At that time, Emmanuel Macron was already very concerned about his image. At that time, he had not yet mastered the art of dodging the paparazzi. On August 26, 2014, a young man unknown to the general public rushed back from Le Touquet. He had just been appointed Minister of the Economy in the Valls government. When he arrived at his Parisian home, he immediately realized that he was expected there. Photographers were outside his home, but he intended to take care of his first public appearance and especially not appear like that at night, in his vacation clothes. How to protect yourself from a bad photo? You called the police, don’t leave. It was 11:30 p.m., he called the Minister of the Interior. Bernard Cazeneuve was the well-mannered type: let him come and spend the night in the Beauvau apartment reserved for passing guests. He would then have time to collect some clothes and present himself at the Council of Ministers in the appropriate manner.
Late in the evening, in the ministry library, here are the two men talking. They got to know each other when the deputy secretary general of the Elysée invited himself to the weekly meeting that Bernard Cazeneuve, then Minister of European Affairs, had gotten into the habit of organizing with an advisor to the presidency of the Republic to review the files. And since Macron was interested in them and wanted to take them into his own hands, he often invited himself. There was a lot of laughter, in dialogues sometimes signed Michel Audiard.
This time, the hour is serious, Bernard Cazeneuve becomes a little solemn: “Beware of the reflection of your image and never forget who named you.” The two ignore it at this moment, and this is how their complicity will expire. The beginnings of the next day will mark the end of their “authentically fraternal relationship”, according to the strong expression that the socialist will later use. On Wednesday, Emmanuel Macron enters the courtyard of the Elysée. “Like the heliotrope confronted with the sun, he naturally turned towards the photographers, with the irrepressible fascination of the one who visualizes the image at the very moment the photographer takes it, with the conviction that it will be to his advantage”, Bernard Cazeneuve will later write in Every day counts. Soon he will observe how his young colleague managed to steal the show by arriving with a beard several days old at the government’s New Year’s ceremony for the president, an old communication trick that his fifteen-year-old elder, deep down, despises.
Emmanuel Macron’s attack
There is what he despises, there is what he loathes. François Hollande’s last Prime Minister, he cultivates loyalty as much as his roses – a question of personal aesthetics. Macron’s betrayal is the bouquet. A transgression? You’re right, Emmanuel. An aggression. He will make a point of honour of turning off the light at Matignon, when the Minister of the Economy will seek maximum spotlight by slamming the door of Bercy to launch himself into the presidential adventure, even before the outgoing head of state has announced his decision.
In a few months, Bernard Cazeneuve has lost his former Macron. The one who likes to feel “terribly vintage” will quickly hate what the herald of the “new world” conveys: vague values, a vision of the country that is confused with personal ambition. Sometimes, in front of his own people, he dreams and mocks: “Why not found a party called ‘En arrière’ and whose motto would be ‘Only the old world is new’?”
Cazeneuve reproaches his colleague from the Economy for taking, for example on migration issues, positions with the sole aim of flattering an electorate, he did not like that he rushed to Nice after the terrible attack of July 14, 2016 alongside the mayor Christian Estrosi, who strongly implicates Cazeneuve. Explaining himself away from prying eyes and discreet ears? Emmanuel Macron is no longer really there, “he fled these exchanges”, the Norman will note.
Bernard Cazeneuve doesn’t like anything about Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 presidential campaign. “The genius of the new politics is to borrow the best recipes from the old ones without it ever coming to light,” he will say. He hates the way the candidate plays with words as if he were playing with a ball, when in his eyes, and especially his ears, the expressions of political leaders must convey ideas, concepts, and references. Colonization, “a crime against humanity,” as Macron said during a visit to Algiers one day in February 2017? “We cannot use words to seduce this or that fraction of the country that we aspire to bring back to us.”
“The Mexican is Emmanuel!”
