How Macron Became the Anti-de Gaulle

There is a certain tragedy—though one almost amusing in its irony—in the sight of Emmanuel Macron overseeing the slow-motion collapse of the very Republic which Charles de Gaulle once saved from itself. When, in 1958, the General emerged from his twelve-year exile of proud silence to accept the appeal of a desperate nation, France was a country on the brink: afflicted by a profound military crisis in Algeria, paralysed by parliamentary tumult, demoralised and confused. Then, de Gaulle did not simply form a government; he re-created the state. In his Fifth Republic, he attempted to anchor France’s chronic instability in the ballast of executive power—fusing the grandeur of monarchy with France’s republican order. Forged at a time of deep national crisis, the Fifth Republic was meant to keep France forever safe from the fevered, self-serving impotence of its lawmakers.

How swiftly—and how foolishly—his successors dismantled it. What de Gaulle dreamt of as a citadel of stability was, over the decades, progressively eaten away to dust by the vices of parliamentarian restoration. First, the President’s long, seven-year term—the Septennat—was abridged. Then, little by little, the political parties reimposed themselves and their grey, mediocre men. The almost kingly office of the Presidency had been thought of by de Gaulle for himself and others like himself: exceptional figures of history, decency, and love of nation. But, once he was gone, it soon became apparent just how hard such men are to come by. As the decades passed, de Gaulle’s successors became increasingly unconvincing copies of the regime’s founder, each new president looking more insignificant and ill-fitting in the General’s shoes. When the likes of Hollande walked into the presidential office, it should have become clear to all that the institution—and, therefore, the Fifth Republic itself—had become terminally ill.

What followed only came to confirm that impression. Mercurial, immature, restless, and altogether non-Gaullist, Macron will be remembered as the final nail in the coffin of de Gaulle’s constitutional legacy. Where the General feared rhetoric and venerated his nation, Macron venerates rhetoric and fears the nation. De Gaulle personified France. Macron is a cosmopolitan with no understanding of it. The General cultivated majesty through distance and parsimony; Macron mistakes activity with leadership, endlessly—ludicrously—performing the role of a philosopher-king for which he just doesn’t have the gravitas.

The fall, return, and likely future collapse of Sébastien Lecornu’s government—already the fourth in a year—is not accidental. It is the mark of a deeper constitutional malaise and the final proof that the system which de Gaulle had built in an effort to prevent precisely such chaos is rotten. Macron’s imploding regime no longer governs; it manages. Whereas de Gaulle’s presidency was the throne of the State, Macron’s is an absurdist, depressing political reality show. Such is his tragedy.

It didn’t have to end this way. De Gaulle was faced with crises infinitely harsher—the war in Algeria, rebellious generals, the threat of civil war—and yet the machinery he built endured because it drew its legitimacy from something larger than politics. More than mere popular acclaim or the counting of votes, this was different. It was metaphysical: the mystique of the State, la France éternelle, her grandeur and place in the world. Macron, meanwhile, reduced the State to an accessory in his own psychodrama. His reforms, no matter how occasionally prudent, were not intended as instruments of national revival but as gestures of self-vindication, autographs on the mirror of history drawn by himself in an egotistical quest for importance. He desired to be Jupiter; instead, he became Icarus.

De Gaulle’s genius was his natural understanding of the national soul. He realised that the French, exhausted by their own convulsions, would rally to a man who appeared to belong less to politics than to destiny. Macron only understands vanity. In his aspiration to be seen as a European visionary, he forgot about being French. De Gaulle’s France stood in proud defiance of two empires, towering free over both. Macron’s France seems strangulated by everyone and everything: the debt, the unions, migrants, the Brussels mandarins, and her president’s own despair. The General believed in national independence as the pillar of greatness; Macron vaguely, parasitically instrumentalises the concept of “strategic autonomy” while begging for German approval and American protection.

The result is a presidency lacking majesty and an executive lacking power—a government that rules by crisis press release, opinion poll, and political stunt. The implosion of presidential authority has not rendered France more democratic; it has rendered it more childish. Every (non-)reform is now the fruit of a riot. When the government no longer rules and the presidency no longer leads, the State itself is left an orphan, and the country, once again, begins to dance with chaos.

De Gaulle warned that France could not exist without a king. He gave her an elected sovereign. Macron gives her a republic of selfies: a choreography of eloquence without purpose. More than everything, he is de Gaulle’s banal doppelganger—proof that charisma without conviction is performance. While de Gaulle had given France institutions strong enough to overcome mediocrity, Macron has given her mediocrity strong enough to overcome the institutions.

Thus does the Fifth Republic, that delicate union of monarchy and democracy, reach its twilight—less by revolution than by exhaustion. And when it eventually unravels at the seams of its contradictions, historians will note that the man who promised to remake de Gaulle’s legacy succeeded only in destroying it. Because in the dismal chronicle of French decay, Emmanuel Macron will be remembered as what de Gaulle never was: a symptom, not a cure.