Book. Enter the « moment Macron » like a “historical revealer” of the state of France. This is the ambition ofEmmanuel Macron at the wrong timea book with two voices: that of the writer and publisher Olivier Mongin, director of the journal Esprit from 1989 to 2012, also co-director of the journal All urban from 2012 to 2021; and that of the essayist and politician Lucile Schmid.
Emmanuel Macron is a fiery and unexpected character, analyze the two authors. Coming out of the shadows without too much warning after having served François Hollande for a time, the enarque and former banker with an atypical career presented himself as a man of rupture, a revolutionary. Stirring up traditional political life, putting it back in motion, transcending the old right-left divide, moving a society stiffened by its stories and myths: all of the objectives that the former Minister of the Economy displayed in 2017. He then wanted to bring in “the old French world” in the ” new world “ economics and geopolitics.
More, “out of time”, even ” against a current “, do they think. Setback between the reforms he had planned and the social expectations of a fractured French society. Setback between his solitary and vertical practice of power and the need for democratic renewal. Setback between the progressive ambitions of the young president in a Europe brought up to date, and his migration and security policy.
“He did not see the backlash coming, he laid bare a France which was on its guard, to the point of overheating the country, disturbing it, annoying it, and even hurting it by his intransigence as much as by his clumsiness”, argue the essayists. The crisis of the “yellow vests” illustrates this only too well.
turbulent history
But Emmanuel Macron is also caught up in time by history, a tumultuous history: the pandemic, the redoubled climate crisis, the migratory negotiations, the attacks of the “democracies” and, it should be added, the return of the war to Europe, which occurred shortly after the writing of the book.
Without limiting itself to cliches and binary oppositions of “for or against Emmanuel Macron”, the essay more generally apprehends his five-year term as a symptom, that of a political world born in the aftermath of the Second World War, which is running out of steam and struggling to sketch out a vision for France. The last five years have crystallized and unveiled the tensions, without however inaugurating a new political cycle. We are far from “the messianic man of a new hexagonal world”.
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