The real President Macron... by those who know him best: 'He is a seducer. And he seduces to get what he wants'

A description of the then economics minister in the government of President François Hollande, at a party for foreign businessmen two years ago – provided by a senior French official and adviser to Macron – is illuminating. As the captains of industry waited, gossiped and picked at the canapés, they were – according to the official – sceptical about the young politician, who was struggling to get modest regulatory reform through the Assemblée Nationale. An opponent in parliament had gone so far as to call him ‘a drip’. 

What happened when Macron walked in, then, was unexpected. ‘He was mesmerising,’ the official told me. ‘They all found themselves drawn to him, like moths to a flame.’

The official knew he was watching a master manipulator at work. One by one, hard-headed dealmakers melted before the the fresh-faced minister who seemed to take such interest in them. ‘He is very clever. But above all, he is a seducer. And he seduces for a purpose, to get what he wants. Argument and authority are one thing, but seduction is the big feature of his politics.’

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that a whole political class has gone weak at the knees for France’s magnetic new President, who only turned 40 on 21 December.

Christophe Castaner, government spokesman, and now head of Macron’s Le République En Marche! (REM), went so far as to suggest there was, ‘une dimension amoureuse’ to their relationship. Such hero worship could hardly be further from the insults and desperate unpopularity that marked François Hollande’s term.

Yet for two decades before Macron became President, the love affair was conducted the other way around. From the moment he left university,  Macron courted a covert world of French politics and power, almost totally unknown to the public.

The truth is, he has been surrounded and mentored from the outset by members of an elite and largely hidden clique who have long dreamt of unleashing a revolution to peel away the bureaucratic stultification that smothers the French economy. His astonishing rise would have been impossible without them. And now that he is in office, his triumph is theirs. ‘We are what we learn to be at the sides of our masters,’ Macron wrote in his autobiography, Revolution. 

On 2 September 1944, eight days after Nazi troops in Paris surrendered, a well-connected journalist and resistant called Georges Bérard-Quélin had an idea. Amid the ruins of the French capital he decided to create a group with the power to shape the destiny of the nation. Its members would be not just politicians, but industrialists, bureaucrats, lawyers.

As long as you were not a communist, political affiliation did not matter. What mattered was that members would represent the country’s elite and have the opportunity to bridge petty but damaging political schisms.  So Le Siècle was born. Its first president was the son of a count whose family owned a château in the Somme. More important, however, Alof  de Louvencourt was an inspecteur des finances  – one of the most influential jobs in French  public life.

Since 1944, almost without exception, all inspecteurs have been members of Le Siècle. When Macron completed his studies at the elite Ecole Nationale d’Administration (ENA) in 2004, he chose to join the Inspection des Finances. And just like the rest, Macron became a member of Le Siècle. 

Among the members to welcome him to Le Siècle’s dinners, held each month in a private club on the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré (just a hop from the presidential palace) was his first boss – Jean-Pierre Jouyet, who recruited Macron into the Inspection.

He is also the archetype of the Macron model – a man who flitted from business to civil service,  to politics and back again. To him, ideology presented no political barrier. His family is on the right and he served right-wing presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy.

He was then chief of staff to the socialist Hollande, also a close friend. It did not matter to the left that he was married into France’s aristocracy – his wife is Brigitte Taittinger, scion of the champagne house. But it was confusing, and in a socially conservative country like France, his fluid identity baffled even his father-in-law. ‘Is my son-in-law left-wing or right?’ said Pierre Taittinger in 2007. 

According to Macron’s biographer, Adam Plowright, Jouyet is ‘one of four or five people essential in Macron’s rise’. Now France’s ambassador in London, the 63-year-old shares Macron’s twinkly eyed charm and enthusiasm, remarking it is ‘very nice’ to be credited with such a prominent role in the new President’s career. 

In an interview in his office overlooking Hyde Park, however, he acknowledges it is also true. ‘I worked with President Macron many times because we have known each other since 2005. When I was in Sarkozy’s government, we often spoke to see what would be the best choice for him, the private or the public sector. I would give him advice and so on. And in 2010, I recommended Hollande to take Macron and he went to the Elysée [to become part of Hollande’s staff].’

Most important to Macron, perhaps, was that Jouyet represented a politics that transcended party lines. ‘On some aspects I can be on the left,’ Jouyet says. ‘On economic and business I’m reformist and pro business, on the right. I am what you might call a French crossbencher. So I was Macroniste before Macron…’

Not that some haven’t aimed for this middle path before. ‘People have tried, only he [Macron] succeeds,’ he adds. Jouyet, who has guided the French President’s career more closely than almost anyone else, is clear on why this is. ‘Macron is very quick. But he also is very empathetic. The Inspection is not exactly the most lighthearted place. But Macron was so dynamic, open, lively, that you were under his charm, rapidly. It was the case for me. Incredible.’

