ABOUT THIS EPISODE
1.
BOTTOMS UP, MR PRESIDENT! Two weeks ago, at Stade de France in Saint-Denis, Emmanuel Macron walked onto the pitch just before the start of the French Top 14 rugby final between Toulouse and La Rochelle. There were 80,000 people in the stands. Many were whistling and jeering.
The tradition—the head of the French state greeting players on the field before a cup final—was revived by Macron at the start of his first mandate in 2017. His predecessor, François Holland, didn’t do it, nor did Nicolas Sarkozy before him. Macron never missed one, not during Covid, nor when the gilets jaunes protests were at their peak. In April, however, at the French football cup final, which fell during the height of the pension reform protests, he stayed in the stands.
If the game had been this weekend, he probably wouldn’t have been in the stadium.
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
For the rugby cup final on 17 June 2023, security was tight and the pension protests were far enough in the past—Macron had even got a 6% bump in opinion polls in June—so down onto the field he went. In preparation for next summer’s Olympics, the police had new protocols in place; in part, also, because of last May’s chaotic Champions League final between Liverpool and Real Madrid, at which the police tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed and clubbed Liverpool fans trying to access the stadium, resulting in dozens of arrests and hundreds of injuries.
When Macron reached the assembled rugbymen, he stuck out his hand. Among the first to accept it was Uini Atonio, one of La Rochelle’s prop forwards. Here’s a video of their exchange:
“Hi Emmanuel, how are you?” Atonio asks in flawless French. He was born in New Zealand but has been a resident of France since 2001, and a star member of the French national rugby team since 2014, with 50 international caps.
“Ca va,” said Macron, who prefers being addressed as Monsieur le Président or Monsieur Macron, and once severely reprimanded a schoolboy for calling him Manu. He also doesn’t appreciate it when commoners kiss his cheeks, as the 6’5” prop was trying to do.
“Are you pushing forward my passport?” Atonio said in the president’s ear, using the familiar tu. “You're speeding up my passport, right?”
“Allez,” said the president. “Bonne finale!"
Toulouse won the match with this brilliant 65-yard solo try by Romain Ntamack three minutes from time.
After the match, an exuberant Macron, spurred on by a roomful of sporting men, raised a bottle of beer to his lips.
Now, the last time I shared a drink with the president of France, it wasn’t a Corona “cul sec” (“in one gulp”) in a locker room after a rugby game. It was a flute of Champagne in the Élysée Palace, where we were celebrating the inauguration of Pavoisé, a temporary art installation on the glass roof of the Jardin d’Hiver by the French artist Daniel Buren.
2.
BLEU-BLANC-ROUGE That’s me under the blue arrow, Emmanuel Macron under the white, and Brigitte Macron—who I ran into again just a few days later at an opening at the Musèe d’Orsay—under the red. The artist whose work we’re celebrating, Daniel Buren, is in front of the white pillar. On Brigitte’s left, in the bright red jacket, is Jack Lang who, as François Mitterrand’s culture minister in 1985, commissioned Buren’s best-known and most controversial work, the zebra-striped columns of Les Deux-Plateaux in the cour d’honneur of Palais-Royal. To Brigitte’s right is the former French president Nicolas Sarkozy, whose minister of culture, Frédéric Mitterrand (the nephew of President Mitterand) oversaw the almost-as-controversial renovation of Les Deux-Plateaux in 2009.
Sarko1, like me, like Brigitte, was wearing an FFP2 mask—this was in September 2021—but he was not yet wearing an electronic ankle bracelet; that wouldn’t get strapped on until two weeks later, when he was sentenced to a year in prison for exceeding the spending limit for his 2012 presidential campaign by more than 20 million euros. The conviction was the result of the so-called Bygmalion scandal, but also the Sarkozy-Khadaffi scandal, which involved an alleged payment of 50 million euros to finance Sarko's 2007 presidential campaign from the Libyan regime of Mouammar Kadhafi. On 23 May 2023, in part based on wiretapped conversations between Sarkozy and his lawyer, Sarko’s convictions were confirmed by the Paris Court of Appeals, as was the sentence: three years in prison—two suspended and one under “electronic” house arrest.
Sarkozy is, apparently, appealing. In both senses of the word: appealing the corruption and influence-peddling convictions to the French Supreme Court, and weirdly appealing to certain figures on the right-of-centre of the French political spectrum. Including Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron.
