Back in 2017, Emmanuel Macron, the political maverick miraculously defied the two — or rather three — blocs that for decades had taken turns at managing France’s Fifth Republic, founded by Charles de Gaulle in 1958. The traditional right (essentially Gaullist), the governing left (embodied by François Mitterrand) and a nebulous technocratic center-right (incarnated by Giscard d’Estaing) for decades comfortably dominated the political landscape.

After two and a half years of a troubled reign challenged by the “yellow vest” revolt, a global pandemic and the war in Ukraine, Macron profited from the confusion to win a second term in 2022, in the name of continuity. But with no clear majority in the National Assembly, the ride became rocky. The year 2023 ended in relative chaos, as Macron put in place a new government led by a carefully groomed youngster, Gabriel Attal.

The year 2024 became Macron’s annus horribilis. It began in controversy with the hotly contested passage of an ideology-laden law on immigration. Throughout the springtime, in the leadup to the European parliamentary elections, Macron spent most of his waking hours vainly devising tactics to prevent the inevitable: the humiliation of losing to the far-right in the June 9 election.

His reaction to that resounding loss surprised friends and foes alike. He dissolved parliament and called for a national reckoning through a snap election. The result in July added insult to humiliation. A quickly cobbled-together left-wing coalition came out on top. Macron’s already motley party was now reduced to political marginality. For the first time, a Fifth Republic president was struggling to keep the political system on life support.

After months of floundering, a vote of no-confidence in December obliged Macron to nominate a new prime minister, François Bayrou. Most experts expect he will meet the same fate as his predecessor, Michel Barnier, who managed to stay in office for 90 days, affording him the satisfaction of nearly doubling Liz Truss’s record of 49 days in the UK in 2022. In other words, stability is not the best term to describe French domestic politics at the start of 2025.

If the year was truly horrible on the homefront, some people believe France has a more solid footing internationally. One of those people is… Macron. Even in the face of a general catastrophe that has unfolded recently across Africa’s Sahel region, where a series of former colonies have invited the French military — stationed for more than a decade in the name of protecting them from terrorism — to pack their bags and go home.

In an address to the annual ambassadors conference, Macron now insists that all’s quiet on the African front. “No, France is not in decline in Africa, it is simply lucid, it is reorganizing itself. (« Non, la France n’est pas en recul en Afrique, elle est simplement lucide, elle se réorganise »).

Today’s Weekly Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Reorganize (oneself):

1. Reformulate the narrative of any humiliating defeat to represent it as a subtle and clever exercise of one’s authority.
2. Make obvious chaos appear to be a conscious imposition of order.

Contextual note

The tone as much as the rhetoric of Macron’s speech reveals much more than the actual words he employs, even though the language itself could serve as exemplary content for a masterclass in defensive self-justification.

It takes cojones (pardon my French!) to say: “We chose to change course in Africa … because we had to move.” (« On a choisi de bouger en Afrique … parce qu’il fallait bouger. ») Both verbs in the sentence are bouger. A literal translation of this would be: “We chose to budge in Africa because budging was necessary.” His tone conveys the idea that this was all about strategic planning, not about receiving marching orders from former colonies. He takes the opportunity to upbraid “a good portion of our press” for creating that “disinformation.”

But his impatience doesn’t stop there. Macron complains that those African nations fed up with France’s meddling “forgot to say merci.” At the same time, he reminds his ambassadors that these leaders owe their privilege “of managing a sovereign country” to France. They should be eternally grateful every time they collect their presidential paycheck. Some interpret these sentiments differently. Le Monde quotes Chad’s foreign minister, Abderaman Koulamallah, who sees this as demonstrating Macron’s “contemptuous attitude towards Africa and Africans.”

As a side note, it’s worth pointing out what the French would call Macron’s “preciosity” of language when he proclaims, “we have looked at our past relationship, memorial, cultural, we factualize it and assume it, and tell ourselves the truth. And we yield nothing to disinformation.” Thank you, Emmanuel, for factualizing your history! Our Devil’s Dictionary still isn’t sure about how to define that verb.

Historical note

In 2016, Macron made the decision to enter the race to succeed François Hollande, the president who put him in the limelight by appointing him Minister of Finance in 2014. He thus had the opportunity to observe from the inside the Fifth Republic’s system built around the unassailable authority of a president who initially had seven years to wield his power. (That was later reduced to five under Jacques Chirac).

Such a system will inevitably be attractive to a personality with a narcissistic view of himself as a messiah or savior of the nation. Macron saw that such a system could never live up to its potential in the hands of a “normal” Frenchman, which is what Hollande claimed to be. Macron drew inspiration from Hollande’s predecessor, Nicolas Sarkozy, often called the “hyperpresident.”

Elected at the age of 37, Macron felt empowered to redesign a nation clearly floundering in the routine of its political past. Two successive five-year terms in office would offer him a full decade of exercising supreme power in the flower of his youth. During that decade he would have the time to establish a new order and groom a generation of politicians who would follow his initiative and complete the transformation of France’s political culture.

The key would be to use the theoretically impregnable power of a Fifth Republic presidency to break with a sclerotic, complex hierarchical system inherited from the previous century dominated by Gaullists and Socialists. He would usher in a new republic based on the meritocratic, neoliberal and technocratic ideals that a generation of Western bankers, traders, entrepreneurs and innovators had redefined as the new universal norm. Oddly, he hadn’t noticed, and still doesn’t seem to notice, that the globalized world was already moving in a multipolar direction that called into question the logic of Western globalization.

Already in 2015, Macron had begun theorizing a changing political chessboard. “The great missing piece is the figure of the king” (le grand absent est la figure du roi.). This remark may surprise some observers who note that, in comparison to other Western democracies, a president of France’s Fifth Republic already exercises virtually regal powers. Macron went so far as to claim that the French regretted killing the monarch. It left “an emotional void in the collective imagination.”

In 2016, after announcing his candidacy, Macron retheorized the nature of the office itself. “France needs a Jupiterian president… not a simple god but the king of the gods.” In some sense, Macron was a disciple of Francis Fukuyama, who decades earlier had predicted “the end of history.”

For Macron, now that history had stopped in its tracks, France could simply enjoy the royal privilege bequeathed to the nation by its noble past. The former Rothschild banker reasoned that to exercise its dynamic power, France simply had to consolidate its own economic contribution to the global order, alongside the other gods on the new Olympus. The old culturally complex social structures dear to the Gaullists and the Socialists of Mitterrand’s generation could now be replaced by a society defined essentially through purely economic relations.

Alas, Macron had failed to notice that, by 2017, Fukuyama’s updated Hegelianism had lost its luster. The drift of history since the beginning of the new millennium had already provided a few dramatic surprises to remind people it was still alive and kicking. Already a global pandemic and a war in Ukraine were in preparation.

As for Macron in 2025, after his annus horribilis, there can be little doubt that the worst is yet to come.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of Fair Observer Devil’s Dictionary.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.