. “You have not left your country but it as if your country had left you. You feel like foreigners in your own country. You are interior exiles.”

The video cut frequently to scenes of random or political violence; muslims praying in the street; white footballers taking the knee against racism; young, white women with big curly hair being obliterated by veils or headscarves.

“It is no longer a question of reforming France but of saving it,” Zemmour said. “That is why I have decided to become a candidate in the presidential election. Vive la République and above all Vive la France.”

What on earth to make of such a performance? It was as if Zemmour was rejecting not just the politics of the last 80 years but every advance in political communication since the dawn of the television age (while posting straight onto the internet).

It was a performative performance. The medium was the message. He was saying, in effect: “You and I detest the normal talking-heads on TV (even though I made my reputation as one). You and I detest all the standard, glib paraphernalia and tropes of 21st century politics. I will bring you back to a purer, more sincere age, when France was France and politicians sat behind microphones on polished desks; when we had Edith Piaf not hip-hop and the France football team was all-white.”

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A month ago, that might have appeared like a courageous stroke — a confident rejection of the advice of political strategists and focus-group obsessed pollsters. It might have seemed like a brilliant innovation by a journalist-turned TV pundit-turned politician who had grasped a public hunger for something bold and new, both in ideas and presentation.

A month ago — even three weeks ago — Zemmour was riding high in the opinion polls. He had come from 0% in August to 18-19% in voting intentions for the first round of the presidential election on 10 April next year. He was second in most polls, behind President Emmanuel Macron (on 24-25%) but ahead of his far right rival Marine Le Pen and well-ahead of the rest of the field of standard politicians of the centre-Right and Left. He achieved all of that without even declaring that he was definitely going to run.

In the past three weeks, the wheels have started to come off the Zemmour bandwagon. Seven opinion polls in succession, by different organisations, have shown his support melting. The most significant of all those polls — the seventh — was published yesterday by Harris Interactive, just before Zemmour released his “1940s-style” YouTube video. Harris was the polling organisation which first picked up Zemmour’s surge in September and which placed him at 19% on 8 November. Yesterday it gave him only 13% and fourth place — a six point fall in three weeks.

In those circumstances yesterday’s retro-political performance — even though recorded two weeks ago — will seem to many like an act of destructive stubbornness or even an act of desperation. A politician staring at his script rather than at the camera might have appeared bold and innovative a month ago. Yesterday it appeared uncertain and furtive.

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The declaration had to be brought forward a few days because of Zemmour’s poll collapse. It was originally to have been released just before a big rally for 5,000 people at the Zenith concert hall in northern Paris on Sunday. It also emerged yesterday that Zemmour had not sought permission to use clips from classic French movies seen in the video — a piece of amateurism that could cost himself and his campaign dearly.

Several high-profile supporters and backers have distanced themselves from Zemmour in the last ten days: the multi-millionaire, Charles Gave; the ultra-Catholic campaigner, Philippe de Villiers; and the independent hard-right mayor of Béziers, Robert Ménard.

They did so because he had ignored their advice to broaden his campaign, to speak of the everyday concerns of French people — from purchasing power to Covid — not just focus on Islam and migration. He made a couple of fleeting references to such concerns yesterday but offered no clues on how — in the very unlikely event that he becomes President next year — he would actually govern France.

His fall in the polls follows a series of mis-steps and outlandish statements — but they should not for the most part be seen as mistakes. They accurately reflect who Zemmour is and what he is trying to do.

He used the anniversary of the Bataclan terrorist slaughter on 15 November 2015 to stand outside the concert hall where most of the murders occurred and criticise the actions of then President, François Hollande (breaking a taboo on using an anniversary of this kind for political campaigning). When insulted by a passer-by who raised her digit to home, in Marseille last weekend, he returned the gesture and was heard to mumble “and very deep too”. The following day it was revealed by Closer magazine that Zemmour’s campaign manager and girlfriend, Sarah Knafo, was pregnant. He is 63; she is 28.

Zemmour’s outlandish statements go far beyond his core argument that white France faces “swamping” and “colonisation” by migration and Islam. Those claims may be factually exaggerated but they represent a genuine fear shared by many. A recent opinion poll found that 67% of French people, including some on the Left, believe there is some truth in the theory of the “Great Replacement” espoused by Zemmour: that there is a deliberate attempt by “the elites” to substitute brown and black people for white ones.

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But Zemmour goes much further. He is also attempting — without any obvious electoral advantage or any sense of response to genuine public concern — to rewrite French history to fit a long-standing, ultra-Right wing, nationalist narrative. Captain Dreyfus, the Jewish officer who was framed a spy by ultra-nationalists in the French army in the 1890s, may not have been as innocent as reputable historians now believe, Zemmour said. The collaborationist Vichy regime in 1940-44 was kind to French Jews, said Zemmour (who is himself Jewish). There is not a scrap of evidence for either assertion.

The allied liberation of France in June 1944 was partly an attempted American colonisation that was defeated only by the vigilance of De Gaulle, Zemmour said last month. At least he did not go to the US military cemetery above Omaha Beach to make the claim. He was speaking in Rouen, at the other end of Normandy.

Why make such claims? What on Earth do they have to do with France’s problems — real or exaggerated — in 2021? Why campaign on history at all? They are part of Zemmour’s attempt, already seen in three of his best-selling books, to change the memory tape of recent French history.

Zemmour rejects what he sees as an anti-French, defeatist official narrative created by the Left and by the cosmopolitan forces of Europeanism, globalism and anti-nationalism. France, according to the Zemmourian world-view, is not a wealthy, medium-sized country which was liberated by the allies in 1944. It is a great civilisation — even the greatest of all civilisations — which has been deliberately frustrated and cast down by, inter alia, les Anglo Saxons. The “great replacement” is therefore just the latest attempt by global elites to conspire against France and Frenchness.

These historical-cultural obsessions suffused yesterday’s 10 minutes and 11 seconds oration, even though it was intercut with more tangible facts and anxieties. Zemmour is, in that sense, a sincere man — unusually so for a politician maybe. No calculating politician would have made yesterday’s bizarre declaration in that form. Zemmour did so because it reflects accurately what he is and the way that he thinks.

Will it also prove to be good electoral politics? I doubt it.

It will certainly appeal to his core supporters, who are mostly concentrated in sections of the young and old within the well-off bourgeoisie. Surveys suggest that the Zemmour constituency straddles the better-off part of the ultra-nationalist or far right vote, a chunk of the conservative or Gaullist vote and some nationalist voters who have been lost to the electoral system for years. Unlike, say Marine Le Pen, Zemmour does not particularly appeal to the “suffering” France of white blue-collar workers and forgotten rural or outer-suburban towns.

To reverse his decline in the polls, he needs to expand his base support beyond the ultra-Catholic and ultra-nationalist bourgeoisie. Nothing in yesterday’s address appeared likely to so. Nothing appeared particularly calculated to do so.

Zemmour, at the end of the day, seems to be more interested in being Zemmour than in being President.

The boat was heading vaguely north-west towards the English coast, crossing one of the busiest and most treacherous seaways in the world. The sea was calm; the weather fine but very cold.

French coast-guards believe that this strange craft — like a child’s trike on a motorway — was either run down or overwhelmed by the wake of a freighter about one hour after leaving a beach near Dunkirk. There were 27 bodies recovered from the sea, including 17 men, seven women and three teenagers. One of the drowned women was pregnant. Two men were rescued. At least another 20 people may have drowned.

Even the provisional death toll makes this the greatest single calamity since the so-called “Calais migrants” started to climb aboard small boats to try to reach England in 2018. Yet the story of the Calais migrants goes back not three years, but almost three decades. I have been writing about them for 24 of those years.

When the Calais saga began, in the early Nineties, the migrants were mostly Bosnian refugees from the Yugoslav civil war. They were followed by Iraqis, Kurds, Pakistanis, Afghans, Eritreans, Syrians, Somalis — the human flotsam of successive crises or wars in Europe, Asia and Africa, washing up against the English Channel.

It is a complex story which is habitually simplified by British politicians and some in the British media. France’s record is not unblemished, but that has nothing to do with the cunning Gallic cynicism of British media myth. I made up my mind years ago about who was responsible for the never-ending Calais crisis. We all are. No one is. Everyone is partly right; everyone is partly wrong.

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The migrants, or asylum seekers, have good reason to go in search of new lives, whether they are genuine refugees or (as the British government and press insist) merely illegal, economic migrants. Britain, of course, has good reason to want to maintain control over its own borders. It is absurd to suggest, as some volunteer groups do, that all who arrive should be admitted. But the French — notably the people of the Pas de Calais — also have good reason to believe that they have been troubled for three decades by what is, ultimately, a British problem.

The British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, presents the events in a simpler way. The fact that 27 people drowned is a tragedy but it is mostly the fault of the French, he said. The British popular media is even more convinced where the guilt lies. “This is on you, Macron,” was the splash headline on MailOnline yesterday. If the website wants to increase, rather than reduce, the trickle of migrants now reaching Britain from France (and it is a trickle not a flood), the best way of doing so would be to carry on insulting and angering the French.

The Calais crisis can only be managed. It cannot be solved. And like it or not, it can only be managed with the help of France. For the past 18 years, Britain has been sheltered from the full force of the successive waves of migration reaching Europe by two barriers. The first was the French government and the French police. The second was the English Channel.

In 2003, President Jacques Chirac signed a treaty with then Prime Minister Tony Blair at Le Touquet, just south of Calais, which in effect moved the south-eastern English border to France. All passport checks were moved to the French side of the Channel. France agreed to accept British cash to toughen its defences against illegal migration to England (mostly stowaways on trucks and freight trains). As a result, migrants wanting to claim asylum in Britain (as is their right under international law) could not do so because they could not reach British soil.

The second barrier — the English Channel — stood more or less unchallenged for years because the migrants were scared of the sea. That terror lasted while large chinks remained in the Franco-British border controls, the Calais port and the Channel tunnel fences. Gradually those chinks have been identified and closed.

This is not mentioned by the British popular media or the Government but the number of migrants reaching Britain — mostly from France — is not increasing. The opposite is true. There were 80,000 in 2002. That fell to 18,000 in 2010. There were 29,000 in 2020, after the boat traffic began.

The Calais migrants started to overcome their fear of the sea in 2018 because they had to. Other ways of reaching England had been closed off, mostly by the diligence of the French. Once the migrants overcame their terror of the sea, yesterday’s tragedy became inevitable. Of course, the people smuggling gangs are partly to blame. They exist because other methods of crossing the 30km of sea between Pas de Calais and Kent have been hammered shut. In sum, blaming France or President Emmanuel Macron for what happened on Wednesday is as foolish as blaming the water in the Channel.

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That isn’t to say that France doesn’t deserve its share of the blame for the muddled policies of the last 30 or so years. But France has, in effect, been protecting Britain from even a small amount of migration, at Britain’s request. If Paris now chose to end that policy — to repudiate the Treaty of Le Touquet as many French politicians are demanding — Britain would face the full force of Europe’s wider migration crisis for the first time.

That would also cause problems for France. But they wouldn’t be nearly as serious as those in Britain: the makeshift camps of migrants would move from Calais to Folkestone and Dover. Presumably neither Boris Johnson nor MailOnline would welcome such an outcome.

I know what the objections to my narrative will be: why should Britain take any illegal migrants? If these people are seeking asylum from persecution or war, why do they not do so in France? Why are the French authorities incapable of stopping something so obvious as a small inflatable boat with 50 people aboard from setting sail from Loon Plage near Dunkirk? Surely this is all about Brexit and France wanting to punish Britain?

I have spoken over the years to dozens of migrants, to senior French officials, to senior British officials, to humanitarian volunteers. I have witnessed the opening of Sangatte refugee camp in 1998; its closure at Britain’s insistence in 2002; the clearing of “the Jungle” , a squalid informal in the dunes and scrubland north of Calais, in 2009; the creation of a semi-official replacement called “Jungle 2”; its bulldozing by the French government in 2014. Most of the questions above have existed from the beginning. This “crisis” began long before Brexit.

The British media in recent days has shown images of French police standing aside while migrants set off in flimsy boats towards England. The French authorities have yet to explain these pictures. I expect some French police are less than zealous when confronted with large groups of migrants. But to suggest that it is official or unofficial French policy to let migrants cross is false. If that were the case, why have all other safer, illegal routes been so successfully closed? If that were the case, why do French police clamp down so brutally on migrant encampments, confiscating tents and even sleeping bags?

In my experience, the policy and practices of successive French governments on the Calais migrant crisis have been muddled and unpredictable. France has alternated between crackdowns (after Britain complains), and compassion (when human rights groups point out excesses). Taken as a whole, however. France has been guarding Britain’s border, with a large degree of success and a growing amount of exasperation.

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It is impossible for the French to police every metre of the 100km of the Pas de Calais and Nord coastline without immense resources. French officials day that 60% of attempted crossings are stopped. Britain offered to give an extra £54m in July, but has so far handed over only £20m. French officials reckon it already costs them €120m a year to “police Britain’s frontier” of which Westminster covers only about 20%.

Meanwhile, serious efforts have been made to secure small boats and to prevent the sale of inflatable craft in shops in the Calais area. But shops in Belgium are only a short drive away. The “boat” which sank on Wednesday is believed to have been bought in Germany.

Yet parts of the British media accuse the French of encouraging asylum-seekers to try their luck in Britain, instead of France. This is nonsense. In 2020, France dealt with 80,000 asylum applications and the EU as a whole 416,000. The UK dealt with 29,000. The great majority of the people who illegally (and invisibly) cross French land borders every day are people who speak a little French and have family or contacts in France. They want to stay in France.

A minority, the Calais migrants, come to France because they want to reach the UK. A very small minority of this minority are people who have had asylum requests turned down in EU countries. When their camps are cleared by French police, they are offered a chance to go to a holding centre many kilometres away and apply for asylum in France. All but a handful refuse.

Why are they so determined to go to Britain? Because they speak a little English; or they have connections in the UK; or they have been persuaded that the UK, without ID cards, is an El Dorado for migrants.

I have spoken to many migrants over the years. One sticks in my mind. Adamkhan was 34. He had been a maths teacher in a primary school in Peshwar in Pakistan. He fled after he was threatened by the Taliban for promoting “western education”.

When I spoke to him at a squalid camp near Calais port in 2014, he was walking with a crutch after injuring his leg fleeing from police while trying to board a lorry. He said: “Most of the immigrants here… want to go to England because they speak a little English and because they think they can work there.”