He was particularly touched by the friendly words of the Macron couple. Since day one, this strange president, whom he doesn't fully understand, has shown him elegance. At regular intervals, Emmanuel Macron invites him to his table at the Elysée Palace. He probes the “disrupter” in chief that is Nicolas Sarkozy. Occasionally, too, the current head of state asks the former to act as his emissary abroad. Admiration and curiosity are shared.—L’Express, 12 June 2023
The pater familias of the “presentable” French right, Sarko sits on the boards of the international group Lagardère (publishing, travel retail, live entertainment, media), the LOV Group (entertainment, hospitality, food, wine, oil) the hotelier Accor, the bank Natixis, the textile group Chargeurs, the Madagascan group Axian, the airline Corsair and the Marietton tourism group. His law firm, Realyze is active in France, Europe, the United States, Qatar and, until recently, Russia—last year, French anti-corruption detectives opened a preliminary investigation into a €3 million “special adviser” contract Sarko signed with the Reso-Garantia insurance group. He has not yet been formally charged.
That Sarkozy’s support and influence continue despite his convictions—not his beliefs, his pronouncements of guilt—I find, even with the Trump lessons we have learned and are still learning, endlessly fascinating. But not at all puzzling: the French political scene right now makes the US look like a stable democracy. The Macron bombs detonated in 2017 and 2022 all but wiped out the centre-left and the centre-right, creating a wide-open hole that, when Macron finishes his second and, unless he steals a page from Xi Jinping’s playbook, last mandate in 2027, will be even more gaping. Who will replace him? Who will stave off the extremes?
3.
HOW ABOUT THAT DRINK? Sarko has never had a drop of alcohol in his life. Macron, on the other hand, likes a pastis every now and then, with two ice cubes and a splash of water. But at heart he is a wine lover—with a predilection for Bordeaux reds and Burgundy whites : “I'm one of those French people for whom a meal without wine is a rather sad meal. I was brought up by my grandparents who had this saying: 'Red wine is an antioxidant'. There was no guilt involved.”
François Hollande drinks wine but not much. He famously sold half the presidential cellars in 2012, at the start of his term as president. According to his ex, Valérie Trierweiler, "After two glasses of wine, he would go to bed."
Sarko’s presidential predecessor, Jacques “Le Bulldozer” Chirac, the French president from 1995 to 2007, was a serious beer drinker. His favourite was Corona—the beer chug-a-lugged by Macron in the Toulousians’ locker room. Coincidence? Chirac’s right-of-centre party, the Union for a Popular Movement (UMP), was transformed by Sarkozy into Les Républicains (LR) in 2015. Macron wants the LR’s 61 deputies in the French National Assembly to leave the opposition and join his government.
4.
JUMP CUT TO SUNDAY, 2 JULY 2023. The police killing of a 17-year-old high-school student and pizza deliverer of Maghrebi Algerian descent named Nahel Merzouk last Tuesday during a traffic roadblock in Nanterre has so far resulted in the arrest of around 3,000 teenage boys, the injuring of around 1,000 cops, the incineration of more than 6,000 cars, the burning and bombarding of some 100 police stations, schools and town halls, and the pillaging of dozens of big-box stores, supermarkets and cafés-tabacs.
The killing—the policeman shot Merzouk through the driver-side window when he re-started his vehicle—was filmed and streamed on social networks. The Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin called the images “extremely shocking” and “not in line with what we want as police intervention”. He announced the officer was in custody and the opening of two investigations. Then he announced that the cop had been indicted for voluntary homicide. Macron described the killing as “inexcusable” and “inexplicable”. He called for calm and for “the truth to be revealed as soon as possible”.
Contrast these responses to those adopted throughout 2005 by Nicolas Sarkozy, then Chirac’s Minister of the Interior:
I wrote about the 2005 events last May, in a post called There Goes the Neighbourhood:
Seine-Saint-Denis citizens have made the international news only three times in the last quarter-century. First, in 1998, when France won the World Cup, thanks in good part to the play of three men from Grand Paris: Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira and Lilian Thuram. By the time of their World Cup win in 2018, a full third of the French squad were from the region, and other Séquanodionysiens played for Morocco, Portugal, Tunisia and Senegal. Today, astoundingly, Grand Paris produces more professional footballers than North America, Asia and Africa combined.
