Cherchez la femme. A woman is almost always the cause of trouble in French mysteries, and there is no bigger French mystery right now than why Emmanuel Macron is courting a popular uprising.
All over France, people have been on strike and marching in the streets to protest their president’s use of a constitutional loophole to bypass Parliament and force pension reform into law. It isn’t just that he raised the retirement age from 62 to 64, insisting that the country will otherwise soon be bankrupted by soaring pension costs. It’s that he did so in such a high-handed, L’État, c’est moi manner.
After a wild spree of marches, strikes, and mountains of uncollected garbage in the streets, this week huge crowds of people again marched in protest all across the country. For now, riots and street violence appear to be ebbing, and, with them, the specter of a May ’68–style insurrection. Yet voters’ outrage is still raw.
It isn’t just that he raised the retirement age from 62 to 64, it’s that he did so in such a high-handed, L’État, c’est moi manner.
What did they expect?
This is the man who as a teenager defied his parents, his friends, and le tout Amiens to be with his lover Brigitte, his married teacher 24 years his senior and the mother of three. It all may sound like a Stendhal novel, but it takes a powerful amount of confidence and inflexibility to pull that off, particularly because the young Macron was also hell-bent on the most conventional, prestigious career France can offer.
In French, “haut fonctionnaire” doesn’t mean a high-functioning person—it’s what they call the ambitious elites who graduate from highly selective schools such as the one Macron attended, the École Nationale d’ Administration, and enter government as a stepping stone to politics.
This is the man who as a teenager defied his parents, his friends, and le tout Amiens to be with his lover Brigitte, his married teacher 24 years his senior.
Macron did all that while living with Brigitte, who left her husband and followed him to Paris. They married in 2007, when he was 29 and she was 54. His career soared, and so did his self-esteem. By the time he was named minister of economics, in 2014, Macron was already well accustomed to getting his way, against all odds.
Macron’s first election, in 2017, was a bit of a fluke: the center-right favorite, François Fillon, conceded defeat after the first round of voting, cut down by a financial scandal. (It’s always a woman: “Penelopegate,” as it is known, blew up when it was revealed that his nonworking wife, Penelope, was on his parliamentary payroll.) Macron won, mostly because he wasn’t too far left nor was he Marine Le Pen, the ultra-nationalist. He seemed to view his victory as his earned destiny.
Macron’s second election, in 2022, was a lot closer, and he lost his majority in Parliament, but not, evidently, his colossal nerve. Massive street protests in Israel over the past three months forced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, not normally a pushover, to postpone his scheme to make the judiciary subordinate to the Knesset. Everyone in France is in knots trying to explain why Macron is so imperiously pushing the country to the brink.
His own aides, quoted in Le Monde without attribution, say they are “stupefied” by his attitude. Even people who agree that France has no choice but to curb its social safety net to stay solvent are baffled by Macron’s autocratic manner. Last week at the Comédie-Française, during a performance of a turgid play, Danton’s Death, the audience laughed only once: when Danton complains that Robespierre has imposed “dictatorship,” the audience tittered knowingly.
Brigitte Macron, who early on was considered Macron’s most valued adviser and a softening influence, has stayed out of sight since the pension debate began. It’s hard to imagine that she, a former schoolteacher, would endorse her husband’s uncompromising crusade, but it’s also hard to imagine he listens to anyone besides himself. One aide told Le Monde that he consults advisers “only to find out if he has missed something.”
Everyone in France is in knots trying to explain why Macron is so imperiously pushing the country to the brink.
It’s worth noting that Macron, while reportedly having a good relationship with his adult stepchildren, never had a child of his own. Some childless couples criticize parents for not imposing more discipline on their wayward offspring, certain that they would do better. The French, moreover, are famous for their no-nonsense child-raising skills—there is a whole subgenre of how-to books, like Bringing Up Bébé, that reveal how French parents instill good manners in their young.
Macron treats the French like the children he never had: intractable and in need of firm direction.
He isn’t entirely oblivious to bad reviews, however. While trying to mollify viewers—without making concessions—in a television interview after a weekend of protests, he was well into a sentence about minimum-wage workers when his arm slipped under the table and re-emerged without his luxury watch: a $2,600 Bell & Ross. (If he’d asked his advisers, one of them might have warned him ahead of time about “optics.”)
It is entirely possible that Macron will eventually get his way. While unions are preparing for another general strike and march on April 6, it does seem as if some of the more incendiary confrontations are losing steam. But it also looks more likely that his so-called legacy will not be the modernization of France but its downfall into the hands of a populist, right-wing demagogue. The one predictable thing in this whole mess is the rise of Le Pen, whose popularity keeps growing as Macron’s sinks.
So the only real mystery is whether the key to Macron’s rigidity is cherchez la femme or après moi, le déluge. Probably both.
Alessandra Stanley is a Co-Editor of AIR MAIL