Like so many others, Jouyet finds himself reaching for the language of love. Macron, he says, ‘has a capacity of seduction that is very rare’. Another key figure who fell under his spell was Henry Hermand, a media and supermarket magnate who, though 53 years Macron’s senior, was the best man at his wedding to Brigitte Trogneux in 2007.

Then there was Alain Minc, another politically connected businessman who also passed through the Inspection. (In 2004 Minc asked Macron what he thought he’d be doing in 30 years. Macron replied: ‘I’ll be President.’) Together these figures lamented the failure of France’s post-war political parties to deliver liberal economic policies and stimulate growth.

‘From 1958-1981 we had the right,’ says Sylvie Kauffmann, editorial director of centre-left newspaper Le Monde. ‘Then from 1981 we had the socialists for most of the time. Both failed. And not only was there a failure of ideologies, there was a basic failure in government administration. President after president had to hold together the centre and their party extremes. Macron was witness to this failure. He drank it in.’

Those like Hermand who dreamed of twinning a liberal, deregulated economy with the social politics of the soft left, despaired. Anyone who tried to reform the system was met by crippling union-organised strikes and demonstrations. So they began to think hard about how to break the system and build not a ‘Third Way’ but what they called a ‘deuxième gauche’ – a second left.

‘There have always been those elites, like Jouyet, who worked on both sides,’ says Kauffmann. It is a ‘clique’, adds Plowright, that ‘is very well established in French political life. Technocrats, these shadowy ENA-schooled, clever-clever people behind the scenes have an enormous impact on policy.’ Emmanuel Macron was adopted by that world – and he became its greatest product. 

The key moment came in 2007, when Jouyet recommended his brilliant protégé to a crisis commission set up by new President Nicolas Sarkozy to get the economy moving. It was like Le Siècle boiled down. Some 40 leading lights from the media, business, law, from right and left, tried to rip up the rule book to drive growth. Though chaired by the economic and social theorist Jacques Attali, it was Macron, then only 30, who stood out.

‘He seduced me immediately,’ said Attali of Macron. Naturally.  Sarkozy adopted the Attali Commission’s findings wholesale. Like so many reform agendas before it, however, it was ground down, chewed up and spat out by the system. But two things did emerge: one, an elite, private group of thinkers was capable of delivering a credible reform agenda; two, they had found their silver-tongued champion – Macron. From the ashes of the Attali Commission rose Les Gracques.

Founded in 2007, it was an initially anonymous pressure group. But when its members’ identities became known, it turned out there were many of the usual top intellectuals, civil servants, and businessmen seeking a new fusion politics. People like the writer Erik Orsenna, who with Macron had proved the other star of the Attali Commission, and, of course, Jouyet.  Les Gracques published manifestos calling for ‘an overhaul of the French left’.

It saw itself as a think tank. But some began to see in it a conspiracy. In 2012, François Hollande succeeded Sarkozy to the French presidency. Jouyet, in his deft way, moved from one administration to the other, and brought Macron into the presidential administration. Articles appeared describing them as part of a ‘cabinet noir’ – a secret committee within the Elysée Palace – to prosecute Les Gracques’ agenda. 

There is no doubt that Macron was indeed a leading light of Les Gracques. In 2015, after he had left Hollande’s administration, he gave the keynote speech at its annual conference. There is also no doubt that by that stage he was fêted by a host of France’s most powerful, rich, influential people, from both centre-left and centre-right. His connections – political, and from a brief stint with Rothschild & Co bank, financial – were unrivalled. 

But even those extreme conspiracists who contend that Macron was the figurehead of an elitist plot to place him on the French presidential throne, cannot have expected what followed. Whatever his backing, Macron’s chances, even six months before last May’s election, were minute. Napoleon wanted his generals to be lucky and Emmanuel Macron, himself often credited with a Napoleonic ego, got astonishingly lucky.

A little over a year ago, when he announced his bid for the presidency (on 16 November 2016), the hurdles that stood between him and triumph appeared insurmountable. Then, in a freakish succession of events, every single problematic rival was spectacularly skewered, ruined by scandal or recklessly jettisoned by their own parties.

It was like watching the final act of a Shakespeare tragedy in which the stage is left thick with corpses after a vengeful festival of murder and suicide (François Fillon, Alain Juppé and Hollande among them).

Macron is often portrayed as the master schemer, but in truth he had barely wandered into the footlights before his last credible opponent had plunged a sword into his own breast and wailed: ‘I die!’ Outrageous fortune ensured that two months after declaring his candidacy to public shrugs, Macron had moved from rank outsider to nailed- on favourite.

In true Macron style, however, he turned this dramatic, improbable ascent to his advantage. Now in office, he presents himself as an anti-establishment candidate, a man without baggage, uniquely placed to reconcile right and left  by creating new lines of battle – nationalist against Europhile, protectionist against free-trader.