The third time le 93 citizens made the front pages was in 2005, when two teenagers in Clichy-sous-Bois were electrocuted in a power substation while trying to escape the police. Their deaths—and the launch of police grenades in a crowded mosque during evening prayer—sparked nationwide riots. Nine-thousand cars and hundreds of buildings were torched. The police arrested some 3,000 rioters, all of whom, according to Nicolas Sarkozy, the interior minister at the time, were led by foreign-born racailles and voyous—scum and hoodlums—that should have had their citizenship revoked and been deported.
The above-mentioned Lilian Thuram, foreign-born yet considered then as now a national treasure by most French people—he’s a Knight and Officer of the Legion of Honour—put the blame entirely on Sarkozy, discrimination and unemployment. “I am not scum,” he told Le Parisien. “Violence is never gratuitous. We must understand where the malaise comes from. Before talking about insecurity, perhaps it is necessary to talk about social justice. I believe that the political debate must be about how to give work to people who live in the suburbs. Not on how to repress riots. We make France look bad. Whose fault is that?”
The government’s response? Chirac announced a national state of emergency. Sarkozy drafted thousands of extra police. Villepin, the Prime minister, tightened immigration.
Le 93 has been seething ever since.
So far, although Darmanin has put 45,000 cops on active duty and rolled out every armoured vehicle at his disposal, Macron has not announced a state of emergency. He is unlikely to do so. This morning, day five, things, for now, seem to have run their course. Maybe the kids have run out of trash cans and supermarkets to trash. Only 719 were arrested last night, half as many as the night before.
5.
PLAYING RIGHT. Darmanin and Macron have focussed their targets on parents. Specifically, “the parents responsible”: working class and immigrant parents. To prevent riots, “it is the responsibility of the parents to keep their children at home,” said the president in Friday’s address. “The Republic is not meant to watch over them.”
This echoes an infamous speech Sarkozy made in Grenoble in July 2010, following, again, urban riots. “Fifty years of insufficiently regulated immigration have led to the failure of integration,” he said. “It is therefore a war that we have decided to wage against traffickers and criminals.” He spoke of the criminal responsibility of parents if their children commit offences, the prevention of minor delinquents from automatically acquiring French nationality when they come of age, and the abolition of family allowances in the event of absenteeism from school.
Not much came of this: the measures announced were either dropped or found unconstitutional. Sarko lost the Presidential election two years later.
But the speech split the French: 49% approved of the measures, judging them “finally up to the situation”; 46% consider them “too stigmatizing vis-à-vis foreigners.” What would be the breakdown today?
My guess: much higher support for a crackdown.
6.
TSK TSK TIK TOK Macron and Darmanin summoned Snapchat, TikTok, Meta and Twitter to the Ministry of the Interior and called upon them to delete “violent content” and provide the IP addresses of protesters who use social media to “fuel the unrest.” “I expect these platforms to act responsibly,” Macron said in a televised statement, citing “violent gatherings” on Snapchat and TikTok which “arouse a form of mimicry of violence, which leads some among the youngest to exit reality”… and “live in the video games that have intoxicated them”. It is not known yet whether the tech companies will comply.
“Comply” is a key word here. In French law it is obtempérer, and since 2017, under Hollande’s mandate, a refus d'obtempérer (failure to comply) allows police and gendarmes “in the performance of their duties” to “use their weapons in case of absolute necessity and in a strictly proportionate manner.” In the case of Nahel Merzouk, the key paragraph of LOI n° 2017-258 is:
4° When they cannot immobilize, other than by the use of arms, vehicles, boats or other means of transport, whose drivers do not obey the order to stop and whose occupants are likely to perpetrate, in their flight, attacks on their life or physical integrity or those of others;
Merzouk’s murder is certainly not the first caused by 2017-258. Will it be the last? The law has been vociferously criticized by everyone on the political spectrum, except of course the far right, the LR and certain members of Macron’s minority government.2 Especially critical has been Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the populist-left candidate that the far-right Marine Le Pen narrowly nosed out of the second round. I profiled Mélenchon last April, on the eve of second round of the French presidential election. He spoke out against the law well before then, and this has focussed intense fire from the right upon his party, La France insoumise (LFI) and his allies within the New Popular Ecological and Social Union (Nupes).