“I know the UK is a crowded island and no one wants us. I know the French authorities have a very difficult job. Conditions in these camps are inhuman. But what is the solution?”

There is none. European countries can improve their external border protection, but many migrants will still get through. A small percentage of them will always try to go to Britain.

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The Calais crisis can't be solved

By John Lichfield

But there can be better management of the crisis. The French can, perhaps, try harder to block the beaches. Britain could agree to process some asylum requests on the French side of the Channel. But Boris Johnson’s suggested solution — British police on the French beaches — could never be accepted and would not work.

The Calais crisis cannot be solved in Calais because it is not a Calais problem. It is a small part of a European, or global, problem of displacement of peoples by war or famine or misery.

The danger, from a UK viewpoint, is that the problem will grow much worse. There is already a rising drumbeat in France — on show in the speeches of candidates in April’s presidential election and in the well-argued columns of Le Monde — which calls for a repudiation of the Treaty of Le Touquet.

France, the critics say, is complicit in a situation which is legally doubtful under international law: Britain has an international obligation at least to consider asylum requests — and France is preventing asylum-seekers from even reaching Britain to make them.

The more the British government and the British media insults France, the more that drumbeat will grow. Further calamities in the Channel could make the pressure irresistible. Lifting the barriers would not be an easy decision for the French government. It would be portrayed in Britain as an act of war. It might attract even more migrants to the Pas de Calais.

Whatever happens, there is one certainty: the present situation — Britain relying on France while insulting the French — is untenable.

By 1968, he was a member of the UDR. In 1976 he was a rising young star in the RPR. He was elected in 1978 France’s youngest member of parliament, aged 27.

In 2002, he joined the newly created UMP party and was appointed foreign minister under President Jacques Chirac. In 2015, he became a member of Les Républicains — in a gap between his second stint as European Commissioner and his appointment as Monsieur Brexit, the European Union’s chief negotiator on British departure.

We speak of course of Michel Barnier, detested by British Brexiteers, admired by British Remainers. Is Barnier an ideologically adjustable Vicar of Bray, version française? No, not at all. Barnier has belonged to five parties but never changed his political coat. The Gaullist or wider centre-Right movements repeatedly altered their names and their geometry. Barnier remained loyal to all of them.

Six months before a compelling French presidential election, Michel Barnier’s party-political life-story is significant for two reasons.

Firstly, it helps to explain why Barnier has emerged as favourite to be chosen as the presidential candidate of the main French centre-Right party in a closed primary in early December. The 90,000 or so “militants” (members) of Les Républicains (LR) face a choice on 4 December between three no-hopers and three uninspiring, senior candidates, two of whom left the party four years ago. Internal polls suggest that members are turning — more in desperation than in expectation — to Barnier, a man who has always stuck by the party (whatever its name or policy du jour happened to be).

Secondly, the potted history of Barnier’s life and times also explains why Barnier, aged 70, may never be the President of the Republic. If he does become the centre-Right nominee, he could yet be the man who saves his political family from oblivion. More likely, he may be remembered as the last chieftain of a troubled, political dynasty which stretches from Charles de Gaulle to Nicolas Sarkozy.

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Macron, the failed Machiavelli

By John Lichfield

After decades of shape-shifting, dividing, uniting, back-stabbing, trampling spending rules, breaking the law, the French centre-Right is running out of ideological and electoral road. Part of its territory — nationalist, anti-European, anti-migration, socially conservative — was conquered years ago by Marine Le Pen. Another part, liberal socially and economically, pro-European, was annexed in 2017 by Emmanuel Macron. A further chunk of harder centre-Right opinion, more educated and better-heeled than Lepennist voters, is migrating to the xenophobic essayist and TV pundit, Eric Zemmour.

As a result, none of the leading contenders to be the Les Républicains’s candidate in the first round of the presidential election on 10 April is sure of reaching the two-candidate second round on 24 April.

Best placed in national — as opposed to internal — opinion polls is Xavier Bertrand, president of the northern French region, Hauts-de-France, followed by Valérie Pécresse, president of the greater Paris region, Ile-de-France. Michel Barnier comes a poor third — with an average of polls giving him only 11% of the Round One vote, far short of the likely 17 to 20% “entry ticket” to Round Two.

Why would LR party members vote for the “weakest” candidate nationally in their closed primary on 4 December? Is this another example of the perpetual instinct for self-harm of French small-c conservatives — once described as the “stupidest centre Right” in the world?

Possibly. Then again, the election is six months away; public opinion is relatively volatile; only 60% of those questioned offer an opinion to pollsters; and Zemmour’s rapid rise could prove as ephemeral as similar irruptions in past French presidential elections.

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Barnier’s supporters point to the fact that his candidature was mocked when he entered the race in August. He was, many pundits said, too dull, too closely associated with Brussels and too little known in France to win the centre-Right nomination. Yet two months later, he looks odds-on to be selected. According to an internal poll, Barnier is approved by 58% of LR members, Pécresse by 52%, and Bertrand by only 38%.

Other than his unbroken membership of Gaullist parties for half a century, Barnier has seduced the LR membership. He could be “our Joe Biden,” they suggest — old and underestimated. Others say that the tall, patrician-looking Barnier has “the face of a President”. In other words, he is not the bland Xavier Bertrand and he is not Valerie Pécresse; competent, likeable but undeniably and — unacceptably to many French conservatives — a woman.

Barnier has also pulled off a great coup, which could yet come back to haunt him. He has called for a referendum on whether France should suspend parts of the EU and Council of Europe treaties to allow a three to-five-year moratorium on migration (though not asylum seeking).

This was greeted by the British media — and some in France — as an act of breath-taking hypocrisy. After years of lecturing the British on the drawbacks of leaving the EU, here was Barnier suggesting that France should step outside the European treaties to “take back control” of immigration policy.

The truth is a little more complicated. Barnier’s point is that the EU has no coherent policy for external immigration and therefore national governments should have the right to create their own. As things stand, he says, the European courts interpret their respective treaties in ways that make this impossible.

The EU referendum initiative, however limited, changed Barnier’s image as an uncompromising Brussels technocrat. It gave him a role — before the rise of Zemmour — in the debate on migration which may shape the election. On both counts, it endeared Barnier to the harder line members who remain in the French centre-Right.

On other issues, however, he remains a fervent European. He called last weekend for the increased “mutualisation” of national economic policies to prevent Europe from being marginalised by China and the United States in the decades ahead.

If Barnier does win Les Républicains nomination, his apparent ambivalence on Europe will be lambasted by Zemmour, Le Pen and by some Left-wing candidates as an example of elitist group-think. The idea of a “mutualised” Europe may also jar with many members of Les Républicains. What remains of the party is close to LePennism.

The nationalist-authoritarian drift of the LR membership is sometimes compared to what happened to the US Republican party under Donald Trump or the British Conservative Party via Boris Johnson and Brexit. There are points of comparison but the battle for the soul of the French centre-Right is much older.

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In 1976, Jacques Chirac created the Rassemblement pour La République (RPR) to replace what was left of the old Gaullist movement — and as a luxury bulldozer for his personal use. The more economically liberal, socially moderate and reformist wing of the centre-Right united loosely behind President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing in an alliance called the Union pour la Democratie Francaise (UDF).

Chirac’s party was supposed to be nationalist-authoritarian and rural, socially conservative and economically interventionist. But it had a pro-European, economically liberal wing too. These two broad strands of the French centre-Right cooperated and tripped each other up for two decades. Chirac seesawed from one viewpoint to the other (while funding the RPR party by embezzling millions of francs from the Paris town hall where he was mayor).

In 2002, after Marine Le Pen’s father reached the second round of the Presidential election, Chirac skilfully exploited the crisis to merge his RPR with part of the more European-minded UDF.

This new centre-Right party (the UMP) was hijacked by Nicolas Sarkozy before his presidential victory in 2007. Like Chirac — but more energetically — Sarkozy attempted to ride the twin horses of the French centre-Right. Like Chirac, he played fast and loose with the rules. And like Chirac before him, he was sentenced to jail last month for fraudulently circumventing campaign financing laws.

The French centre-Right adores law and order — for others. The last two centre-Right French Presidents were given jail sentences for corruption. Three of the last six French centre-Right prime ministers have been convicted of criminal offences after leaving office.

This miserable record — three of the last six French centre-Right prime ministers have been convicted of criminal offences after leaving office — has left a legacy of personal loathing within the main centre-Right party to date. The party changed its name to Les Républicains in 2015 to distance itself from a damaged “UMP” brand. But two years later, the centre-Right failed to make the second round of a presidential election for the first time in the history of the Fifth Republic. After its candidate, François Fillon, was accused of fiddling his parliamentary expenses, Emmanuel Macron carved off a chunk of the “centrist-liberal-European” wing. Marine Le Pen took some of the nationalist-authoritarians.

Following Macron’s victory, the LR party membership subsided from over 200,000 to 80,000 at the start of this year. It is now 90,000 and rising. This membership surge may or may not allow Bertrand, or less likely, Pécresse, to overtake Barnier and snatch the nomination. Most people’s money is on Barnier.

If he does win, he will take on a heavy, historical responsibility. The 2022 election will be passe ou casse for the battered legacy of De Gaulle, Chirac and Sarkozy. Another failure to reach the second round will hasten the disintegration of Les Républicains. The moderate, pro-European elements will be absorbed into a Greater Macronism. The rest will merge with the far-Right.

This, I believe, is Eric Zemmour’s principal ambition: to do well enough in 2022 to destroy both the LR and Le Pen’s Rassemblement National. A new nationalist, anti-migrant, Eurosceptic movement could then emerge before the next Presidential election in 2027.

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Barnier could, however, still prevent the destruction of the movement that he has served since the age of 14. He — or whoever becomes the centre-Right candidate — still has a slim chance of being elected President of the Republic. As things stand, far-Right rivals Le Pen and Zemmour are jostling for second position in the first round on 17% to 20%. The top place seems likely to go to President Macron, whose first-round support is stable on 23-27%.

The second place in Round Two on 24 April could be a three-way lottery until the last moment. Le Pen and Zemmour could cancel each other out and reduce the entry score to something in the high teens — reachable by Barnier, or another Gaullist.

If either Marine Le Pen or Eric Zemmour qualifies for Round Two, Macron will crush them. The Left and Greens, with around 30% of the vote split seven ways in Round One, will not vote for the far-Right in Round Two. Some will abstain. Most will grumble and vote for Macron.

If Barnier, or another centre-Right candidate, sneaks into Round Two, the result could be very close. Many Left and Green voters loathe Macron. They would vote to dump him on 24 April — and then loathe the new centre-Right president the next day.

Could that be President Barnier?  It remains unlikely. But I no longer think that it’s impossible.

Britain, he said, was guilty merely of its “usual opportunism”. Boris Johnson’s government was the “fifth wheel on the cart” in an unfriendly conspiracy against France by the two other English-speaking nations.

This is not normal language between allies – certainly not that of an experienced foreign minister speaking to his nation on live TV. There was a “serious crisis” between Paris, Washington and Canberra, Le Drian said, “a serious breach of trust”.

Three days into the great US-Australian-French Submarine Row, Le Drian made no attempt to lower periscope and dive into calmer waters. He exploded a series of diplomatic depth charges. He warned of further “consequences”, perhaps related to the fact that French officials say that they have documents which prove that President Joe Biden’s government lied to America’s oldest ally, France.

The fallout was caused by the Pacific security pact announced last week — AUKUS — which included a vague plan to build up to eight US-designed nuclear-powered submarines for Australia by an unspecified date. At the same time as detailing this, Canberra announced that it was cancelling a five-years old, Euros 60bn French contract to supply 12 diesel-powered submarines to the Australian navy by 2030.

This was the same 2016 deal that Australian and French ministers met to discuss last month. Although problems were discussed — cost-overruns, delays, design changes — a joint statement was agreed which restated the “importance of the (2016) contract”.

French officials now say they believe that the Australia-US-UK discussions have been going on for at least six months. And they suspect that they may have begun 18 months ago, under the Trump administration, and were then pursued by the Biden White House – which denied their existence in correspondence with France.

Hence the accusations of “lies and duplicity”. And hence France’s highly unusual step of withdrawing ambassadors from its allies Australia and the United States. And, in possibly the first example of a country being snubbed by a decision by another country not to recall its ambassador, Mr Le Drian said that the Johnson government had played only a small, “opportunistic” role in the affair.

Some British commentators have been delighted by France’s anger. This is all, they suggest, the “usual” French sulking and pique. Paris was excluded from the AUKUS partnership and from the new submarine deal, they say, because France is an “unreliable” ally and the French naval-building company, Naval Group, had messed up its “deal of the century” with Australia.

Other senior diplomats and former diplomats say that this is a gross misreading of what may come to be seen as the most serious diplomatic crisis within the western alliance since the second Iraq war in 2003 or the Suez Crisis in 1956.

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Lord Peter Ricketts, a former British ambassador to Paris and Nato and a former head of the Foreign Office, said: “France sees it as a betrayal by the British and the US, who did this secretly with Australia for the last six months. French diplomats have told me that America lied about what they were doing and they will be releasing documents to show that America lied. They are asking themselves, ‘What is the point of being a Nato ally if this is how the US behaves?’”

Gérard Araud, a former French ambassador to Washington, wrote yesterday: “[The United States] deliberately trampled the important interests of an ally…They might have invited France to join the project or offered some form of compensation. They couldn’t be bothered.”

The great winner in the saga, to date, is China — the intended “target” of the AUKUS pact and the reason why Australia sought upgraded submarine defences, which will now be delayed until the 2040s. Beijing must be looking on in delighted bemusement.

France is by no means free from blame. The Barracuda submarine programme, agreed under President Francois Hollande, has been subject to cost hikes and delays – some, but not all, caused by Australian second-thoughts and the promise that much of the work would be exported to Adelaide.

The suggestion in French media is that President Macron and his government took their eye off the ball: they didn’t monitor the submarine programme properly and failed to pick up on the secret talks with the USA. Where was French diplomacy? Where was the French external intelligence service?

The promised submarines were a nuclear-powered French design, reconfigured for diesel engines at Australia’s request. When France suspected that Canberra had changed its mind, it offered nuclear subs but the Australian government refused (while secretly asking for nuclear subs from the US).

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In Australia, though, the decision by Scott Morrison’s government to throw over the French contract has not been universally well-received. Canberra has been shilly-shallying about better submarines for the Australian navy since 2009. First a Japanese order was cancelled; now a French one. So the Australian tax-payer will once again be landed with billions of dollars for cancellation payments. There is no firm plan for the new US nuclear subs, just a “plan to have a plan” as the Sydney Morning Herald pointed out. Less work and less technology will probably be exported to Australia than under the French deal.

