On May 5, Emmanuel Macron delivered a speech at the Institut de France to mark the bicentenary of Napoleon Bonaparte’s death, after laying a wreath at his monumental tomb at the Invalides. In Macron’s syncretic style, the oration attempted to move past arguments about the Emperor’s controversial legacies and the appropriateness of officially celebrating such a divisive historical figure. The president tried to appease his critics by chastizing Napoleon for his obsession with power, his love of military conquest and his restoration of slavery in the French colonies in 1802, a “betrayal of the spirit of the Enlightenment”; he paused to salute the authentic revolutionaries, such as the Haitian leader Toussaint Louverture, who had fought for emancipation and kept alight “the torch of universality”. But the overall tone was unapologetically celebratory. Macron hailed the emperor as the embodiment of political will, individual self- realization and military genius, and reminded his audience that Napoleon’s life had inspired writers and philosophers, from Goethe and Stendhal to Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo and Hegel. He also lauded his dedication to science, his healing of the social fractures provoked by the French Revolution and, above all, his creation of a modern State which had promoted the “unity and grandeur” of France.

A year before he faces re-election for a second term, Macron’s tribute to Napoleon was unsurprising. For a leader who has sought to position himself as straddling the left–right divide, the Napoleonic myth of a saviour who combines an appeal to order and progress is still useful to recycle (even though, as we shall see, this claim appears increasingly hollow in Macron’s case). The president also appreciates that, despite frequently grumbling about the institutional dominance of their Grande École bureaucrats (la noblesse d’état, in Pierre Bourdieu’s evocative expression), the French continue to identify with the Napoleonic ideal of a strong state, serving the general interest. So much so that Napoleon’s imperial synthesis, combining elements of the monarchical and revolutionary traditions, was resurrected by Charles de Gaulle when he created the Fifth Republic, and made the president a directly elected “republican monarch”. Bonapartism, in short, remains profoundly embedded in modern French political culture, and its long shadow both explains why a technocrat like Macron was able to capture the presidency in 2017, against all apparent odds, and how in turn the French system has reinforced the president’s centralizing and authoritarian instincts.

All presidents come to the Élysée promising radical change, and in Macron’s case literally so: his programmatic pamphlet was entitled Révolution. Yet he has done little to transform the political system. On the contrary, perhaps more than any of his predecessors since de Gaulle, Macron has governed by concentrating presidential powers in his hands (Napoleon once remarked “il faut que je sois le centre”, and this could well be Macron’s motto). His two prime ministers, Édouard Philippe and then Jean Castex, were both obscure figures with no independent political base. The presidential party La République en Marche (LREM) has likewise been kept on a tight leash; Macron remembered how bitter infighting within the ruling Socialist party destroyed the presidency of François Hollande (as a result, a number of Macron’s progressive parliamentarians have quit the party and formed an independent centre-left group in the National Assembly). The government agenda and its implementation at ministerial level are tightly controlled by the president through his inner circle of advisers, and in key areas through the direct intervention of Macron himself. This control freakery has been most apparent in the French government’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic, where the president has immersed himself in the scientific literature on epidemiology, and waded in on technical issues. (He imprudently pronounced in January that the AstraZeneca vaccine was “quasi-ineffective” for seniors; the European Medicines Agency contradicted him on the same day.) Macron reviews the vaccination charts on a daily basis and has overridden the advice of his senior medical experts (including his own health minister, Olivier Véran, trained as a doctor). He thus blocked the implementation of a tight lockdown in early 2021, an unfortunate decision which increased the deadliness of the pandemic’s third wave in France.

Covid-19 has posed huge challenges to political leaders across the world, and few have emerged completely unscathed. But this was not Macron’s first significant political misjudgement. In the autumn of 2018, a wave of public discontent unfolded in provincial and rural France in opposition to a new fuel tax supported by Macron’s government, led by men and women who gathered at roundabouts wearing hi-vis yellow vests. By mid-November tens of thousands of people were protesting across France, and in early December there were violent clashes in Paris; by now the gilets jaunes movement had become, in characteristic French contentious political style, a challenge against the system as a whole. A contrite Macron appeared on television to announce a withdrawal of the new levy, and pledged that he had heard popular demands for change. In early 2019 he duly organized a public consultation on taxes, environmental policy, institutional reform and citizenship. Although this exercise in democratic deliberation was significant (more than two million documents were mailed in to the official Grand Débat website), Macron’s final responses were tepid, consisting of vague promises about introducing more democratic participation and accountability, and gimmicks such as the abolition of the much-criticized École Nationale d’Administration. This decision was formally confirmed in April this year, and will probably only amount to a mere change of label, given that the President, his current Prime Minister and the administrative head of the Élysée are all énarques (as the old joke goes: Spain has the ETA, Ireland the IRA, Italy the Mafia, and France the ENA).