Already in April, a week after violent clashes at the megabasin project in Sainte-Soline left many demonstrators and police officers injured—Darmanin, in the pages of the Journal de Dimanche (whose new editor-in-chief, Geoffroy Lejeune, was until this month the editor-in-chief of the extreme-far-right organ, Valeurs actuelles) decried the “intellectual terrorism of the far left, which consists in overthrowing our values: the thugs become the attacked and the police the aggressors”. Darmanin all but named the LFI and NUPES as part of a “very worrying complacency of the political movements which have their entries in the National Assembly” and held them accountable for the violence in Sainte-Soline and the demonstrations against the pension reform. Since Tuesday, he and others are also blaming them for the “Justice pour Nahel” riots.
7.
THIS IS PART OF A MUCH WIDER AUTHORITARIAN ESCALATION. Last week, before all this exploded, Darmanin, backed by the Council of Ministers, officially banned the climate-activist association Les Soulèvements de la Terre (LSF) and, in a large-scale, country-wide police operation, arrested 18 of their members.
LSF brings together around 100 associations. The ban decree describes it as a “de facto grouping” based “on ideas put forward by theorists, advocating direct action and justifying extreme actions up to and including confrontation with the forces of law and order.”
It is the first ecological association to be banned in France.
Amnesty International France condemned the government's decision, as did the Ligue des droits de l'homme (Human Rights League), who denounced a “challenge to the freedoms of association, demonstration and expression, as well as to the rights of the defence” and called on people to “join the rallies in support” of LSF. Mélenchon responded to the ban by saying the LSF has been “repressed like terrorists, which they are not”, saying they should be "listened to".
Greta Thunberg called it “a question of the right to protest and the defence of life. I hope more people will mobilize against what's happening right now, and defend the right to protest.”
Marine Tondelier, head of Europe Ecologie-Les Verts, said there was “no evidence of anything” to justify the ban. “I will not let this government make environmentalists the scapegoats for their climate inaction.”
Nobel Prize winner Annie Ernaux defended LSF, as did the actress Marion Cotillard: “What's happening in our country is extremely serious. Those who alert us to the eminently dangerous drift of our world and our humanity, the activists who call for government action commensurate with the urgency, are today being branded criminals or ecoterrorists.” Cotillard was of course instantly ridiculed in the right-wing press for her Chanel ads and yacht.
8.
IN LAST YEAR’S PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS, Sarkozy refused to publicly support Valerie Pécresse, the LR candidate. Instead, he backed Macron. Yet he still has the backing of most of the ranks of the LR, and in whatever scenario unfolds Sarko and the LR are sure to play key roles. This is why, on 06 June he was back at Élysée for a one-on-one with the president. The timing coincided with rumours that Elisabeth Borne, Macron’s prime minister, was about to get the chop. Borne, whom the “left-wing” of Macron’s majority forced upon him after last year’s elections, has proved a capable hatchet-jobber, successfully pushing through Macron’s wildly unpopular pension reform without a vote, and working with Darmanin on an immigration package designed to win over the LR and steal votes from the extreme right parties, especially Marine Le Pen’s Rassemblement national (RN). But as Sarko bluntly put it to Macron at the meet, “When France leans to the right, you have to appoint a right-wing Prime Minister.”
"You can't continue with this Prime Minister. You were elected by the right! To be central, you have to be two-thirds right, one-third centre," Nicolas Sarkozy insists. However, on June 6, when he spoke with his predecessor, Emmanuel Macron had no intention of appointing a right-wing Prime Minister. “I’m thinking of appointing (Julien) Denormandie," the head of state told him. “You can't put in Denormandie, he's not a majority leader. Put in Lecornu and tighten up your government with one or two right-wing heavyweights,” advised the former president, who also keeps the Christine Lagarde option in mind. “It's hard to fire a woman without putting in another woman. Besides, Lagarde reassures the markets”, he pleads with the politicians he meets. His aim is twofold: to reinforce the weight of the right-wing in the government, and to anchor it... on the right. At the risk of once again being accused by his political family of playing against his own camp.—Le Parisien, 15 June 2023
The 42-year-old Julien Denormandie has been part of Macron’s inner circle since 2015. As Minister of the City and Housing during the first Macron mandate (2018-2020), he brought about cuts to a housing allowance scheme that favoured the more affluent. He also pushed—or at least paid lip service to the idea of pushing—for more social housing for the poor. These left-oidal moves, though countered by his work on reversing a ban on neonicotinoid pesticides for sugar beet growers, do not sit well with LR types. And Macron, as Sarkozy no doubt reminded him, needs the LR’s support to preserve his legacy, and the future of the centre-right.