“Australia can now contemplate another decade or two with no new subs,” wrote Peter Hartcher, political editor of the Sydney Morning Herald. “And even if this proposal goes to plan, Australia will not have a full sovereign capability but an increased defence dependency on the US.”

There is an important part of this story which is often missing from British commentary. France is Australia’s neighbour. It is a Pacific nation — even a Pacific power. It is also an Indian Ocean nation.

Australia’s nearest neighbour to the east is New Caledonia, a French overseas territory, which is constitutionally part of France, not a French colony. Going west for a few thousand miles, Australia’s long-distance Indian Ocean neighbour is the island of Réunion, a French overseas département. The torpedoed submarine deal was the cornerstone of a new Pacific and Indian Ocean security partnership between France and Australia — re-asserted this year when Prime Minister Morrisson visited President Emmanuel Macron in the Elysée Palace.  That deal is now also, in effect, dead.

The French had hopes of playing an allied but independent-minded role in the Indo-Pacific region, alongside Australia, the United States and Japan. Macron especially wanted to strengthen France’s role there because he feared that Washington — whichever President might be in power — would stumble into a confrontational approach to China. He wanted Europe to have its own calming voice in western-Chinese relations.

Some commentators in France are suggesting that AUKUS is just a vulgar arms deal dressed up as a security pact. Washington, they say, was under pressure from the US military-industrial lobby to steal the French deal when evidence emerged that it was struggling (as all such big deals do). Senior French sources say that, au contraire, the principal attraction for Washington was to destroy the Franco-Oz pact and putting the French in their place. European and other countries are officially encouraged by the US to join in the policing of the Pacific or the South China Sea – but as junior partners not as thinking heads.

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The former Washington ambassador, Gérard Araud, says: “The United States have identified a single enemy, China and all foreign policy is subordinated to that imperative…They can only conceive of coalitions as under their direction and will only work with countries which accept a secondary role, such as the UK and Australia.”

Other sources suggest that the reality is more muddled. Neither the Trump nor the Biden administrations took the trouble to understand French interests in the Indo-Pacific. Insofar as they did, they were neutral or unsympathetic. American commercial and geo-political interests came first.

The secrecy of the talks — the failure to involve France in some way — does suggest that the US approach was a deliberate hit on Paris and Macron. Hence the extreme fury in the Elysée Palace.

Could Macron be deliberately over-reacting for domestic political reasons? Not exactly. His fury is, I am told, sincere. But Macron also knows that a high-profile assertion of French independence from Washington will do him no harm in the presidential election in April. The alternative — protesting in a more conventional way and playing down the affair — might have been very damaging.

In truth, Macron is in an odd position, both humiliated by what he sees as US treachery and vindicated by it. The French President has been saying for almost four years that Nato is “brain dead” and that Europe should no longer rely on the Atlantic alliance with the United States to defend, or even consider, European interests.

Le Drian said on Saturday that France would now make that point even more forcefully at the Nato summit in Madrid next year. Lord Ricketts predicts that the Pacific submarine saga will cause a “huge rift” within the Atlantic alliance.

As things stand — or as they stood — there are few takers for Macron’s vision of a European Union which plays a much bigger role in defending its own security and prosperity in association with Nato. Few other EU countries want to face the consequences of losing the American guarantee against Russia or having to pay more for their own defence.

That will not be transformed overnight but the tectonic plates might shift. European Nato countries were already badly shaken by America’s failure to consult on its withdrawal from Afghanistan. They must now consider the implications of the AUKUS affair — Washington mendaciously crushing the interests of an ally.

Nato in its present form survived Donald Trump. Can it survive Joe Biden?

The Egyptian pyramids had been built by extraterrestrial beings, he said. The aliens were still among us, secretly running the world. Their existence was being covered up by the political and business “elites”.

France might be the country of Descartes, one of the fathers of logic and rationalism. But it is second only to the United States among western countries in its vulnerability to fantastic and fact-free deviations from conventional wisdom. Only three years ago, one survey found that 79% of French adults believed in at least one elaborate conspiracy theory. One in three believed in four of them.

What exactly did they believe? More than half said that they thought the CIA had assassinated President John F. Kennedy, while a similar proportion suggested that the French government was working with the pharmaceutical industry to conceal the fact that all vaccines are dangerous. One in three French people thought that the AIDS virus had been “created in a laboratory and tested on Africans before spreading to the rest of the world”. One in five thought that the “Americans never reached the moon”.

Against this background, it is no surprise to discover that the preposterous but destructive QAnon conspiracy — that Satan-worshipping, liberal elites are trafficking children into sexual slavery and Donald Trump has been sent by God to stop them — is spreading steadily in France.

Earlier this month, Christian Maillaud, a former gendarme and paratrooper, was arrested in the Loire département of central France and accused of trying to foment a military insurrection. Maillaud, 53, also known as “Stan” or the “white Zorro” by his followers, is a leader of the “Conseil national de transition”, which has adopted “Qanoniste” ideology and wants to destroy the Satanist politicians and institutions that (he claims) control France. “He wants to bring together the extreme Right and the extreme Left, the Gilets Jaunes and various conspiracy theorists to create a new world,” explained the local state prosecutor, Eric Neveu.

Maillaud may or may not be a dangerous person. Most probably he is harmless but crazy. He is, however, a symptom of a wider pattern of half-plausible conspiracy theorising — “complotisme” in French — which some people, including the Government, fear may eventually pose a threat to French democracy.

“It’s become a big issue in this country,” says Professor Antoine Bristielle, a researcher into conspiracy theories for the Fondation Jean-Jaurès, “even if we’re not yet at the level of the United States where 56% of Republicans say they believe in QAnon.”

“The problem is that people who come to believe in one conspiracy theory tend to swallow all of them… You see an increasing number of people, not just in the US but also in France, who reject the legitimacy of elections… That could cause a big problem for the Presidential elections here next year.”

Rejection of politicians is one thing; rejection of democracy and democratic institutions is another. Criticism of successive governments is, of course, perfectly normal — as are suggestions that French governments sometimes cover up the truth. Certainly, French voters have had plenty of legitimate gripes against their political leaders in the last four decades.

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But the last few years have revealed a pattern of contempt and paranoia in France which goes beyond political opposition or traditional populism — and plunges into elaborate theories of treachery and plots against “The People”. Some of the theories are modern (they blame Bill Gates, Big Tech and Big Pharma) and others are very old (it’s the Jews). All are rapidly propagated online, but they cannot be explained by social media alone.

The Covid pandemic — a phenomenon imperfectly understood and explained by “official sources” — has been an El Dorado for conspiratorial thinking in every country. But France seems to be more susceptible than most.

The original Gilets Jaunes movement of 2018 was partly a rational revolt by rural France against years of limp government and the insolent success of the big cities. It was also accelerated by absurdly inflated allegations, spread on social media, of stolen elections and self-enriching politicians. (“Brigitte Macron gets 500,000 Euros a year from the tax-payer,” was one of the more popular claims.)

Over the past six weeks, it has been much the same with the street demonstrations against the French government’s proposed “health pass”. Some of the protesters have reasonable, or at least rational, arguments against rapidly developed vaccines or assaults on personal freedom. Others carry banners accusing capitalism (Big Pharma) or “the Jews” of exploiting or even inventing the Covid pandemic.

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At the same time, the growing QAnon movement in France has been encouraged by — and also now threatens to supplant — more traditional and indigenous purveyors of paranoia.

Alain Soral, a former official of the far-Right Rassemblement National, runs a website called Égalité et Réconciliation, which has tried for years to unite white working class people and migrants with extravagant allegations of a Jewish plot to control the world. He is closely associated with the comedian, Dieudonné, who has several convictions for making anti-Semitic jokes and baseless accusations.

Several months ago, Alain Soral embraced QAnon. So did what’s left of the once-great French evening newspaper, France-Soir, now reduced to a website without journalists which propagates conspiracy theories about Covid. It is supplemented by another website, DéQodeurs, which spreads QAnon fantasies.

The people who visit these sites — les Qanonistes  — are described by a French police investigator as a sponge for a range of other conspiracy theories and theorists. “They exist in a plot-obsessed bubble which includes radical Gilets Jaunes and Covid-deniers,” my source said. “Their profile now overlaps closely with the word of Dieudonné and Soral”.

One of the leading online propagators of QAnonist ideology in France is a man who calls himself Leonard Sojli, who posts an online debate each week featuring conspiracy-theorists of the extreme Left and extreme nationalist and racist Right. The “debate” also sometimes extends to the most abstruse QAnon allegations, such as a “conspiracy” by the satanic “elites” to extract the blood of children to create an anti-ageing drug called “adrenochrome” (actually just a form of  adrenalin).

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Tristan Mendès France, a French writer and filmmaker who studies and combats conspiracy theories, says the French branch of the “Q” movement remains marginal but is still “toxic”.

And it has gained a foothold. Marie Peltier, a Belgian writer and lecturer on “complotisme” believes the proliferation of outlandish conspiracy theories in all democratic countries is a symptom of a 21st century crisis of identity and belief. “The old 20th century ideas (both political and religious) no longer have the same hold on people,” she said. “We are struggling to find a new overarching narrative which brings people together. Conspiracy theories fill the vacuum.”

Antoine Bristielle makes a similar point. He says the key is the collapse of confidence in democratic institutions — from parliaments to the media. “There is a kind of logic in all this,” he says. “If you’ve lost confidence in such institutions, you are no longer ready to believe what they tell you and you seize on alternative narratives which reject and blacken the institutions.”

There is, however, a French exceptionalism – even in conspiratorial thinking. In the United States, conspiracy theories are mostly associated with devout religious belief and radical forms of patriotism. They are mostly confined to the far political Right.

In France, they range from the far-Left to the far-Right and sometimes unite them. They are a symptom of the collapse of widespread religious belief and observance, but also the collapse in support for traditional political ideologies and parties from Communism to socialism and Gaullist conservatism.

The relationship between populism and “complotisme” also differs from country to country. In the United States, Donald Trump aligned himself with and even promoted belief in “plots against the people”. In Britain, the Johnson government – though not always scrupulous with the truth – does not indulge in such fantasies. It promotes other populist themes – Brexit, migration – to help retain the support of many of the kinds of people attracted to wilder, anti-establishment narratives in France.

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In France, even the “official” extremes of far Right and far Left – represented by Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon – have been wrong-footed by the rise of conspiratorial populism such as the Gilets Jaunes and parts of the Anti-Pass Movement. They try to shun the wilder theories while praising the protests. That is a difficult balance to maintain. The “complotistes” increasingly reject them as part of the “political establishment”.

In the United States, large parts of the population now appear to exist in separate realities. France is not yet at that point. But as Antoine Bristielle points out, France is also divided between people who may be critical of the Government but accept the democratic system and those who believe that elections and democratic institutions are a farce or a plot.

Their numbers are perhaps not yet great enough to undermine or skew next year’s presidential election. But the longer-term trend is, as the junior interior minister Marlène Schiappa says, “deeply worrying”.

This may be the work of the anarchist far-left. It may be the work of the libertarian Right. It may — though less plausibly — have been painted by ordinary apolitical people infuriated by President Emmanuel Macron’s decision to ban all fun and long-distance travel for unvaccinated citizens from Monday.

All three of these groups, along with many other angry citizens, were represented in the protests against the “passe sanitaire” (health pass) on Saturday, which attracted over 200,000 people to 150 demonstrations in French towns and cities last Saturday.

Politics goes to the street more rapidly in France than other democracies — but protests during the late July-August holiday season are very unusual. And the numbers have doubled since they kicked off three weeks ago. Further protests are expected this weekend.

The political and social geology of the gatherings is equally bizarre. There are anarchists. There are fundamentalist Catholics. There are dotty conspiracy theorists. There are priggish anti-vaccine fanatics, some of whom attacked and destroyed a stall in front of a pharmacy offering free Covid tests on Saturday’s march in Montpellier. There is the anti-capitalist hard-Left, which believes the pandemic was invented by “Big pharma” to sell vaccines. There is anti-Semitic ultra-right — some of them holding banners which read simply “qui?” or “who?”. The intended message is that “you-know-who” (ie the Jews) are somehow responsible for the pandemic.

There is the rump of the anti-Macron Gilets Jaunes movement of 2018-9, which has little support and no clear aims but is keen to latch on to any protest against the President. And there are also many hundreds of moderate-seeming, apolitical people. Many are young. Many come in family groups. Some are anti-vaccine. Others detest the idea of health passes restricting personal freedoms or creating separate categories of French people: the government-approved “fully-jabbed” and the unvaccinated and “unclean”.

In Caen, Mélanie, a primary school teacher in her thirties, said: “I’m vaccinated. I’ve never protested before. I’m not interested in politics. But I can’t accept a segregated society. This is supposed to be the country which invented human rights.”

In Paris there were four separate marches to accommodate the different points of view. In other towns and cities, habitual enemies walked together in condemnation of Macron and the French parliament which approved the health pass last week.

Some amendments were accepted during the emergency debate but the broad thrust of Macron’s policy passed both houses of parliament. To travel long distances or to visit a café, restaurant, cinema or museum from next Monday you must be able to show a code proving one of three things: you are fully vaccinated; you have recovered from Covid; or you recently tested negative. All health and care workers must be vaccinated by 15 September or risk suspension or dismissal.

Similar, though more limited, “vaccine passports” have been introduced in other EU countries, as well as in New York City. But the French pass is the most comprehensive in Europe. Macron argues that it rewards those who put aside individual or selfish concerns to protect themselves and others – a classic example of “fraternité”, one of the three principles proclaimed by the French Republic.

Opponents say that the pass contravenes the principle of “liberté” or freedom of individual choice; or that it offends against the principle of “égalité” because it divides the French into first and second-class citizens.

These allegations – and the suggestion that Macron is somehow turning France into a dictatorship – – fell flat on their face yesterday. The Conseil Constitutionnel, which fulfils some of duties of the US Supreme court, approved the pass with a couple of relatively minor tweaks.

All in all, the health pass has exposed the contradictory and — somewhat teenaged — French attitudes to “the state”.

The French Etat (the “virus” on the Norman-Breton motorway bridge) is expected to be all-protecting. It is also constantly criticised for being intrusive and suffocating. Mummy, or Maman, state is expected to do the laundry; she is also criticised if she interferes in her children’s/citizen’s lives.