Macron now faces an uncertain political future. His approval ratings took a serious knock in the winter of 2018, his handling of the pandemic has again damaged his popularity, and more than two-thirds of the electorate still regard him as an arrogant “président des riches” (a slogan which surfaced during the gilets jaunes crisis). He enjoys high levels of support only from within the ranks of his LREM electorate, and a majority of voters does not want him to stand again in 2022. This highlights the wider ongoing challenges of political leadership in contemporary France, and Macron will need no reminding that François Hollande, his immediate predecessor, was so weakened politically by 2017 that he could not even run for re-election, and that before him Nicolas Sarkozy also failed to secure a second term. Sarkozy, it has to be said, has set new benchmarks for failure: he was unable to secure the presidential nomination from his own party in 2017, and a French judge convicted him for attempted bribery in March this year; the previous year, his former prime minister François Fillon was handed a jail sentence for embezzling public funds. Sarkozy is now back in the dock, facing another major prosecution for illegal campaign funding in 2012.

The president retains one potential advantage: the fragmented political landscape which contributed to his election in 2017 remains largely unaltered. The Parti Socialiste and the Républicains, the old governing parties of the left and right, are still struggling to offer credible alternatives in terms of policies and leadership, although Xavier Bertrand may be emerging as a possible contender after his triumphant re-election as president of the Hauts-de-France region last month. On the Left, the presidential poll numbers for Anne Hidalgo, the Socialist mayor of Paris, remain disappointing, and she has announced that she will decide about her candidacy only in the autumn of 2021. Even if she stands, she will have a hard task uniting the left, as the Greens are resurgent (they won control of Lyon in last year’s municipal elections) and the radical progressive Jean-Luc Mélenchon is also expected to run again (he performed creditably in 2017, but things are looking less promising for him this time). The right, which has still not fully recovered from the Fillon–Sarkozy debacle, continues to be divided over how to position itself in relation to Macron, and the president has skilfully exploited these fissures by drawing many of his key ministers (Bruno Le Maire at Economy and Finance, and Gérald Darmanin at the Interior) from the Républicain ranks; in some regions, the two parties have formed an alliance. All of this means that the strongest challenger to Macron will again be the far-right leader Marine Le Pen. Her Rassemblement National failed to exploit the gilets jaunes movement, but it continues to appeal to entrenched French fears about their social and economic security, and what they see as the dilution of their national identity by European integration and “Islamism”; the party has also rebranded itself as a champion of the welfare state and a defender of French laïcité (a less overt way of denigrating French citizens of Maghrebi origin). Current polls put Le Pen ahead of all Macron’s other challengers, but these numbers may change and the president cannot take his presence on the second round for granted.

Faced with an anxious and volatile electorate and a populist challenge from the Rassemblement National, Macron has already plotted his strategy for the next twelve months: tacking firmly to the right, in order to promote himself as the best guarantor not only of French public health and security but also national identity. In his homage to Bonaparte, the president tellingly observed that the emperor was one of the architects of the modern French nation, a “part of us” (“une part de nous”). This was a provocation: associating the ideal of French nationhood with a historical figure who not only restored slavery, but in his decree of June 25, 1802, banned Black and mixed-race people from entering French territory. Macron’s formula also drew a silent contrast with those who were not “part of us” – most notably France’s Muslim citizens, who have been increasingly scapegoated by the president and his ministers. Gone are the days when Macron denounced France’s “crimes against humanity” during the Algerian war, and promised not to conflate France’s five million citizens of Maghrebi origin with the tiny minority who have engaged in acts of terrorism. Under the pretext of upholding the principles of laicité, Macron has passed a law against “separatism” which is widely seen by French Muslims as a stigmatization of their culture and religious beliefs. This law will do little to tackle the roots of Islamic terrorism; the evidence suggests that the perpetrators of these crimes are social misfits rather than religious devotees; if any institution plays a decisive role in tipping them towards violence, it could be argued to be the French prison system. In a television debate with Marine Le Pen in February, the Interior Minister Darmanin (who has publicly criticized supermarkets for selling halal food) accused a visibly astonished leader of the Rassemblement National of being “too soft on Islam”. Leading LREM figures have taken very aggressive positions against the Islamic headscarf, already banned in schools; in 2019, the Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer declared that the Islamic headscarf was not “desirable in society”. After being baited on Twitter by a regional leader of the RN, LREM general secretary Stanislas Guerini withdrew the investiture of Sara Zemmahi, a young engineer standing for the June local elections in Montpellier under the LREM banner, for being officially pictured with a veil alongside her running mates. Overall, these elections were a humiliation for the ruling party, which scraped just over 10 per cent of the vote and failed to win control of any of the metropolitan regions; two-thirds of the electorate stayed away from the polls. The only consolation for the president was that the RN also underperformed, even in its strongholds such as the Provence-Côte d’Azur region.