This is becoming too wonkishly granular. Let’s go back and have another glass of champagne in the Jardin d’Hiver.
9.
DANIEL BUREN: “THE PUBLIC SPACE IS NECESSARILY POLITICAL”
Pavoisé is a Buren’s only overtly political work of art. It is a tribute to the French flag, and to this painting by Claude Monet.
A pavoisée street is one whose buildings are decorated with flags. It was a common painting motif in the late 19th century and the 20th century, especially among the Impressionists and the Fauves. Georges Braque painted a bunch, as did André Derain, Raoul Dufy, Édouard Manet, Albert Marquet, Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh or Maurice de Vlaminck.
Monet’s La Rue Montorgueil was painted on June 30, 1878, the day the new Republic named “Peace and Work Day”. It was the first national holiday since the defeat of Napoleon III. The entire country, every street and building, was festooned with le drapeau tricolore.
“I loved flags; I was walking along rue Montorgueil with my work tools; the street was adorned with flags, the crowd was crazy. I saw a balcony, went up, and asked permission to paint, which was granted. Then I went back down, unnoticed!”
It had been a tough decade. Monet had a young son, a pregnant wife, and a mountain of debt. But he was feeling better about his prospects, and his countrymen were feeling better about themselves. General MacMahon and the Versailles army’s slaughter of the Communards in Paris had slightly etherized the chronic feeling of humiliation after the Prussian occupation in 1871. The creation of a two-chamber parliament followed. Then the dissolution of that parliament. Then the resounding victory at the polls of the republicans, and the final defeat, perhaps for ever, of the royalists. MacMahon was now president, elected in a landslide. Gustav Courbet, blamed by MacMahon for the toppling of Napoleon’s statue on the Vendôme column, was out of prison and, unable to pay the stiff fines demanded by MacMahon, hiding in Switzerland. MacMahon’s attempt to restore the monarchy under Henri, Comte de Chambord, had failed, mainly because the king insisted that the Bourbon house’s white flag replace the much-loved tricolour of the Revolution.
Heady times. Which Monet paid little if any attention to. But the pavoisé painting was popular among his newly nationalistic French collectors. So he knocked out a couple.
10.
OK MOONEY, TIE THIS UP
So, there I was, in the Jardin d’Hiver in Élysée Palace, one of only a tiny handful of foreigners in the room, listening to the speeches, chatting with colleagues in the art world, and thinking that for my first ten years in France I was an illegal immigrant, sans papiers, and now, here I was, a flute of Champagne Gardet Réserve Premier Cru in my hand, rubbing shoulders with Manu and Brigitte and Sarko and Jack. And, like Uini Atonio, the loose-head kiwi prop on the rugby pitch, wondering if I should talk with someone about facilitating my naturalisation. And then wondering, should I write about this event? Or would that just be asking for trouble?
The same kind of trouble that stopped me from attending last month’s “action” at the Annual Shareholders’ Meeting of TotalEnergies. The same kind of trouble that I worry this piece could provoke, that has stopped it from being a different piece.
Ridiculous, I know. As if. Delusions of grandeur. But I have a meeting at the police prefecture on July 19th to renew my ten-year residency card. So why poke the beast, right? Better to keep your cul sec and your mouth shut. Turn off the engine. Keep your hands on the wheel, in plain sight.
Thanks for reading. Sorry for the length. Next week’s will be shorter. I promise.
Barack Obama, A Promised Land, 2020: “With his dark, expressive vaguely Mediterranean features (he was half Hungarian and a quarter Greek Jew) and small stature (he was about five-foot-five but wore lifts in his shoes to make himself taller), he looked like a figure out of a Toulouse-Lautrec painting…. Conversations with Sarkozy were by turns amusing and exasperating, his hands in perpetual motion, his chest thrust out like a bantam cock's, his personal translator... always beside him to frantically mirror his every gesture and intonation as the conversation swooped from flattery to bluster to genuine insight, never straying from his primary, barely disguised interest, which was to be at the center of the action and take credit for whatever it was that might be worth taking credit for.”
Macron’s government consists of 250 deputies (compared to 320 in the opposition). The breakdown is 170 from his party, Les députés Renaissance (RE), 51 from the Groupe démocrate, MoDem et indépendants (DEM) and 29 from the Groupe Horizons et apparentés (HOR). Adding the LR’s 61 would give Macron an absolute majority in the Assembly.