Another less of the health-pass protests — but not an entirely new one — is that part of the French ultra or alternative Left is now as “anti-state” as the American hard Right. In the United States, and up to a point in the UK, the politics of Covid scepticism has been a largely a Right-wing affair. In France it is more diffuse.

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Macron, the failed Machiavelli

By John Lichfield

I visited friends in a picturesque Breton village this week which is divided between two hostile tribes: ultra- conservative Catholic locals and green, alternative-artistic incomers. “They now agree on one thing,” my friend said. “They don’t really believe Covid exists.”

And yet and yet…

It is important to point out — as some foreign media commentary on the protests fails to point out — that the Macron health pass has already been an immense success.

Its intention is to revive the French vaccine programme, which was famously slow in January and February. It was quietly excellent from March to mid-June, but faded again as it ran into layers of the vax-shy, vax-lazy, vax-sceptical and vax-resistant.

France has long been the most anti-vaccine country in the developed world. One opinion poll last year suggested that fewer than one in two adults would seek vaccination against Covid-19. The real numbers of the willing proved much higher but they slumped in late June — as they also have in Britain.

Confronted with a Delta surge threatening a fourth Covid wave, Macron reneged on his promise not to coerce or force the French to be vaccinated. The impact was immediate, with one million people booking jabs online in the 24 hours after his announcement. Since when, well over 7 million French people have received their first vaccine, taking the total to over 44 million or 80% of the adult population. The rate of vaccination has almost doubled and shows no sign of slowing in the habitually inactive month of August.

Roland Lescure, spokesman for Macron’s party, La République en Marche (LRM) and member of parliament for French expats in North America, said: “There were 200,000 demonstrators with all kinds of motives (last Saturday). On the same day 500,000 people were vaccinated – which means 8.5m first vaccinations in the month of July. The result is not even close.”

Arguably, Macron’s decision to impose the pass — and it was largely his decision — will save hundreds of French lives.

Some of the old vaccine critics, such as the hard-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon and the far-right leader Marine Le Pen, now criticise the health-pass without fully supporting the protests. Centre-right and centre-left opposition parties voted in favour – but say little in pubic to support Macron’s approach. There is, after all, a presidential election next spring.

Opinion polls suggest that the health pass is broadly popular with French people. Between 60 and 70% of samples questioned by pollsters say that they approve. Only 40% (at most) say they support the protesters although 50% say they “understand them”. The Gilets Jaunes movement – with which the pass protests have been compared – attracted over 70% support in its early months.

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On the other hand, while support for the GJ’s gradually declined, support for the anti-passers — both in the polls and on the street — seems to be increasing.

They may, in part, represent a surge of anger against the on-off social restrictions of the last 18 months. No attempt to organise protests against mask-wearing or curfews has been successful in France. The anti-health pass protests have channelled months of frustration.

When Jean-Paul Sartre died in 1980 his funeral attracted a huge crowd, one man saying that he had “come to demonstrate against Sartre’s death”. Many of the non-political participants on Saturday’s marches were demonstrating — consciously or not – against Covid-19.

The sociologist Jean Viard says that a leaderless coalition of the ordinary and the politically-motivated should worry the government. “This movement is a cocktail which could prove explosive and whose boundaries are difficult to draw,” he said.

In particular, he predicted, the protests could be the harbinger of a more widespread social unrest (and not just in France) if the Covid pandemic – fuelled by new variants – drags into 2022 or beyond.

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Government ministers admit that they are surprised that the protests have not faded away and this Saturday will be an important test. Another big turnout on the first full weekend of August, even if somewhat lower than last week, will suggest that the movement is here to stay. It could grow larger in September and, potentially, damage Macron’s campaign for re-election in April.

On the other hand, Macron’s gamble could pay off. France is well on the way to reaching its target of first-vaccinating 50 million people over the age of 12 by the end of this month. On present trends, France should overtake the UK total of first vaccinations (covering people 18 and over) within the next two to three weeks.

The Delta wave, which hit France late, is already showing signs of fading. The health pass was always meant to be temporary. Once France reaches 52 million or so first jabs – around over 90% of over 12’s – Macron could declare it to have been hugely successful and no longer necessary. He could even hope — cautiously — to reap a Covid bonus in the elections in April.

President Emmanuel Macron and the far-Right leader Marine Le Pen were the big losers in regional elections over the last two weekends. Cue premature political obituaries for both in parts of the British press, largely based on wishful thinking and the shallow expectation that French politics follow patterns seen elsewhere.

The truth is that Macron and Le Pen, though weakened, are still likely to be the biggest players in the presidential election next April — likely, but no longer certain. Macron’s allies took only 7% of the votes in the 12 regions of mainland France last Sunday, and only 34% of voters turned out. In other words, the Macronistes attracted 2.4% of the electorate. Disastrous.

And yet Macron remains the most popular late-term French president of the last two decades, with 50% approval in two recent surveys. In an Elabe poll taken after the weekend calamity, he topped voting intentions for next spring’s first round with 29-31% — his highest level for two years. How can that happen?

Local and national politics in France beat to different drums. Turnout was so low in the last two weekends partly because many voters have no interest in the country’s sprawling regions, created seven years ago, while Macronism — which was always a top-down movement — has failed to grow local roots. Provided there isn’t another serious Covid lockdown, Macron remains the somewhat shaky favourite to win a second term next April.

Le Pen, the smiling apostle of anger, hoped to capture at least one region for the first time this month, shattering the glass ceiling which has prevented the radical Right from running anything bigger than a medium-sized town in France for 77 years. The miserable turnout might have been expected to help her — not a bit of it. Voter turnout among her habitual supporters was even lower than the national average — only 30%. In two of her most important constituencies, the young and the white working class, it was even lower: 18% and 25%.

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Why could the people who are, according to Le Pen, angry and suffering and ready for radical change not be bothered to vote for the angry party, the Rassemblement National (ex-Front National)? Critics within her party and the wider far-Right — and there are suddenly many — have an explanation: Le Pen, they say, has become too soft.

She has cleaned up (cosmetically at least) her father’s political business in an attempt to make herself “présidentiable”. But she has succeeded only in creating another mainstream party which fails to mobilise the disaffected and the distressed.

And yet such people are unlikely to return en masse to other traditional parties next spring. They will likely turn out in much bigger numbers in the first round of the presidential election on 10 April — enough almost certainly to put Le Pen in the two-candidate run-off, but not enough to give her a realistic chance of winning the presidency in the second.

In effect, the presidential race will be decided, as it was in 2017, in the first round. Whoever reaches the second round with Le Pen wins. That could be Macron — though the regional elections did increase the chances that he will be edged out of the second round by a candidate from the old centre-right.

Indeed, the biggest single winner last Sunday was, without a doubt, Xavier Bertrand, the president of the north-eastern region, Hauts-de-France. He was easily re-elected, trouncing the far-Right and the Left-and-greens alliance.

Bertrand, 56, had already declared in March that he would run for the Elysée in April if he won in the north. An Ipsos poll at the weekend gave him 18% support in the first round of next year’s election — just behind Macron and Le Pen on 22% each.

The later Elabe poll has him only 14%. But the gap could soon close. Two incidents during the regional campaign illustrated the precarity of Macron and Le Pen’s positions. In the north-west, Macron’s home region, five ministers were sent into battle, but his party La République En Marche did not even qualify for the second round. This left Macron with an embarrassing dilemma last Sunday in Le Touquet in the Pas de Calais, where he has a holiday flat and always votes.

He could not cast a ballot for the far-Right, quite obviously, so had to choose between the Left-green alliance and Xavier Bertrand, the man who may yet be his strongest challenger next April. Macron revealed — to his credit — that he had voted for Bertrand.

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The moment that encapsulated Le Pen’s humiliation — and increased doubts about her within her own party — came when first round results were announced. At her parliamentary constituency at Hénin-Beaumont near Lille, Le Pen launched into a tirade before the televisions cameras against her own voters — or non-voters. “If you want things to change, you have to vote,” she said. “If you don’t vote, your ideas, your voices count for nothing.”

To some of her supporters, she sounded like a mainstream politician attacking the electorate for ignoring the dictates of the great and good. “I was shocked,” a senior party official told Le Figaro. “Whenever did shouting at our own people help us? She sounded just like a member of the elite saying, ‘You bunch of yokels. Wake up and vote for me.’”

Le Pen now faces a difficult party Congress next week in Perpignan. There will, I suspect, be no public splits, but instead much off-the-record moaning and a push to return to a harder line on Islamism and her abandoned pledge to leave the European Union.

In an attempt to expand her electorate into the centre-right, Le Pen ditched her support for “Frexit” in 2019 and promised, if elected, to work within the European Union and even the Euro. Meanwhile, she has made a distinction between Islam (“a great religion”) and radical Islamism — to the dismay of the many Islamophobes in her party.

Robert Ménard, the “far-Right” mayor of nearby Béziers, is a Rassemblement National fellow-traveller rather than party member, so is able to say publicly what many RN officials and supporters say privately.

“The most astonishing thing is that RN has become the object of the same public contempt as other parties, without ever having been in power,” he said recently. “People now regard the Rassemblement National as part of the political class.”

And so Le Pen faces an insoluble conundrum. Hardliners will push behind the scenes in Perpignan for a return to Euroscepticism and the barely coded racial politics of her father, Jean-Marie. Yet she knows she cannot challenge strongly in the presidential election next year if she goes down that road. This dilemma, more than any, suggests that Marine Le Pen has taken the French far-Right (in its present form) as far as she can.

She does, however, probably still have enough support among white blue-collar workers, the young and extreme nationalists to reach the two-candidate second round of the presidential elections on April 24. She is marooned in a kind of electoral twilight zone — able to assemble enough votes to reach the run-off but not enough to reach the Elysée.

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Macron, the failed Machiavelli

By John Lichfield

Macron faces a different dilemma. Does he ignore yesterday’s results, or try to rebuild his reputation as a grey-suited revolutionary by resurrecting a few of his proposed reforms in the autumn? Does he reshuffle his government, or does he rely on the receding pandemic and a recovering economy to see him home?

First indications are that he intends to go for broke and at least commence a couple of radical reforms — including a revival of his controversial plans to reconstruct the French pensions system (abandoned last year at the start of the Covid pandemic). If he does, it will be a sign that Macron believes that his most dangerous opponent next year will not be Marine Le Pen but the man he voted for in Le Touquet last Sunday.

It has long been probable that Macron’s greatest danger next April would come from a plausible, centre-right contender who could squeeze the President out of the top two places in the first round. Luckily for Macron there have so far been no plausible centre-right contenders; or rather, there has been a host of contenders and no accepted way to choose between them. Xavier Bertrand now threatens to be that man.

Yet Bertrand’s political offer is vague, defined as: “I am Not Macron and I am Not Le Pen”. He pledges to govern partly by referenda, borrowing one of the demands of the Gilets Jaunes movement. He says he stands for “regionalism, not Parisianism” (the Gilet Jaunes again). He emphasises that he is not an “investment banker” (Macron) nor an “heiress” (Le Pen) but a small-town insurance agent from Flavy-le-Martel in Picardy who “comes from the people” and found himself swept into politics.

This positioning or pretence — “Monsieur Bertrand goes to Paris” — disguises the fact that he held ministerial positions for nine years under both Chirac and Sarkozy; that he was a member of parliament for 12 years and secretary general of the main centre-right party for two years (divorcing two wives along the way).

Bertrand, to put it simply, does not offer a new beginning. He offers a return to the something-for-everyone, do-very-little politics which allowed France to drift aimlessly through much of the 1990s and early 2000s (and again under François Hollande).

Macron, by reviving his shelved reform agenda, doubtless hopes to expose the vacuity of Xavier Bertrand. In the meantime, however, Bertrand’s immediate enemies are neither Macron nor Le Pen, but other centre-right barons, and one baronness, Valérie Pécresse, president of the greater Paris region, Île-de-France. At least four of them — including the former EU Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier — have ambitions to be the single centre-right candidate next April.

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Which of them will triumph? The main centre-right party Les Républicains is thinking of organising some kind of beauty contest, but is not sure how or what or when, with a decision due in September. In any case, Bertrand, who resigned from Les Républicians in 2017, says he will ignore any decision by the party to impose a single “traditional Right” contender — unless presumably it is himself.

In other words, there is a strong possibility that there will be two centre-right candidates (at least) in the field of a dozen or more runners in the first round of the presidential elections, That would almost guarantee that Macron and Le Pen top the poll and qualify for the second round — likely guaranteeing Macron a second term.

There are, however, several other “known unknowns”, as well as maybe some “unknown unknowns”. The pandemic has more or less evaporated in France, and the economy is recovering strongly — with 5.7% growth predicted this year. Unless those things change, Macron’s high approval ratings will persist. But they may change, with the Delta variant spreading fast, and doubling in the last week.

The French vaccination programme recovered from a slow start and now covers (with one jab at least) two-thirds of the adult population and four-fifths over 65s. All the same, a fourth wave of Covid — bringing renewed lockdowns and another shock to the economy – could ruin Macron’s chances next year — without re-floating those of Le Pen.

French politics is wonderfully complex, but complexity sometimes has dull consequences. And a President Xavier Bertrand would be a fittingly dull prospect.

Some of the country’s 6,000,000 Muslims worship in informal prayer rooms which occasionally become breeding grounds for radical, anti-western Islamist teaching. Financing new mosques is difficult in a secular country where public subsidies for religion are banned.

In any case, planning permission is systematically opposed by a range of Right-wing politicians, who also complain when Muslim prayers spill over into the street.

So a decision in 2013 to build Europe’s biggest mosque in Strasbourg — with the blessing of national and local politicians — seemed at the time to be an important breakthrough. Work began four years ago in an unlovely industrial estate on the southern fringes of the Alsatian capital; the Turkish Prime Minister was present, as were French national and local officials.

Construction of the Very Big Mosque — described ambitiously by its promoters as a rival to the magnificent 12^th century red-stone Strasbourg Cathedral — was haphazard. Eight of the 30 domes were completed. The bases of two minarets appeared.

Building halted in 2020 and resumed this year – but stopped again last month in the midst of a many-sided political row stretching from Alsace to Paris to Ankara. Everyone involved now accuses everyone else of acting in bad faith; everyone seems to be partially right and partially wrong.

In the background — not very far in the background — is President Emmanuel Macron’s campaign to curb the spread of extremist Islamic ideology in France. Further in the background (again, not much further) are the presidential elections next April and May in which the far-Right leader Marine Le Pen hopes to exploit fear of radical Islam — and Islamophobia more generally — to reach the Elysée Palace.

