This is a novel that no publisher in the world would have accepted.
An incumbent president, François Hollande, who, for the first time in modern French history, decides not to seek reelection…
The conservative big wigs who pick each other off, opening the field for a candidate, François Fillon, whom everyone believes to be above reproach … until his past catches up with him …
The governing Socialists who, after sucker-punching their prime minister, Manuel Valls, split between an apparatchik, Benoît Hamon, who really earns his single-digit finish in the first round, and a rival, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who trick-or-treats as a revolutionary, worships dictators and his own hologram, but stumbles on the threshold of the second round …
The far-right candidate, Marine Le Pen, who commits public suicide at the end of a debate in which, like a character in a farce, she drops the mask of respectability that her handlers had made her wear and, after an embarrassing rhetorical strip-tease, grimaces, “This is my real face, the face of a die-hard dissident party” …
Right up to the last minute, when the top aide to the democratic candidate, Emmanuel Macron, in a fatal tweet, confirms the electronic hold-up by the hackers of the fascist-Stalinist international, who have revealed that members of the candidate’s party had been engaged in skullduggery such as paying their employees, sending e-mails to reserve tables at restaurants, and exchanging files for each other to read …
And, at the end of this series of improbable twists and turns unimaginable by the most imaginative of screenwriters, at the moment of truth in a drama that has stretched to a new limit the “suspension of disbelief” that Coleridge saw as the principle of the French novel—at 8:00 pm on Sunday, May 7, a young man practically unknown a year ago accedes to the presidency of France.
°°°°
Still to be written, of course, is the detailed history of this campaign both disastrous and magnificent, a campaign senseless and miraculous, a campaign in which it so often seemed that the gods whom we had been expecting to descend from the stage loft had got lost somewhere between Moscow, Washington, and the Le Pen compound in St. Cloud.
But well before that history is written France’s new president will have to confront the challenges posed by this incalculable concatenation of circumstances. He will have to get things done while convincing us that he can get things done. He will have to keep in mind that rejection of Le Pen is not the same as endorsement of his own program. From the first hours of his term, he will have to apply and reapply himself to the task of truth and unity that, as a perceptive reader of Paul Ricoeur, he made the focus of his campaign. While at it, he will have to resist those of his supporters who, in the heady glow of victory, would have him be both demiurge and thaumaturge: like King Canute, who, dismayed by the flatterers and dreamers who imagined him to be not just master of himself but also of the universe and wishing to remind them that his powers were human, fallible, and humble, commanded the waves not to strike his throne and then, setting his throne on the beach, demonstrated the fragility of his orders and his empire, Emmanuel Macron will have to celebrate victory modestly and, as he did with the workers at the Whirlpool plant in northern France, bring the work of politics back to its right and reasonable proportions. In a word, he will have to remember not to forget that even though his startling introduction to the political world was no bed of roses, the path before him will be thorny.
But we are not yet at that point.
For the time being, I have only one wish: to greet a man who, with a throw of the dice, abolished chance and the hazards of the road before him to become the world’s youngest president.
°°°
Not that youth has ever been a convincing argument on its own.
Like the rest of us, I am aware of the warning from Ecclesiastes to the country whose king is a child.
But I also know, as Machiavelli knew, that there is in the enthusiasm of youth, in its bold drive, in its furia, its virtù, in its desire, something to which fate may cede more readily. Was that not the case with Hoche and Saint-Just? With Bonaparte the first? With Bonaparte part deux (until this evening the youngest president in the history of France)? With Benazir Bhutto, Joan of Arc, Jack Kennedy, Jacques Decour, and Theodore Roosevelt?
And I know that there are too many forms of conservatism in this country, too many blockages and thromboses; I know that too many fanatics on both sides of the spectrum swore as one, before Mr. Macron’s election, to spurn the banker who would be president and to fling him from the Tarpeian Rock; I know that there are too many populists on the left (notably the bitter Mr. Mélanchon) and on the right (the pathetic Mr. Dupont-Aignan skittering away from the cameras Friday night after leaving the cathedral in Reims, where France’s kings were crowned), who, under a fig leaf of scorn for finance, betray the true spirit of France; I know that the sad passions slumbering in those forms are so virulent that it has become nearly impossible for them to make room for the shared ideas that are the social bonds of republican democracy; and I know that there is, in the enthusiasm of today’s winner, in his joy, in his youthful optimism (an optimism at once measured, fervent, and didactic), something that responds to the malaise of French civilization.
It is over, the seemingly interminable moment between two electoral rounds, a moment in which France seemed to waver.
Now begins the open combat between those who believe that freedom lives and those who have already buried it.
Both sides have shown their hands.
Good luck, Emmanuel Macron.
Translated by Steven B. Kennedy
