Coming out of a celebratory dinner at a Montparnasse brasserie after topping the poll in the first round of the French presidential election on Sunday, Emmanuel Macron had a brief brush with the press. A reporter asked: ‘Is this your Fouquet moment? This referred to a notoriously showy celebration by Nicolas Sarkozy at Fouquet’s restaurant after his own victory in 2007. The 39-year-old centrist was visibly cross. He simply wanted to thank his secretaries, security officers, politicians and writers, he said. Then came the dig. ‘If you don’t understand that,’ he said, ‘you understand nothing about life. I have no lessons to learn from the petit milieu Parisien.’
This dismissive reference to the chattering classes is par for the course for a man who shows no hesitation in demonstrating his superiority; a man who claims he’ll create a new sort of politics to replace the discredited and cliquey system which reached its nadir under Hollande. But behind Macron on the red velvet banquettes of the brasserie was as fine a collection of a particular kind of Parisian in-crowd as one could wish for.
Jonathan Fenby and Anne-Elisabeth Moutet discuss Macron’s coronation:
Alongside secretaries and security guards sat the perennial presidential adviser Jacques Attali, who was whispering in François Mitterrand’s ear as he steered France into a downward course in the early 1980s. There was Daniel Cohn-Bendit, survivor of the 1968 student riots turned Green politician and all-purpose pundit. There was a radio host, a well-known actor, a veteran senator and big city boss and the 88-year-old singer Line Renaud. Very much business as usual.
The man who set up his own party to challenge the system, En Marche! (his own initials), is in fact a perfect insider-outsider. A graduate of the top administrative college, l’ENA, he made a fortune organising mergers and acquisitions for the Rothschild bank, earning €2.9 million
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