The row over the Grande Mosquée de Strasbourg is, however, confusing and elusive. Macron’s interior minister Gérald Darmanin said last month that the mosque was “part of a project to impose political Islam” in France.

Is he right? Not really. The mosque’s Franco-Turkish promoters, although ultra-conservative, have nothing to do with the anti-western, jihadist ideology which has generated more than 30 terrorist attacks in France in the last six years. Almost all were committed by radicalised French or foreign-born Muslims linked to France’s 5,000,000 or so people of North African or Arab descent.

The Strasbourg mega-mosque is the project of the 700,000-strong French community of Turkish origin, which is heavily concentrated in Alsace. No Franco-Turk has been involved in any of the jihadist attacks in France, although some have been accused of acts of intra-Turkish or anti-Kurdish terrorism on French soil.

The big row over the big mosque is part of a separate, but interwoven, confrontation between France and Turkey and in particular between President Macron and President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The two men have frequently wrangled and exchanged insults in the last two years over their two countries’ involvement in the Libyan conflict or illegal Turkish exploration for gas deposits in Greek territorial waters.

Turkey experts say that Erdoğan does have a political project in Europe, but it is about national influence and his own hold on power in Ankara, not the advance of Islam. His aim is to impose his own conservative nationalist interpretation of the Islamic faith on the large Turkish diaspora in Germany, France and other countries.

“The Turkish Government wanted to use this mosque as a kind of soft power,” said Erkan Toguslu, an expert on Turkish affairs at Leuven university in Belgium. “Erdoğan’s aim is not so much religious as nationalist.”

President Erdogan and the Turkish Government are, however, no longer directly involved in the Strasbourg Mosque. The ultra-conservative Turkish movement behind the project, Milli Görüs, has been close to Erdogan at various periods in the past, but Ankara cut off funding for the Grande Mosquée after falling out with Milli Görüs in Turkey last year.

So a bizarre situation has arisen. Successive French governments and local administrations gave their enthusiastic blessing to the Big Mosque when it was linked to Erdogan; after Erdogan ended his involvement it became, according to interior minister Darmanin, a Turkish Trojan Horse — an example of “foreign meddling on our soil”.

When they lost access to funds from Ankara, the mosque’s promoters asked for money from a newly-elected Green and Socialist administration at Strasbourg town hall. Previous local administrations of Right and Left had offered money for the mosque but were turned down. The new Green mayor, Jeanne Barseghian, agreed in principal to make a € 3mcontribution – almost 10% of the total cost.

Although public funding of religious projects is illegal under France’s 1905 “secularity” law, Alsace was not part of France at the time, having been annexed by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War in 1870.

When Alsace returned to France in 1919, it preserved some of its own laws and characteristics, and to this days Alsatian trains run on the right-hand track, as they do in Germany, not on the left as they do in most of France. The German-speaking province also retains a Napoleonic-era right to public funding of religious projects.

There was therefore nothing illegal in the decision earlier this year of the Green mayor of Strasbourg to promise the funds – yet all hell let loose all the same.

Darmanin and other members of the government accused Ms Barseghian of being politically naïve. The far-Right accused her of surrendering to so-called islamogauchisme (an alleged unholy alliance between radical Islam and the Left).

She received death threats from the ultra-Right, and was also bitterly criticised by French-Armenians — of which is she one — for helping an association which refuses to recognise the post-1915 genocide of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire.

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The man who leads the organisation which is building the mosque says that Mayor Barseghian has been the victim of shameless political hypocrisy. “Almost every other local political party has offered to helps us in the past,” said Eyüp Sahin, head of the Milli Görüs federation in the eastern region of France. “She never promised anything beforehand. Now they are attacking her.”

Milli Görüs has now withdrawn its request for money from the Strasbourg city authorities and, as a result, Mr Sahin says that completion of the giant mosque will be delayed until 2024 or 2025.

“It has become impossible to deal with French politics and politicians,” he said. “If we seek to raise money abroad, we are attacked. When we seek local money, the sky falls in.

“When it suits them, we are French; when it doesn’t suit them, we are Turks. They demand integration. Well, we are integrated. My accent may not be French but it’s not Turkish either. It’s Alsatian.”

Mr Sahin protests a little too much, however. His organisation, Milli Görüs, is a powerful German-based movement which promotes a very conservative interpretation of Islam and seeks to preserve the Turkishness of the diaspora in Europe into the second, third and fourth generations.

Milli Görüs itself means “national dream”, and the nation that the title refers to is neither France nor Germany.

As part of President Macron’s drive to curb the growing extreme Islamist influence in France, more than a dozen Muslim organisations were asked to sign a charter earlier this year – the Charter for the Principles of French Islam — which rejects foreign influence and recognises the primacy of democracy and secular laws over sharia law. Only three refused, including Milli Görüs and another Turkish organisation even more closely associated with the Turkish state.

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The balkanisation of France’s Muslim community into organisations linked directly or partly to countries of origin was once encouraged by French governments. It is now recognised as part of the problem. There already is, for instance, a big mosque in Strasbourg which is also called confusingly “La Grande Mosquée”, and which attracts worshippers from the local Maghrebin (North African) communities but not Franco-Turks.

Interior minister Mr Darmanin is threatening to dissolve Milli Görüs, as an organisation which refuses the supremacy of French law and is “tied to a foreign power”. Samim Akgönül, head of Turkish studies as Strasbourg university, says that Darmanin is missing the point and missing a trick.

Since Milli Görüs seems to have parted ways with Erdogan the French government should be finding ways, he says, to draw them into French life, not push them away.

“By refusing to consider these populations as part of French society, we are giving them up to Turkey. But in truth they are Strasbourgers,” Mr Akgönül said.

Another academic who knows Turkey well, but who asked not to be named, said that the Strasbourg Mosque row, far from curbing Erdogan’s power, was playing into his hands. “Erdogan uses France in the same way that the Johnson government does in Britain,” he said. “For both of them, stirring up anti-French feeling is a useful way of stirring up national feeling.”

President Macron’s drive to restrain extremist Islamist ideology in France was necessary and well-intentioned.

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It was grotesquely misrepresented in some parts of the Muslim world – and by liberal media in the United States. Unfortunately, however, Macron has allowed his ambitious interior minister to muddle the issue with tough-man posturing – on the Strasbourg Mosque and other issues.

The big, and often misleading, row over the big mosque is part of a wider and dangerous polarisation of attitudes to Islam in France. The far-Right and even part of the traditional Right exploit Islamist excesses and exaggerate Islamist influence to disguise and promote more generalised Islamophobia. Meanwhile, part of the Left refuses to admit that violent, Islamist ideology is advancing — or even that it exists.

The Strasbourg row is confusing — far more than it needed to be — but that’s not surprising. As the 2022 elections approach, it has become increasingly impossible to speak rationally about Islam in France.

The current outbreak of political zizanie in France may seem obvious. There is, after all, a presidential election 11 months away. But that, in itself, cannot explain the degree of hysteria and personal hatred — between political opponents but also between supposed allies — which has enlivened and disfigured French politics in the last three weeks.

Right at the heart of the current political turbulence is President Macron, who generates an exaggerated, blind fury among his opponents on Left and Right — largely undeservedly. He can be deeply annoying, this is true. And his record is patchy. Mostly, though, he is still paying the price for being a successful upstart and a centrist from outside traditional, political structures.

In the present zizanie (which shows no signs of abating), Macron has been both victim and a would-be aggressor. He is the intended victim of a campaign of poison-pen letter-writing by a group of retired and serving military officers who allege that France is on the verge of “disintegration” and “civil war”. They should be taken seriously for what they are: a Trump-like campaign by people close to the far-right leader Marine Le Pen to semer la zizanie or sow discord. But they should be taken less seriously for what they describe: a dystopian and vastly exaggerated picture of France’s genuine problems with radical Islam and other forms of violence.

They may succeed — or they may blow up in Le Pen’s face.

Much less has been written abroad about recent attempts by Macron himself to semer la zizanie among the French centre-right — the political descendants of Charles de Gaulle, Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy. Macron’s attempts to carve off another chunk of the French centre-right probably says more about the future of French politics than the generals’ letters.

To bolster his chances of winning again next April and May, Macron would like to split Les Républicains, the troubled centre-right party which has already been leaking members: both of his Prime Ministers, Edouard Phillippe, 2017-2020, and Jean Castex 2020-21, and several of his most senior ministers are refugees from the centre-right.

Les Républicains are divided and further sub-divided, often in mysterious ways, by personal animosities, jealousies and ideological differences. Broadly-speaking, one wing of the party is economically liberal, pragmatic, European-minded and compatible with Macronism. Another is nationalist-authoritarian, hates Macron’s guts and plays footsie with Marine Le Pen. There are other people in the party, both leaders and the led, who feel uncomfortable with both camps.

This split — and the lack of credible leaders — is making it hard for the party to find a presidential candidate for next year. By pushing the two sides further apart Macron hopes to colonise even more of the centre-right vote than he managed in 2017. Even ex-President Sarkozy argues (privately) that part of his old party should embrace Macron in next year’s election. He believes that the pragmatic non-Leppenist-leaning section of the party can only become a force in the land again if it merges with, and eventually swallows, Macronism.

So Macron seized an opportunity presented by two-round regional elections at the end of next month to generate zizanie within Les Républicains. The elections are for 13 French regions and Le Pen’s Rassemblement National can potentially capture at least one for the first time. Macron’s five-years-old centrist party La République en Marche (LREM) has no chance of winning in any region, the top-down party having failed to build local support and with no popular local leaders. It does, however, have enough strength — around 11% in most regions — to help decide the outcome of the 2nd round of the regional elections on the 27 June.

Macron’s people erected — or so they thought — a de facto alliance in the Nice-Marseille region (Provence-Alpe Cote d’Azur or “PACA”) between Macron’s LREM and the incumbent, centre-right regional president, Renaud Muselier. This alliance was supposed to take the form of a joint list of candidates in the first round of the regional election, including  centre-right politicians and leading figures in Macron’s LREM, including a junior minister.

The justification for the deal was simple — and a relatively normal procedure in French politics — to prevent Rassemblement National from coming first in the first round and making it harder for them to capture the region, home to 5,000,000 people, in the second. Cue an explosion of uncontrolled anger within Les Républicains, with the national leadership saying that this was not just a normal electoral manoeuvre or procedure but an attempt by Macron to destroy their party — correctly.

Muselier, 62, told a friend that in 28 years in national and regional politics he had “never seen such violent insults and accusations” as he faced within his own camp. Eric Ciotti, a member of parliament for Alpes-Maririmes (the Nice-Cannes area) accused Muselier of “stabbing his party in the back”. Asked about Ciotti — a rent-a-quote populist, whose comments are often indistinguishable from those of Le Pen — Muselier said: “I prefer to deal with honest people, people with a real vision.”

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The French investigative newspaper, Le Canard Enchainé,  adores and encourages all forms of political zizanie. It  revealed that Ciotti, the man shrieking against alliance with Macron’s party, had made a secret non-aggression pact with Rassemblement National in 2017 to ensure his re-election in Alpes-Maritimes.

Ciotti and other ferociously anti-Macron centre-right politicians in the Provence region are also accused of maintaining private close links with Thierry Mariani, the Lepennist candidate for regional president. Mariani, also 62, is a former centre-right politician and was transport minister under  Sarkozy.

“Ciotti and others are appalling hypocrites,” a Les Républicains insider told me. “They act like dealing with Macron’s people is like playing cards with the devil but they are closely aligned with and have many contacts with Le Pen’s party.”

Yet is there a difference between dealing with Macron and dealing with Le Pen? Both would like to destroy Les Républicains, after all. “There is something about Macron and his people which sends some of our people crazy, and not just those on the right-wing of the party,”  the insider said. “There is a smugness about Macron and his people, a we-are-always-rightness about them. Others have not swallowed the humiliation of Macron’s victory in 2017. There is also a section of opinion in Les Républicains whose thought-patterns are little different from Lepennism — Islamophobic, Eurosceptic, authoritarian.”

Macron’s great mistake, he said, was to make his attempted pact with Muselier so transparently a pre-presidential election manoeuvre. It should have been presented as something purely local to the PACA region — an alliance to keep out the far right.

The Républicains’ national leadership withdrew official support for Muselier’s campaign, threatening to kick him out of the party. He backed down, and said he had never made any alliance with Macron’s LREM.

As a result, two senior Macron-friendly local leaders — the influential mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, and mayor of Toulon, Hubert Falco — resigned from the Républicains, with Estrosi saying that he planned to build a “wide” new party of the centre and centre-right (presumably with Macron).

And then things became confusing. Macron was originally left looking like a failed Machiavelli because his PACA alliance with the centre-right had fallen apart. Within a couple of days, Musellier announced that his list of candidates would embrace one in four from Macron’s LREM party but no senior Macroniste figures from Paris.

So there had been an an alliance, of kinds, after all. Who had won now?

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Le Pen’s position in the PACA regional election may well have been strengthened by all, the Macroniste-Républicains deal justifying her old mantra: “All the other parties are just one party. We are the only opposition.”

Her man Mariani (a fan of Vladimir Putin and apologist for the Syrian regime) leads in the first round of the Provence region, according to polls — a lead which has widened since the squabble began. On the other hand, Muselier has also proved a resilient and wily politician, and may yet attract enough support in round two to hold on to the regional presidency.

The undisputed losers are Les Républicains, who have lost two important southern chieftains and appear more split than ever between the Macron-detesting and the Macron-compatible. In the medium term that should, despite his initial embarrassment, be good news for the President of the Republic.

More gyrations, and zizanies, are to come. Two centre-right chieftains from other regions — Xavier Bertrand in the industrial north west and Valérie Pécresse in the greater Paris area — hope to do so well in their own regional elections next month that they emerge as the chief rival to Macron and Le Pen. Both walked out of the Républicains party during previous zizanies. Should the party endorse one or the other? How should party members decide? And which should they choose?

The broad Left, in the meantime, is engaged in a noisy zizanie of its own. The Green Euro MP Yannick Jadot, ephemeral presidential candidate in 2017, is pushing, sensibly enough, for a single candidate of the Left. For this he has been viciously attacked by the hard-left Jean-Luc Mélenchon and accused by other Green politicians of trying to steal a march on their party primary in September.

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What does this all mean for the likely outcome of the two round presidential election next April and May? Macron remains steady in the polls at around 40% approval — a high figure for an incumbent French president in recent times, although that support may be soft. His hopes depend on continued ebbing of the Covid pandemic and success of a much-improved French vaccination programme.