April 21, 2017. The day before, an attack cost the life of a police officer on the Champs-Elysées. In two days, Emmanuel Macron will come out on top in the first round of the presidential election, in an ideal position to win two weeks later against Marine Le Pen. He calls Bernard Cazeneuve: he wants to know the nature and level of the terrorist threat. Then he addresses more personal questions, asks his interlocutor what he plans to do. The Prime Minister intends to lead the legislative elections on behalf of the PS and then step back. On May 14, he attends the inauguration ceremony of the new president. “Be careful, from now on, the Mexican is Emmanuel!”, he whispers in Brigitte Macron’s ear in the ballroom of the Elysée Palace. Audiard, the return. During the TGV journeys to Brussels for the European summits and during the nights of negotiations, François Hollande, his deputy secretary general Emmanuel Macron and Minister Cazeneuve spent hours and hours side by side. Because he was the president, word of Tontons flingueurs, Hollande had earned the nickname of “the Mexican”. End of an era.
Emmanuel Macron walks on water, Bernard Cazeneuve crosses the desert – that doesn’t make it easy to meet. The first five-year term is an ordeal for the socialist. He doesn’t appreciate the action taken, judging from dawn that only the right is flattered. “A power that got elected by claiming the left of Michel Rocard, but which governed like the right of Guizot”, he will say in 2023. Surpassing is not his cup of tea either: “I saw the political maneuver, in its chemically pure form, creating an ambiguity that had all the virtues of a slow poison.”
One day, he had lunch with Jean-Michel Blanquer, the new Minister of Education, who was full of admiration for Emmanuel Macron (he would come back to that…). At the mere mention of the president, he stiffened. Appearances rarely lie. In 2022, the same Blanquer would be replaced by Pap Ndiaye. Regarding this succession between two ministers with opposing ideologies, Cazeneuve pointed out: “I don’t know what the president’s thoughts are on the Republic.” No less. Suffice it to say that when the Head of State approached him in February 2019 to offer him a place on the Constitutional Council, he declined immediately.
Cazeneuve, tomorrow’s solution or incarnation of the old world?
Seven years have passed. 2017-2024, number of one-on-one meetings between the two men: zero. A presidential trip to Cherbourg in 2019, a city where Cazeneuve was mayor for eleven years, that’s all. But it’s not nothing. Between the two angry accomplices, that day, something is repaired, a little. Emmanuel Macron is in a playful mood, he offers his elder his juicy and bawdy stories that he likes to tell in private. Cazeneuve, suddenly, feels lighter: the president is back on the same footing with him as when they were friends. “A day of genuine laughter where Macron wanted to show me that he had not forgotten the happy days”, reports the former socialist on his return.
On March 6, the President received his two predecessors, François Hollande and then Nicolas Sarkozy, to discuss the war in Ukraine. At nightfall, outside of his schedule, he welcomed Bernard Cazeneuve. The man was marked by a terrible ordeal, the illness of his wife who died on June 2. During this period, the Macrons were considerate, present, and precious. “It was very friendly on his part, I was touched by it, he didn’t have to do it,” the former Prime Minister confided to a mutual friend.
Wednesday, August 28, at 5 p.m., Bernard Cazeneuve had still not had direct contact with the president. But neither of them has a failing memory. The French do not want to “always see the same faces,” Emmanuel Macron told anyone who would listen in 2017. Even then, Bernard Cazeneuve had trouble accepting this kind of talk. Especially from someone who, during Hollande’s five-year term, had been “in charge for more than four years.” “What characterizes transgression is that it authorizes everything, especially what is inconceivable,” the Norman would sting.
Becoming tomorrow’s solution after having been the ultimate incarnation of the old world? The story is teasing, except that it doesn’t make Emmanuel Macron laugh. Appointing Bernard Cazeneuve to Matignon is not even going back to square one, it is reducing, symbolically in any case, Macronism to a parenthesis. This is one of the reasons, it seems, that makes the head of state hesitate. Because otherwise, they no longer have to discover each other. “They’re like exes,” even suggests a close friend of the head of state. They have characters that are complete opposites. One day, in L’Express (March 9, 2016), Emmanuel Macron suggested what Audiard might think of him: “Happy are the cracked, because they will let the light through.” Bernard Cazeneuve seeks the Light in the classics rather than in the cracked. If the president makes him his fifth Prime Minister, the two know what to expect from the other. You don’t take sausages to Frankfurt.
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