Macron will not face an easy campaign in 2022. Incumbency is an undeniable advantage, especially in France’s hypercentralized political system where opposition leaders often struggle to achieve any visibility. It is also true that one of the notable outcomes of the June local elections was that most sitting regional chief executives – whether from the right or the left – were re-elected. But at national level, an incumbent president is more exposed than any of his challengers, and Macron’s handling of the pandemic may prove a major vulnerability. And in their daily lives French citizens are painfully aware that their public services are in a depleted state, partly through Macron’s reforms and budget cuts. Pandering to the far right will further increase Marine Le Pen’s credibility, thus assisting her long-term strategic ambition to normalize her party. There is already evidence that key elements of the lepeniste platform, with its bleak and pessimistic accompanying vision of French déclinisme, have become part of the French political mainstream: the former Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, who is hoping to run as the candidate for the Républicains, has called for a total ban on immigration from outside the EU for five years. The rot has spread to the French police: a recent study found that at least 60 per cent of officers intend to vote RN. There is also the army. Two open letters published in April and May 2021 in the conservative magazine Valeurs Actuelles by serving and retired French army officers denounced the “hordes of the banlieue” for fomenting “civil war” and trampling on France’s cultural heritage in the name of “anti-racism”. Warning that French authorities were conceding too much ground to “Islamism”, the texts hinted that the army would step in if politicians failed to restore order. The first letter was published on the anniversary of the attempted pronunciamiento by far-right military officers against president de Gaulle in April 1960, at the height of the Algerian war. Indeed the atmosphere has become so toxic that the far-right nationalist intellectual Eric Zemmour, author of the best-selling pamphlet Le suicide français, may be considering a run for the presidency in 2022.

When Macron was elected, he vowed to tackle the underlying causes of the Rassemblement National’s political successes: the polarized rhetoric corroding the national conversation, the blight of France’s small towns and rural communities, and the issues surrounding the integration of France’s ethnic minorities (racism, chronic dilapidation of the banlieues, educational underachievement and social discrimination). He has made little headway on any of these fronts. But the president’s greatest failure is an intellectual one. In the name of republican “equality”, the French still refuse to allow their statisticians officially to gather ethnic data, an aberration which has doubly unfortunate consequences: the real successes of French integration cannot be properly quantified, and the debate continues to be poisoned by demagogues. And despite Macron’s grand pledge in his speech at the Institut, echoing Napoleon, to accept and deal with everything about France’s history – “Nous assumons tout” – the public conversation about the French imperial past remains stilted. A recent study by the Fondation pour la Mémoire de l’Esclavage, the leading association campaigning for a more open discussion of France’s colonial past, has found major shortcomings in the national school curricula, notably around the ending of slavery, which continues to privilege the role of enlightened European abolitionists while ignoring the decisive acts of resistance by local men and women in French colonies. The Haitian revolution is an especially important gap here, as it also brings up the moral debts incurred by France. Haiti’s post- independence leaders were forced to compensate French slave-owners for their losses in the nineteenth century; this harsh debt crippled their economy and was only fully paid off in the mid- twentieth century. The economist Thomas Piketty estimates that the sum of 30 billion euros would be an appropriate settlement by France. Like all his predecessors, Macron has refused to engage in meaningful discussions about slavery reparations. Dismissing uncomfortable truths from the past can be unwise, especially in France, and as he prepares to face his destiny the President might reflect on this intriguing fact: all the French leaders who chose publicly to commemorate Napoleon, from Louis Philippe and Louis Napoleon in the nineteenth century to Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou more recently, came to a sticky end. The next victim of this historical jinx may prove to be Emmanuel Macron.

Sudhir Hazareesingh teaches politics at Balliol College, Oxford, and is the author of How the French Think, 2015, and Black Spartacus: The epic life of Toussaint Louverture, 2020