If Les Républicains continue to fight one another, if no credible “traditional right” candidate emerges, Macron may well feast on centre-right votes next Spring.  But so would Marine Le Pen. That is the great weakness, or great gamble, in Macron’s strategy of divide-and-conquer. He may capture part of the centre-right vote next year. Much of the rest may emigrate to Le Pen.

Writing in his diary that night, he asked: “Why did I go to that party?…  I went and I loathed it… There… were gathered the Nurembergers and the Munichois celebrating our victory over their friend Herr von Ribbentrop. I left early and in haste, leaving my coat behind me.”

The party had been given by a Conservative MP, Henry “Chips” Channon, who was born in Chicago in 1897 and became ostentatiously and snobbishly more British than the British. Channon, along with many others at the party, had been enthusiastically pro-Nazi and anti-Churchill until deep into 1939 — hence Nicolson’s description of the “Nurembergers” and the “Munichois”.

The VE Day party is interesting for more than its startling hypocrisy. It is one of scores of occasions in which Channon and Nicolson – two of the three great British diarists of the 20^th century — wander into one another’s pages.

For many years, I’ve been a great admirer and frequent re-reader of the diaries that Nicolson kept from 1930 to 1962. A writer, broadcaster, diplomat, politician, gardener and closet homosexual, he is, in my opinion, one of the greatest diarists of any century. Henry Channon’s diaries were first published in heavily expurgated form in 1967, and a first volume of the more complete diaries (covering 1918-1938) was published last month, brilliantly and painstakingly edited by Simon Heffer.

The enlarged Channon diaries have rightly attracted a great deal of attention. They do not have the breadth, wit or literary quality of the Nicolson diaries but they are more detailed and more frank, and maybe more honest, about the opinions and sexual escapades of some of the leading figures in British politics and high society in the years between the world wars. And reading the two diaries side by side is illuminating.

The two men were important, secondary figures in the opposing political tribes, the appeasers and anti-appeasers,  in the pivotal years from 1935 to 1939. They represented not just ephemeral political viewpoints but opposing philosophies of Britishness which survive, in somewhat different form, to this day.

Both Nicolson and Channon married wealthy, aristocratic women. Both were bisexual and had frequent homosexual affairs while other men, less powerful and less protected, were prosecuted for gross indecency.

They knew each other well, although not as lovers. Both were elected to parliament in 1935 — Channon as a Conservative, Nicolson as a follower of Ramsay McDonald’s National Labour, which supported the Tory-led government.

Nicolson’s diaries introduce you to an extraordinary cast of 1930s and 40s characters, from Winston Churchill to Charlie Chaplin, James Joyce to Virginia Woolf, Charles Lindbergh and Charles de Gaulle. Channon’s are acute, sometimes funny and startlingly frank but frequently tedious, snobbish and self-regarding. You meet Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, before she married the future King George VI. You meet the future Duke and Duchess of Windsor. You meet the leading politicians of the 1930s and hordes of uninteresting aristocrats and junior royals.

The early part of the Channon diaries read like an interminable Daily Mail gossip column, with a new name dropped every sentence and a price-tag for everything. The later part — when Channon becomes a Parliamentary Private Secretary in the Foreign Office — give a compelling, and pro-Nazi, insider’s view of one of the most controversial periods in British politics, leading to the Munich crisis of 1938.

As political thinkers, there is no comparison between the two men. Nicolson (although close to Sir Oswald Mosley before he became a full-on fascist) understood clearly what was happening in Berlin and wrote and spoke and conspired against it. Channon’s diaries, in contrast, leave him very much marooned on the wrong side of history. Adolf Hitler, he writes in September 1938, is “always right, the greatest diplomat of modern times”. Winston Churchill, he writes in May that year, is a “fat, brilliant, unbalanced, illogical, porcine orator… All his life he has preached against (the Germans) and thus done much to poison our relations with Germany.”

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The extent of Nazi fellow-travelling among a part of the British upper and governing classes in the 1930s has been well-documented but is seldom mentioned these days. A new biography of the novelist Barbara Pym reveals that she — the archetype of a certain kind of British decency and good sense — was also an enthusiast for the Nazis and had an affair with an SS officer.

The excuse usually given — and a reasonable one up to a point — is that we have the leisure of reading history from back to front. We know how the story ended. For many upper-class Britons in the 1930s, the Soviet Union appeared a greater threat than the Nazis, who might be a bulwark against Communism and its threatened destruction of wealth and tradition.

But Channon goes even further, praising the “virile” ideology of Mussolini, Franco and Hitler compared to a “tired” and “declining” Britain. “Germany and Italy are seething with vigour and life,” he writes: “Democracy is absurd.”

On 20 September 1936, Channon and Harold Nicolson were at the same house — or more strictly “castle” — party at Schloss St Martin in Austria. Their respective diary entries for that day are telling.

Channon and his wife Honor Guinness, daughter of the Guinness family grand patriarch, Lord Iveagh, had been to the Olympic Games in Berlin. They had been invited as personal guests of Joachim von Ribbentrop, former champagne salesman and Hitler’s ambassador in Britain from 1936 to 1938, and later the German foreign minister.

Nicolson wrote in his diary that night: “The Channons have fallen under the champagne-like influence of Ribbentrop… They think… that we should let gallant little Germany glut her fill of the reds in the East and keep decadent France quiet while she does so.”

“I say that this may be expedient but it is wrong… We stand for tolerance, truth, liberty and good humour… [The Nazis] stand for violence, oppression, untruthfulness and bitterness.”

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Channon’s diary entry that day is both generous and patronising. “Harold Nicolson arrived, dear sentimental, hard-working, gentle Harold, who is always a victim of his loyalties. He refused to go through Germany because of Nazi rule… I am worn out with Nazi discussions.”

While in London, Von Ribbentrop (and through him Adolf Hitler) was originally courted by a wide section of British high society and the Conservative Party. But he made himself a laughing stock with a series of gaffes, including giving the Hitler salute to King George VI, earning the nickname “brickendrop”.

Channon was among the few who defended him to the end (while also mocking him). He describes Von Ribbentrop’s eighteen months in London as a “missed opportunity” for an Anglo-German alliance (implicitly against France). In 1946, Joachim Von Ribbentrop was convicted of crimes against humanity at the Nuremberg trials, and became the first Nazi leader to be hanged.

In the period from 1936 to the Munich crisis in 1938, Nicolson was a frequent parliamentary speaker and a member of a group of dissident, strongly anti-Nazi MPs surrounding Anthony Eden. Meanwhile Channon became parliamentary private secretary to the junior foreign office minister Rab Butler (a keen appeaser).

The two diarists evidently fell out. Channon says of Nicolson in March 1938 that he is “a bit mad, but all old women have a change of life.” He uses the word “wet” or “wets” or “moist” to describe Nicolson and all supposedly pro-government MP’s who were anti-Hitler.

The situation deteriorated and on 28 September a war over Czechoslovakia appeared imminent. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain (“the greatest ever Englishman” to Channon; a man with “no conception of world politics” to Nicolson) addressed the House of Commons. In mid-speech, however, a message arrived from Hitler inviting Chamberlain to further peace talks in Munich. Tory MPs stood on their seats and waved their order papers.

Both men recorded the event in their diaries. Channon wrote: “There was born in many, in me at least, a gratitude, an admiration, for the PM, which will be eternal. I felt sick with enthusiasm, longed to clutch him.”

“I remained seated,” Nicolson recorded: “Liddall (the Conservative Member for Lincoln) behind me, hisses out: ‘Stand up. You brute.’”

Of the “peace for our time” surrender to Nazi demands two days later, Channon wrote: “The whole world rejoices while a few malcontents jeer… Chamberlain gave in on a few minor points but he saved the world which does not want to go to war over a timetable.”

In his diary, Nicolson described the Chamberlain government’s position: “This is the greatest diplomatic achievement in our history: therefore we must redouble our armaments in order never again to be exposed to such a humiliation.”

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Two further volumes of Channon’s diaries are to be published. He appears seldom in the two later volumes of the Nicolson diaries but the two men seemed to have become friends again — of a kind — hence the brief visit to the VE Day party. But Nicolson does mock the grandiosity of Channon’s post-war lifestyle. When he receives pocket handkerchiefs for his birthday one year he writes: “(They) will be preserved for those occasions when I dine with Emperors and Princes or Queen Mothers or Mr Henry Channon.”

For all his political views, Channon comes across as a self-absorbed, shallow but in many ways likeable man. He was a contradictory figure, American-born but detesting the United States (while living partly off American money). Living in an aristocratic world which no longer exists, he thought the rise of American power was a threat to the royalist-aristocratic-high Christian-traditional values that he professed to cherish (while living a somewhat untraditional private life of brothels and bisexual affairs).

All the same, his voice is recognisable 80 years on. He represents a kind of inward-looking glorification of Britishness which can still be heard today. Paradoxically his successors often dwell simplistically on Britain’s part in the defeat of the Nazis whom Channon so admired.

Nicolson – the idealistic “wet” — had simplifications and contradictions of his own. He was a devotee of the League of Nations and international cooperation; he believed in Britain’s vocation as a model for decency, law, freedom and truth-telling. And yet, by contemporary terms, he is certainly racist and at least mildly anti-Semitic.

Eight decades on, the two have almost switched positions in popular memory. To be anti-Hitler is to be “wet” no longer. Nicolson, the “sentimental old woman”, represents with Churchill and Eden the far-sighted defence of Britain’s freedom and values against violent, bullying dictators. Channon, in contrast, the supposed champion of “virility”, now embodies a failed policy of short-sighted vacillation and appeasement.

On paper, it seems like a straightforward political win. ENA is France’s most prestigious seat of higher education; an officer-training school for senior civil servants which has produced many leading politicians and (more rarely these days) captains of industry. In terms of its preservation of the elite, the closest British comparison might be Eton and Oxford — combined.

Indeed, when General Charles de Gaulle created ENA in 1945, his primary aim was to train a new, meritocratic elite, to replace the social elite whom he believed had betrayed France in 1940. By the 1990s, however, ENA was accused of a new form of betrayal: the creation of a self-perpetuating oligarchy which prevented more practical or inventive talent from rising in the French system.

Since then, the destruction of ENA has become a theme of French politics. The school has been constantly reformed, reduced in size and moved from Paris to Strasbourg. In fact, the all-powerful ENA of legend probably ceased to exist years ago. And yet it has remained a symbol of a know-it-all, elitist French state, with President Macron as its most perfect manifestation.

Macron graduated from ENA in 2004. A dozen years later he became President of the Republic. Laurent Fabius took only 11 years from graduation to become Socialist prime minister (1984-6). Jacques Chirac was an énarque. So was Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, François Hollande and more than a third of the prime ministers of the Fifth Republic.

And yet despite its reputation, ENA is not fee-paying. In theory, it’s open to people of all backgrounds: the 80 students in each year class are paid a salary by the state. Entry is based on tough exams after two years of “prépas” (preparatory courses). Once they’re in, the 80 students are graded from 1 to 80, with those in the top 15 — the “botte” or boot — admitted directly into a kind of praetorian guard of the French civil service, les grand corps, when they graduate. They are guaranteed a senior job and salary for life. (For what it’s worth, Macron came 5^th in his year.)

Although theoretically a place of learning, ENA is actually a place of permanent examination — of stress-testing — rather than education. An ENA graduate once told me: “You learn nothing… It’s a system for grading you, for deciding how well you will cope with the kinds of problems that might be thrown at you.” Another well-known product of ENA in the late 1980s told me: “It was a machine for discovering how flexible your spine was. If it wasn’t flexible, you didn’t do well in the final classification.”

The Covid crisis offers evidence both for and against the ENA effect. France has got many things wrong during the last year, partly because its administrative culture is so ponderous and averse to risk. And yet, on the other hand, its state-funded economic support programme has been exemplary and much copied (including by Britain). That was shaped by Macron (ENA 2002-4), his then Prime Minister Edouard Philippe (ENA 1995-7) and most of all by his finance minister, Bruno Le Maire (ENA 1996-8).

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Even so, ENA remains shorthand for the gulf between a struggling rural and inner suburban France and the administrative, political classes who are viewed as too abstract and too arrogant to grasp the harsh realities of daily life. Macron’s decision to suppress ENA from June and replace it with another smaller college, the Institut du service public or ISP, therefore made political sense.

Stymied by the pandemic, it is the only high-profile reform he can realistically offer before the presidential election next spring. Not that it hasn’t been a long time coming; Macron promised the death of ENA during the Gilets Jaunes’s rural and suburban revolt against the elite in 2018-9. But doing it now fits in with Macron’s wider campaign to seem less arrogant and aloof, along with his apology for failing to grasp sooner the need for a rapid roll-out of Covid vaccines. Destroying ENA in its present form also fits the original Macroniste offer and vision from 2017 of making France a land of opportunity — a can-do, start-up country where top jobs in government are open to clever young people from forgotten rural France and the struggling, multi-racial banlieues.

Though hardly reported, Macron has made other advances in that direction in recent months. Two policies have been introduced to fight social and racial discrimination and allow capable young people from rural or suburban backgrounds to climb the ladder more rapidly in state jobs. In other words, the suppression of ENA will be deployed in Macron’s election campaign next spring as a way of saying: “I have started to open up and change France for the better. The pandemic got in the way — so give me more time to complete the job.”

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In truth, however, abolishing ENA is more like a burial than a murder. The school has ceased in recent years to be the ultimate pinnacle of ambition for hyper-clever, young 20-somethings in France. “ENA was once the place you had to go to prove yourself and to be sure of success. No more,” one 2016 graduate told me. “Young people now strive to go to the HEC (the top French business school) or Polytechnique (the elite engineering college). They used to ‘do ENA’ afterwards. Now they want to go to McKinsey or to Silicon Valley and then come back to France to start their own business.”

Another recent student said that he had learned since graduating that ENA no longer has the same mystique within the French political and administrative system. Ministries, he said, were turning to the big consultancy firms, such as McKinsey, to make the strategic decisions that énarques once made. “Macron’s decision fits this pattern, I fear. It’s part of a trend that’s been going on for several years to downgrade the importance of the senior French administration, to move away from a specifically French approach to French problems and become more international. In the long run, I think that’s something France will regret.”

Is it still the case that, as I was told, you “learn nothing at ENA”?

“That’s certainly true of the 18 months you spend within the walls of ENA itself in Strasbourg, yes,” said my first source. “In the preparatory courses, you learn things. In the two six-month placements in France and abroad, you learn a great deal. But once you’re in Strasbourg, you are incessantly tested and, I would say, taught only that to succeed you must conform.”

