Emmanuel macron

A trip to the supermarché at the beginning of our French month yielded many of the necessary things one also buys at home, but even washing powder acquires romance when sporting a French label, and the fresh fish, meat, veg and wine sections are far bigger than ours, with mountains of lettuce and seven different varieties of tomato. The Carrefour bookshelves also yielded Tintin books which are, like Asterix, best read in French. I bought Tintin et L’Ile Noir, Tintin et La Crabe au Pinces D’or, and my favourite, Tintin et Les Bijoux de Castefiore. The French is simple, the drawings are masterpieces, subtle, witty, full of style and character.

President Macron’s speech on Monday to the combined houses of parliament in the Palace of Versailles proved how stunningly different are the French from the British. Imagine our head of state promising to cut the size of parliament by a third. Imagine her, or even her prime minister, promising to renew the nation with ‘the spirit of conquest’, as M. Macron did. We are often accused of nostalgia for empire, but we would never say such a thing, or even think it. Imagine the ribaldry which would descend upon M. Macron’s equivalent — if our constitution could have such a phenomenon — for striding though the marble halls past a guard of honour holding their swords erect, and then dumping more than an hour of grandiloquence upon the assembly.

Have the French belatedly realised the error of their regicide and decided to restore the monarchy?  If so, will the regime of Emmanuel Macron, whose seizure of power must certainly be inspiring politicians around the globe with its brutal efficacy, end the same way?  Macron’s glittering and symbolic appearance yesterday at the Palace of Versailles to address a joint session of the National Assembly – over which he currently exercises complete domination – and the Senate, will give historians, semioticians and journalists plenty to mull (although Macron has said that his thoughts are too complex to be explained to the media). But Macron played a blinder. Many French deeply regret not having a king.

Was that a touch of gloating I detected last night as I watched the news on French television? The lead item was Donald Trump's acceptance of President Macron's invitation to attend the Bastille Day commemoration in Paris next month. It's always a prestigious occasion and this year marks the centenary of America's entry into WW1. Hence the invitation to the American president which came in a telephone conversation where the pair also agreed on a joint military response against the Syrian regime should Bashar al-Assad launch another chemical attack.

Islamic State will be delighted by what happened outside Finsbury Park mosque in the early hours of Monday morning. In the space of three months they've achieved in Britain what they failed to pull off in France during five years, and provoked a retaliatory act. This is what they want. When the Syrian intellectual, Abu Moussab al-Souri, published his 1600-page manifesto in 2005, 'The Global Islamic Resistance Call', his stated goal was to plunge Europe into a war of religion.

It's in the little gestures one learns much about a man, and such is the case with Emmanuel Macron. Since his anointment as president of France last month, the 39-year-old has held talks with Angela Merkel, Recep Erdogan, Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. Those tête-à-têtes have made the headlines but it's what happened in Paris at the end of last month that demonstrated the steeliness of the youngest French president since Napoleon. As is customary for the head of state, Macron attended the final of the French Cup at the national stadium in Paris. There once was a time when the president of France was introduced to the two teams on the pitch before kick-off, but Nicolas Sarkozy dispensed with that tradition when he came to power a decade ago.

If there's one country that knows how Britain feels in the wake of last week's suicide bombing in Manchester, it's France. Similar horror has been visited on the French several times in the past five years with nearly 250 slaughtered at the hands of Islamic extremists, so the French are all too familiar with the grief, the rage and the shock still being felt across the Channel. But not Britain's incomprehension. At first, maybe, when Mohammed Merah shot dead three Jewish schoolchildren in a Toulouse playground five years ago, but since the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists were slaughtered in January 2015 the French have understood what is going on.

Every politician in France is on manoeuvres. Vast chasms have opened up in the anti-Le Pen coalition and the country faces another two-round election for the National Assembly in June. It's likely that a fractured and dysfunctional legislature will emerge, complicating or even making impossible the program proposed by president-elect Emmanuel Macron. Nonetheless, Macron will still be hoping that amidst this electoral entropy he can push his own slate to the forefront. This is a big ask. Possibly only about 20 per cent of voters supported him for the presidency for any reason other than he was not Marine Le Pen. His program is either not understood or not supported by the vast majority of voters. His ambition to secure a majority in the assembly looks impossible to me.