His is a cultural battle as much as a political one, he says, which is why he self-consciously seeks to bracket himself with those grand figures who have remodelled not just French politics but France itself: Napoleon, de Gaulle, take your pick. He’s not shy.

This style has been given the Olympian nickname ‘Jupiterian’, with all the omnipotence and detachment that implies. But Macron’s message is clear: in a world of punchy extremists, the middle can be muscular, too. Hence his willingness to engage in knuckle-crunching handshakes with Donald Trump or Vladimir Putin.

Never fear, his demeanour suggests, wimps have a champion now. It’s as if James Bond had taken the helm of the Liberal Democrats.  He has no little help in this unlikely challenge from his wife, Brigitte, 64, his former drama teacher who became the love of his life when he was just a schoolboy and she a married woman with three children.

Their unorthodox relationship has not damaged his political fortunes, however. Quite the reverse. The evident affection between the pair proved a winner on the campaign trail. Now in office, she is, his allies think, the President’s secret weapon. ‘He [Macron] has an advantage in his private life,’ says Jouyet. ‘His wife is very popular in France. It’s important.’  It’s also different.

Macron’s two predecessors –  Hollande and Sarkozy – both saw their relationships collapse while in office. And while the age gap means it’s tempting to see in Brigitte a mothering, manipulative figure, the reverse seems true. Determinedly sexy, she remains the foundation on which he expresses his precocious ambition. But she is not the source of that ambition. He is. 

If his marriage is unusual, critics say that Macron’s politics are anything but, that he is far from an anti-establishment candidate. From left and far-right he is assailed as the ‘president des riches’, the frontman for a cabal of unvarnished capitalists who successfully unleashed a secret scheme to turn France into an American-style economy, to their profit and the workers’ loss.

His lavish 40th birthday party in a château in the Loire did little to dispel that aura.  Yet Macron has not been captured. Instead, ever the seducer, he used those who backed him. He admits as much in Revolution, suggesting he used his insider’s knowledge and connections to blow up the establishment, like a sleeper agent.

‘I do not believe our country must submit to elitist conformity... I am convinced that maintaining true independence from the system, while at the same time being intimately familiar with how laws are made and the process of public decision-making, is a real strength. That is what spurs me on...’

Those who have been charmed by him do not demur. ‘He owes nothing to anybody except to the French people who voted for him,’ said Pierre Buhler, whom Macron appointed to run the Institut Français last August. 

‘Like Napoleon, he came up through the middle when traditional right and left were in disarray,’ says historian Robert Tombs. ‘He is as independent as one can be – having created a movement that slew the big beasts, it essentially now revolves around only one man.’

Indeed, for those who have swooned at the young President’s rise, this solitary deployment of power is the only cause for concern. Formal pictures of him in Time magazine, in the Elysée ‘golden salon’, tend towards the demagogic. ‘It’s as if he was a dictator in central Asia,’ said one backer.

No wonder that for some politicians in Britain he is now a figure of suspicion, and even fear. For Macron has made clear his utter disdain for Brexit, which he views as an insult to the grand integrationist EU project which he fervently backs. It will require reform, and possibly a two-speed Europe, but he wants to forge that closely united bloc by 2025.

And Britain is getting in the way. So at Brexit negotiations, it is always the French who are the toughest, most unyielding to the British position. Boris Johnson is the architect of a betrayal, and Theresa May is implementing it – never the best foundation for friendship. 

Which is odd, because Macron is such an Anglophile in many ways. He speaks fluent English and the French expat community in Britain was a crucial source of funds in his campaign. It is this love-hate relationship that will be the background to Macron’s top-level visit to Britain next week. 

Will Britain be ‘seduced’ by him and his wife, as so many others have? Maybe. Because charm will always be a key weapon for him in his mission – and that mission is now becoming increasingly clear. Emmanuel Macron may have surfed the ‘deuxième gauche’ movement to power, ruthlessly networking in the secret world between left and right for political and financial backing and being equally energetically promoted by them. But he is not a ‘Third-Way’ reformer like Germany’s Gerhard Schröeder, or Bill Clinton.

The keenest observers think his mission is grander than that. ‘He’s not a French Tony Blair,’ said Buhler. ‘He’s a statist. He still thinks the best way to reform France is through state power. He will use all the state power he is armed with through the constitution.’ 

This, then, is Macron’s mission: to re-establish the glory of the French state. ‘The French constitution is drawn up so the presidency is effectively a monarchy,’ says Tombs. ‘It would be fascinating to know how Macron interprets France’s history over the last couple of centuries. Because it’s common to think that France has somehow been lacking a figure in the centre, someone to hold it together. Does Macron think of himself like that, think that he is what they call in France “the providential man”, even at his young age? I believe he does.’