The former student, who asked not to be named, was an atypical énarque, the only one in his year who came from a working-class family. “ENA was my dream from the age of 16,” he said. “It was the way I thought I could succeed in life. When I got there, I detested the place. Why? Because the whole ENA approach is detestable.”

After working for several years in government, he left to start his own business. My other informant still works in government but has started to build a political career for himself in the provinces because, he says, “being an énarque no longer helps you so much as all that”.

And so Macron’s decision is not the revolution that he claims — it is more like a recognition of changes that are already happening. Its replacement’s college will be housed in the same building and will have many of the same teachers. Perhaps the most obvious difference is that there will be only 40 students, not 80; hardly a sign that it will be more open.

How they will be selected is still unclear, possibly by high achievement in relation to their social background, rather than just by competitive exam. This approach has already been tried with some success at “Science-Po”, France’s “political university” which sends many of its graduates to ENA. The numbered classification will remain but the top 15 graduates will no longer enter the praetorian ranks of the state service directly. They will have to prove themselves in more lowly work for five years first.

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But will replacing the ENA alone help France to become the land of opportunity that Macron promises? Hardly. France has a baffling system of “first and second divisions” in higher education which will remain largely intact. State university courses, medicine and law apart, are inexpensive, easy to reach but extremely variable in quality. And clever students from well-off families aspire instead to go to a separate archipelago of state-run Grandes Ecoles, like Polytechnique, or to private, fee-paying business schools, like HEC. To reach them, two years of preparatory classes are needed.

Replacing ENA might remove the topmost pinnacle of the mountain. But for the great majority of French youngsters, the slopes to success will remain as forbiddingly steep as ever.

The term was invented 19 years ago by a French academic to describe an alliance between radical Islam and the extreme Left. The word has since been hijacked by the French Right  – both the far right and more traditional conservatives — to mock attempts to combat racism or discrimination against France’s 5,000,000 Muslims.

Islamo-gauchisme certainly exists — as it does in Britain and other countries — as a wilful blindness by part of the radical Left to the violent, anti-western, anti-feminist, anti-Semitic teachings of radical Islam. It also exists, more respectably, as a left-wing voting bloc in multi-racial suburbs. Migrants and their descendants have become a kind of substitute “proletariat” since the white working-class shifted to the right and far right.

It further exists, some academics complain, as a dogmatic and intolerant approach to social and political studies, based on a coalition of French and American theories on race, class, gender and post-colonial oppression.

And yet a part of the French Left remains fiercely secular and worried by the advance of radical or “political” forms of Islam — to the point where other left-wingers accuse them of being (another buzz word) “Islamophobic”. In summary, “Islamo-gauchisme” has become so many things that it has lost much of its meaning, except as a term of abuse.

Last month the universities minister, Frédérique Vidal, a mildly left-wing scientist turned politician, ordered an investigation into what she called the “gangrene” of Islamo-leftist ideas in French politics and social science faculties. Her timing was odd. Many people thought that there were far more pressing issues on French campuses — such as how to teach, and feed, students in a time of Covid — and her intervention caused an explosion of anger on the French Left, as well as critical articles in liberal US media. Cue also an accusation by the usually measured Le Monde, that President Emmanuel Macron is “flirting with the far-right.” 

It is a misleading accusation, even unfair. It would be truer to say that Macron has lost control of the political debate surrounding his efforts to contain radical Islam — efforts which have been more ambitious and, in some respects, more successful than any of his predecessors. But politics is about perception. If enough people say that there is a problem — including the mildly left-wing but cautious Le Monde — then there is a problem.

France is just over a year away from a presidential election, which could pair Macron once again with the far-right leader Marine Le Pen in the second-round run-off next May. There is already a drum-beat rising on the French Left that Macron and Le Pen are “just the same” and that left-wing voters will, or should, stay at home in the second round this time, possibly letting Le Pen into the Elysée.

In those circumstances, what, one might ask, is Macron’s electoral interest in angering left-wing voters and chasing a far-right electorate which derides him as a pointy-headed internationalist from the French governing elite?

To confuse the situation further, the latest, much-watched monthly opinion poll by Ifop for Paris Match shows Macron’s support rising on the Left and tumbling on the Right. It appears that French voters know something that Le Monde and the New York Times don’t know.

First some context. The “Islamo-gauchiste” argument rages mostly in the Paris political-media world.  It has had little impact so far in wider France. The same is not true of the larger debate on radical Islam and the secular French state — a debate which Macron chose, rather courageously, to re-open in a speech in the western Paris suburbs five months ago.

A draft law to “reinforce Republican principles” and curb the advance of radical or extremist Islamic ideology is now going through the French Parliament, with text developed in consultation with a representative section of moderate Muslim leaders. It is intended, inter alia, to prevent the spread and foreign financing of violent and intolerant mutations of Islam. It should help the great bulk of law-abiding French Muslims who wish to practise their faith without being bullied by religious extremists or by the French far-Right.

This was a dangerous box for Macron to open but a box that he could not ignore. There had been over 30 Islamist terrorist attacks in France, big and small, since the slaughter at the Charlie Hebdo offices in 2015. There have been two attacks since he made the speech on 2 October, including the beheading two weeks later of a history teacher who had invited his class of 14- year-olds to consider the rights and wrongs of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed.

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On security, race and Islamism, Macron is no revolutionary. He is a French secular traditionalist, sharing neither the identitarian racial politics of the hard right nor the identitarian anti-racist, anti-authoritarian politics of the new or young Left.

He has, however, allowed some of the more right-leaning members of his government — and notably the ambitious, young interior minister, Gérald Darmanin — to stray towards what sounds, or can be made to sound, like a much harder-right-wing viewpoint.

Long before the “islamo-gauchiste” controversy exploded, Macron, Darmanin and the new law on “Republican principles” were being falsely criticised by the French Left and by liberal US commentators as an attack on Islam, not Islamism. Last month Darmanin debated with Le Pen on the proposed law on live prime time TV. The interior minister defended Islam as a “great faith” and eloquently dismissed calls from Le Pen and some centre-right and even Macronist politicians for a ban on the hijab or Muslim headscarf on French streets.

That is now forgotten. All that is recalled of the 70-minute debate is a single word, in a passage towards the end, when Darmanin accused Le Pen of going “soft” on Islamism.  If you watched the entire debate, it was apparent that Darmanin was mocking Le Pen for claiming hypocritically to defend “Islam and all religions” while her party remains virulently Islamophobic (systematically opposing the building of mosques for instance).

Was Darmanin trying to be too clever? Was he trying to appear simultaneously liberal and tougher-than-Le Pen on the Lepennist subject par excellence? Probably. At any rate, his ambiguous remarks were ill-conceived and have done his boss, Macron, damage in the current hysterical ambience on Islam and Islamism in France.

And then up stepped Frédérique Vidal, a brilliant bio-chemist who proved, until now, to be a rather obscure universities minister. She has been accused of starting a McCarthyist witch-hunt into Left-leaning and foreign (i.e. American) ideas on not just “islamo-gauchisme” but all gender and race theory — “woke” ideas, as Anglophones call them.

Ms Vidal says this is not a witch-hunt but a fact-finding mission. The Elysée criticised her comments — but then did nothing, and Le Monde has since carried several multi-signature articles from French academics and politicians, either defending the minister or demanding her head.

Some of the academics reject all suggestion that “islamo-gauchisme” exists. Others — including one of the most respected French Islamic scholars, Giles Kepel and the philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff, the man who invented the term in 2002 — say that the phenomenon exists but the word has become valueless.

In an article in Le Monde, Kepel, Taguieff and a score of other academics claimed that it was now difficult to obtain research work or speaking time at French universities if you challenge the dominant academic viewpoint on race, gender and post-colonial theories.

As the inventor of the word “islamo-gauchisme”, Mr Taguieff  is worth listing to. Everyone in French politics or academia, he says, now risks being labelled as an “islamophobe” or an “islamo-gauchiste”.

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“This opposition is falsely simple,” he wrote last October. “Very many French people, both on the Right and the Left, see Islamism in all its forms as a great threat to our national unity. Are they all Islamophobes? This is a confusion deliberately fostered by the Islamists themselves.”

Taguieff also dismises crisply one of the objections, raised by American critics, to the term “islamo-gauchisme”: that it recycles the far-Right and Nazi term “Judeo-Bolshevik” used in the 1920s and 1930s.

“That term was a means of alleging that Bolshevism was a Jewish phenomenon and that all Bolsheviks were Jews,” Taguieff said. “It is absurd to suggest that the term Islamo-gauchisme means all leftists are Muslims and that left-wing politics are a Muslim phenomenon.”

One thing the “islamo-gauchisme”  row proves is that Macron was wrong in 2017 when he claimed that he had made the Right-Left opposition obsolete. Four years later, France — media and political France at any rate — still mostly  thinks in Right-Left terms (even if they are re-branded as Islamophobic v Islamo-gauchist). Even Macron’s own centrist party, La République en Marche divides on this issue roughly according to whether they are ex-Left or ex-Right.

The whole debate may seem to be harmless to some senior Macron senior supporters from the centre-Right — even potentially a vote-gainer. That’s a dangerous argument.

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By Liam Duffy

The election will be decided by Covid and by the economy more than Islamism or Islamo-gauchisme. But Macron cannot afford to be branded as hard right (whatever the recent polls show); he needs to restate the balanced approach he took in his speech on 2 October, which also promised action to end the systematic marginalisation of racial and religious minorities in France. “Typical Macron”, his critics said at the time: lots of en même temps — on the one hand, on the other hand.

That’s unfair. In his approach to Islamism, Marcon has (or once had) a reasonable tale to tell. His non-ideological, pragmatic approach has gone much further than the ideologically-constrained attempts of previous governments of Right or Left. His law on Republican values is going through Parliament, and so are three initiatives to boost the economy of the banlieue and to curb discrimination — distinctly non-Lepennist actions which are scarcely mentioned by either French or American left-wing commentators.

Far from a deliberate flirtation with the far-Right, as Le Monde suggests, the muddled debate on Islamism is more a symptom of a new Macronist tendency to drift, a failing also seen with his approach to Covid. A young president who promised to go beyond Left and Right instead heads into his re-election campaign going nowhere.

In 21^st century France, Bonaparte is everywhere. And nowhere.

The Napoleonic Code of 1804 remains the basis of French law (and that of several other European and Latin American countries). He created the baccaulaureat, the départements, the prefects, investigating magistrates, lycées, the Banque de France, the légion d’honneur.

And, yet, there are no public buildings or institutions named after him. His body lies in Les Invalides, but there is no statue of him anywhere on the streets of Paris or any other large French city except, for some reason, Rouen.

So, as the 200^th anniversary of Napoleon’s death approaches, President Macron (whose own brusque rise to power before the age of 40 has been described as Napoleonic) is faced with something of a dilemma. Should France commemorate the Emperor on 5 May? And if so, how? The President has already delayed making an announcement several times.

Napoleon is a problematic figure. Currently, there is a strong campaign running to deny him a bicentenary celebration because he re-instated slavery in the French West Indies in 1802 (quite apart from his various other acts of racial discrimination).

It is a valid criticism and is one of the greatest stains on a pretty disreputable record. But France’s ambivalence about Napoleon goes back much further than these voguish protests might suggest.

True, the Emperor inevitably tops French historical polls of the “Greatest Frenchman or woman”, and popular media dwells on the glorious or visionary parts of the Napoleonic story. But “official France” and French politicians of all stripes have long questioned the legacy and legend of this man whose insatiable ambition killed millions of people. Former president Jacques Chirac detested him, and in 2005 refused any state celebration of the 200^th anniversary of Austerlitz, the emperor’s greatest military victory.

So how should we remember Napoleone di Buonaparte?

Was the obscure Corsican of Italian extraction who became emperor of France and briefly master of Europe the father of modern times? Or was he an old-fashioned despot? Was he a genius, a charlatan, a monster and a butcher? Or a man of peace and a pan-European idealist?

Did he, by accident or design, shape the world we live in? Or was he the man who buried two centuries of French dominance at Waterloo while “modern times” were forged in the factories of the English Midlands and spun in the mills of Lancashire?

Scores of private initiatives — exhibitions and books and documentary films — to mark the bicentenary are already under way. The most spectacular (Covid restrictions permitting) will be a €5 million Napoleonic grand spectacle or “living biopic” at an exhibition hall near Charles de Gaulle airport from 14 April. To prevent the hall’s many staff of French West Indian origin from boycotting the event, the organisers guaranteed that the spectacle would include Bonaparte’s decision to rescind the Revolution’s emancipation of slaves.

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Meanwhile, Macron’s decision on the scope of French state observance of the bicentenary has been affected by the coronavirus epidemic. There are obviously limits as to what is possible, but Macron does not share Chirac’s distaste for Napoleon, and is convinced that he, and the French state, must “do something”.

Elysée officials hint that the President is leaning towards a speech or colloquy which will attempt to re-examine Napoleon’s legacy without celebrating or denigrating him. “Classic Macron”, some say: “Centrist history.” Not so, retort Elysée officials. The President is no statue-toppler; nor is he a flag-waver. “He likes to face up to history and he is not afraid of complexity.”

A state-sponsored opportunity to look afresh at Napoleonic facts and myths might be an excellent thing and not just for the French. The Brexiting British, also, might learn a great deal from revisiting the received wisdoms of 1799-1815. Napoleon was said to have been obsessed by Britain, and two centuries later, Britain remains obsessed by Napoleon. The British Library catalogue lists 13,000 works on the Emperor — from the laudatory to the slanderous.

So with that in mind, here is a modest proposal for Macron — some briefing notes for his “complex” Napoleonic speech. I can’t imagine the President will let the occasion pass without taking the podium himself.

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Europe is waiting for its Napoleon

By Peter Franklin

In one respect at least, Napoleon was a very modern figure — rather chillingly modern. He was one of the first great figures in world history to understand the importance of spin.

A man without wealth, or even a nationality, he reinvented himself several times before he became Emperor at the age of 35. He was obsessed with the way others saw him and how history would portray him.

As early as 1796, when he was an obscure 27-year-old general, Napoleon created two newspapers that glorified and exaggerated his exploits in Italy. (“Bonaparte flies like lightning and strikes like thunder…He knows that he is one of those men whose capacity is limited only by his own willpower… an immense genius.”)

He employed teams of writers and historians to laud his military and political expertise after seizing power by coup in 1799. Later, exiled in Saint Helena, he dictated a sprawling memoir of his life to the Comte de Las Cases, which remains to this day the principal source for the view that Napoleon was a misunderstood man of vision and peace — and a great “European”.

While he was a great opportunist, his motives were not purely selfish — not at the beginning at least. He convinced himself that he was the only man capable of rescuing the legacy of the Revolution from the murderous chaos of the 1790s. He believed in egality and democracy, as principles to be fought for, even though he imposed himself as consul, then emperor, and installed his feckless relations on the thrones of Italy, Spain, Germany and Holland.

The administrative structure created in Napoleon’s first four or five years in power has survived for more than two centuries (and counting). Though many of his institutions or texts had already been discussed or half-completed, he had the vision and the willpower (and simply the power) to apply them.

As Thierry Lentz, prolific Napoleonic historian, says: “He pulled together a great synthesis, by merging old institutions with the national ideals born from the Revolution… In that respect, Napoleon could have died in 1804 [after the Code was published] and his legacy was already assured.”

The American historian Robert B. Holtman describes the Napoleonic Code as one of a handful of documents which changed the world. It stands, according to Holtman, alongside Magna Carta and the founding texts of the United States, as a step-change towards the rule of law and respect for property and individual rights. It still provides the basis for the law of many European and Latin American countries.

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Wherever he went — Italy, Germany, the Low Countries, less so in Spain — he brought his code and hastened the end of feudalism. By doing so, he laid the foundations for modern economics and politics.

“It is no accident that the bourgeoisie was most attached and the nobility most hostile to his regime,” Holtman wrote.

Hence the frequent view, expressed not just by French historians, that Napoleon may have been a brute but he was the brute who helped to found Modern Times. Other stubborn historians, not all of them British, suggest that Modernity was born not at Austerlitz but in industrial Bolton and Birmingham. In truth, the two interpretations aren’t mutually exclusive.

Then there is the suggestion — first suggested by Napoleon himself over a glass of wine, and possibly arsenic, at the end of his life in Saint Helena — that the emperor was the first “European”; that his intention, all along, had been to create a Europe without borders and without “civil wars”. To do that, he had to defeat Perfidious Albion by imposing a single European market — “the continental system” – from which the incorrigible and un-European British would be excluded.

This theory may be attractive to French romantics, and British eurosceptics, but it makes little sense. Indeed, Napoleon was, at various points, hopeful that he could do a deal with “les Anglais”. The European dream was a justification, invented later, in the long, boring hours of imprisonment in Longwood House on Saint Helena.

He did have a chance to create a loose European political system but botched it. After Austerlitz, Napoleon was advised by his foreign minister, Talleyrand, to treat the Austrians magnanimously, encouraging a kind of exhausted peace in Europe in which France would be the dominant but not the overwhelming, imperial power.

The British, without a serious army, would be powerless to intervene. Instead, Napoleon imposed humiliating conditions on Austria, consolidated his control of Italy and broke up what remained of the Holy Roman Empire. In doing so he awakened national hatreds which brought about his downfall, nine — and again 10 — years later. He also, accidentally, helped to create the antagonistic, European nation-states which dominated the next 150 years and generated two world wars.

Napoleon lost his final battle, in June 1815, to a European army, led by an Irish-born general, with troops from Britain, Ireland, Germany, the Netherlands and what later became Belgium. Britain fought Napoleon partly as the logical continuation of a 200 years war to prevent domination by France, the greatest continental power. But Britain also fought to maintain untrammelled access for British goods to the continental market.

After 1815, the restored French royalty and the British government copied Napoleon’s strategy in one respect. They employed pamphleteers and historians — sometimes the same historians previously paid by Napoleon — to reverse the imperial propaganda.

L’Empéreur was ferociously belittled as the upstart “Bonaparte”: cowardly, superstitious, irreligious, sadistic, sexually depraved, incestuous, impotent, a man who cheated at chess, insane and small (even though he was in fact around five feet seven inches tall, which was above average for the period).

It was precisely because he was a man without pedigree who achieved extraordinary things, that the degenerate royalties who ran the Continent, and the arrogant aristocracy and squierarchy who ran Britain, were determined to deflate him.

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To them, meritocracy was the most terrifying of all the ideas thrown up by the French Revolution and its Napoleonic aftermath. Napoleon must not only be beaten; he must be exorcised (or in modern jargon “cancelled”). No Napoleonic myth must be allowed to survive and thrive.

Two centuries, 80,000 books and 100 movies later, it is clear who won that battle.

It is, therefore, much too late to cancel or de-platform Napoleon. It has been tried before.

What will Macron do? It remains to be seen. The President is right, though, to contemplate “something complex”. Napoleon did many wicked things; they should be remembered in May. He also achieved many things. These should also be remembered. History is rarely as clear-cut as the present might like to paint it. This bicentenary could be an opportunity to contemplate the tangled roots of our common European past. And an attempt to understand our present.

A couple of days earlier, Macron saw his most likely rival in next year’s election, the far-right leader Marine le Pen, creep to within 4 points of him (52 to 48%) in voting intentions in the two-candidate second-round in May next year.

Those polling figures need to be taken with a pinch of salt. Other opinion surveys are far more favourable to the French president. Long-distance election forecasts are as hazardous as long-range weather forecasts. Le Pen has her own problems.

All the same, the poll gave Macron a jolting reminder of the chain of unfortunate events which could confront him in the final full year of his mandate: a lingering or worsening pandemic; a stuttering French vaccination programme; and a darkly negative, even angry swing in popular opinion. Small wonder if the President’s mood has been a little unpredictable.

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Speaking to a group of foreign correspondents at the Elysée Palace last Friday, Macron barged, Trump-like, into a blazing quarrel over reduced Covid vaccine supplies to the EU from the British-Swedish pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca. He suggested that there was “growing evidence” that AZ’s cheap-and-easy-to-use product was “quasi-ineffective” for people over the age of 65 and possibly for people over 60.

No such evidence exists. There is a shortage of formal evidence that the AZ-Oxford vaccine works on the over-65’s. There is no evidence that it does not work at all.

This was an unusual Macron mistake (if it was a mistake). He is verbose but he is usually careful with the facts. France is already the most vaccine-sceptic country in the world. Why would a French president cast doubt on a vaccine which will be one of three available to France in the next, critical months?

A few hours later, Macron chaired what may turn out to be the single most important meeting of his presidency. The outcome was decided by a presidential hunch which flew in the face of scientific advice.

A meeting of the Health Defence Council last Friday afternoon was expected to place France into a third Covid lockdown. The chief medical adviser and health minister had warned Macron privately (and other experts had warned him publicly) that the faster-moving “British variant” of Covid was starting to spread rapidly in France.

France was already suffering 20,000 new cases and 400 deaths a day — bad enough but less than most of its neighbours. The experts warned that, without a lockdown, the new variant would tip France into the kind of 1,000 deaths-a-day “epidemic-within-the-epidemic” suffered by Britain since Christmas.

Macron decided against the lockdown. He had, according to Elysée sources, prepared for the meeting by studying reams of data himself. He looked at not just the slowly rising cases but the “incidence rate” (which was stable) and reports on virus traces in waste water in the Paris sewers (falling).

In any case, the French — and especially the young French — were not in the mood for a third lockdown, Macron judged. Unless threatening figures became deadly facts, the French would resist another confinement. There would be widespread disobedience. Restaurants all over the country were already defying the partial lockdown rules — some secretly, others openly.

If there were another lockdown, the mental health problems of isolated students — something Macron had promised to address only a few days earlier — would become desperate. Large union demonstrations against Covid-related job losses are already threatened in March.

It was time, Macron decided, to gamble and defy the European trend towards third lockdowns. France could become “the country which didn’t have to lock down” when others did. “If we succeed, we will have saved ‘French exceptionalism’,” one senior Elysée official told the newspaper Le Figaro.

Instead of a new confinement, Macron decided to reinforce — or rather enforce properly for the first time — an existing 6pm to 6am curfew. All non-imperative travel from outside the EU would cease. Large non-food department stores and shopping centres would close. If the pandemic worsened, France could still lock down in the next couple of weeks.

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There is something a little worrying about this account of such a vital meeting. The decision to avoid a lockdown was taken partly for good reasons (to spare the country’s shredded nerves) but also for dubious ones (to create a positive narrative that France could still succeed where others failed). The gravitational field of the presidential elections next April and May is, it appears, beginning to skew Macron’s personal and political compass.

Until now the President has prided himself on taking early and firm decisions on lockdowns (a first from mid-March to May and a second from late-October to mid-December). He boasted that these prompt decisions saved lives, compared to the delayed lockdown in Britain in March and the weak and poorly-enforced partial lockdown in Germany last autumn.

This time he decided to delay, partly for political reasons. The choice is all the stranger because Macron and his government have given so little attention to another potentially positive “national narrative” — France’s vaccine roll-out. After a glacial start (400 jabs in 4 days), the French programme took off reasonably well in January. France managed 1,486,493 vaccinations by the end of the month including 45,468 second injections. This was almost 50% ahead of the modest government target of 1,000,000 jabs.

Having caught up a little, France looks likely to fall off the pace again this month and drop behind Germany and Italy — never mind the extraordinary figures achieved by Britain. The government’s promise of a rapid acceleration in February (4,000,000 injections) has been mysteriously scaled back. The official plan is for 1,400,000 second jabs and 1,000,000 first time injections.

Yes, you say, but isn’t that the fault of the EU’s slow vaccine supply programme, which has been disrupted by production problems at the Pfizer and AstraZeneca factories (and also problems with the third supplier, Moderna)?

No, it isn’t. By the end of January France had received 2,600,000 (mostly Pfizer) jabs. It had used only 1,490,000 of them. It has 1,110,000 doses unused, in stock or unaccounted for.

The difficulties with supplies from Pfizer and AstraZeneca have now eased. France should receive a little less than 5,000,000 doses in February, adding to the 1,000,000 in stock. But France is planning only 2,400,000 injections this month.

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Officially, the health ministry blames the shortfall on supplies from Big Pharma. Unofficially, France teems with stories of poor logistics, unambitious management and shortages of staff and needles. Professionals at the sharp end (literally) blame a cumbersome health service administration. Enthusiasm is sometimes lacking at all levels because staff (including 76% of care home workers, according to one survey) are infected by the widespread national allergy to vaccines.

Part of the French problem is legitimate. Britain’s 12-week delay between first and second injections has hugely boosted the UK headline figure for first jabs. France, like other EU governments, has dismissed that long gap as too risky. France gives the second jab after 28 days — and therefore needs to keep some doses back to fulfil that pledge.

In his meeting with foreign correspondents, Macron attacked Britain’s long delay between vaccine shots as “not very serious” and even dishonest. “We are lying to people when we tell them they’ve been vaccinated by getting one injection of a vaccine that consists of two injections,” Macron said.

He has a point. But the short French delay doesn’t fully explain the slow French roll-out. There were enough doses in France last month — and there will be more than enough this month — for a far more ambitious programme of both first and second jabs.

When the programme got off to a glacial start in late December, Macron made his anger known publicly. The rules were simplified. Urgency became briefly evident. Since then, urgency has abated but the President said little until last night.

He told TF1 TV news that France would “offer” a vaccine to all adults who wanted one before the end of the summer. He denied that that French vaccine programme was falling behind schedule. But his words were chosen carefully. “Offering a vaccine” is not the same as completing the required two injections.

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Until now — despite many complaints and some failures — France’s record on coping with the Covid pandemic has been reasonably good. With the same size of populations, France has had 76,000 deaths, compared to 110,000 in the UK. Generous and early French furlough and economic support schemes — which provide the models for the British ones — helped keep the loss of GDP last year to 8.3% compared to 11.3% in Britain.

On vaccines, the UK is oceans ahead. Hence, I suspect Macron’s grumpy and inaccurate comments on the failings of the AZ vaccine last Friday. The president has been irked by Britain’s success with vaccines when he feels (correctly) that France has done better with almost everything else.

The French “failure” also extends to vaccine research. The Pasteur Institute abandoned its attempts to create a Covid vaccine last month. The French pharmaceutical giant Sanofi delayed its roll-out target until the end of this year after mistakes in testing. In both cases, this may have mostly been bad luck, rather than bad science. The rush to create Covid vaccines in months instead of years has created a global lottery of inspired versus less inspired guesses.

All the same, the French failures have been embarrassing for a President who argues that France and the EU must reconquer “strategic and economic sovereignty” from the United States and China. By comparison, the British government and British media have been able to vaunt the success of “our” vaccine. (“Ours” meaning that it was invented by an international team of scientists in Oxford and multiplied industrially by a British-Swedish company with a French boss).

So, at the meeting with foreign journalists, Macron was already in narrative-building mode. He wanted to play down and denigrate the British narrative (“fast vaccines trump all”). He wanted to prepare the ground for a “French narrative”, including the lockdown decision or “non-decision” that he took a few hours later.

The President evidently hopes to be able to sell in the election campaign in spring next year a three-part French success story. The three elements would be: resisting a third lockdown; making a plodding success of a “careful” and “honest” vax programme; and opening up French lives and the French economy by the autumn (when the elections will be six months away).

He could yet succeed.

Take Macron’s promise to  vaccinate  all adults, (52,000,000 people) by the end of August. Many adults will refuse. The willingness of the French to roll up their shirt sleeves is increasing but has reached only 56% (the equivalent of 29,000,000 adults).

Two jabs for all willing adults might require 58,000,000 injections or 276,000 a day. The planned jab rate in February is less than 100,000 a day.

Hope remains, however. France’s vast network of local pharmacies will be allowed to vaccinate people from later this month once — irony alert — the easy-to-store AstraZeneca vaccine becomes available. As AZ supplies increase in April and May, the French pharmacies say they will be able to vaccinate up to 500,000 a day. But that would require a massive effort by the French government to get the vaccines out to them.

Another grimmer narrative is also possible.

What if  Macron’s gamble last Friday fails? France is forced into lock down later this month. The vaccine programme remains laborious. Cases and deaths explode just as they begin to fall elsewhere.

Worse, the UK, for all its earlier Covid failures and crippling self-imposed Brexit trade barriers, succeeds while France fails. Macron’s presidential rivals (including Ms Le Pen) are presented with a counter narrative. Britain surfs on its rapid vaccine campaign to an early retreat of the pandemic; British lives and businesses open up; deaths in Britain fall. France’s do not. Macron’s election chances evaporate (not necessarily to Ms Le Pen’s ultimate gain).

It is small wonder that the President is in a tetchy mood.