The rumor had been circulating for several months, it became reality on December 15. Frédéric Michel, the Head of State’s “special communications and strategy advisor”, announced his departure from the Élysée, in the midst of a political crisis caused by the Immigration bill. The man, supposed to tell the French the story of a country mending fractures and laying the foundations of a political legacy, lasted barely a year and a half before returning to the private sector. What a thankless mission! Combining with the future a story that we struggle to tell day by day… For a more than half-hearted result: many, including those in the president’s entourage, have never stopped worrying about the absence of a coherent narrative from Emmanuel Macron, since the start of this mandate.
Last May, the weak signal came from the government. One year after the re-election of Emmanuel Macron, 24 communications advisors to ministers or secretaries of state left their positions, as explained Le Figaro. Fatigue… and loss of meaning. “The slightest interview, the slightest bill is restricted by Matignon and the Élysée. When you are a young advisor and any attempt at political creativity is crushed, this job is useless. It is not by slowing down everyone that the message conveyed will be coherent! rants a former seasoned ministerial advisor, who left at the same time. It’s worrying, and it allows others, like Marine Le Pen, to impose their narrative.” In those around the “PR”, according to the established acronym, we half-heartedly acquiesce. And these storytelling professionals point to the absence of an incipit – Emmanuel Macron’s non-existent campaign for his re-election – as responsible for the difficulties in writing the five-year history.
However, exercise is essential. Because to govern, the new Prince must create stories. Or create this story. Bring it to life through presidential and government measures. Deploy it in all political matters. And make it last over time. It is of course the Élysée which gives the there of this rhythm. The note emanates from campaign promises, materialized throughout the five-year term by proposals decreed by the President of the Republic. Around the latter, spin doctors and other communications strategists stand ready to unravel the story. Every time they travel, speak or make an Elysian announcement, they are hard at work. During the “briefs off”, these informal meetings called “off microphone” with journalists preceding a publicized meeting of their champion. For the speeches of the Head of State too, where the latter pronounces the words that his pen has put on paper. The work makes it possible to assemble the Elysian action into a coherent whole. To embed, as much as possible, the mandate in collective history.
“Are we creating a narrative by fighting debt and unemployment?”
“Stories are essential, analyzes Jonathan Guémas, Emmanuel Macron’s “speech advisor” from 2019 to July 2022. It’s not communication, it’s politics! Take ecology, for example: you “You won’t have an impact without convincing people to change their habits. You won’t have an impact without a story. Politics is a competition to assert one’s interpretation of reality.” It’s all a matter of perception. Since, in the eyes of communicators, politics is a battle of stories.
“Are we still capable of covering the nudity of power with the veils of the sacred which lead a people to intimately consent to obedience?” asked psychoanalyst Roland Gori in 2020 at a time of fragmentation of cultural identities, in an article published in the social sciences journal Cities. Questions answered by the philosopher Pierre-Henri Tavoillot, author of How to govern a people-king? (Ed. Odile Jacob, 2019). “Today there is a triple difficulty linked to globalization, media coverage and the complexity of the files. And the multiplication of stories within society makes it more difficult than in the past to structure an epic.” If attacks and international conflicts have resurfaced since the presidency of François Hollande, the tragedy has largely disappeared from the five-year term. “Do we become a nation by fighting against debt and unemployment?” pretends to question Bernard Poignant, special advisor to François Hollande. François Mitterrand himself would have predicted these difficulties, according to a famous phrase attributed to him. “I am the last of the great presidents […]. Because of Europe, because of globalization, nothing will be the same again […]. After me, there will only be financiers and accountants.”
“When the monster of the event arises”
However, it is in this context that narration professionals attempt to write the five-year destiny. The work is therefore often Sisyphean: those close to Emmanuel Macron, but also to his predecessors, François Hollande and Nicolas Sarkozy, are unanimous. “The head of state has his nose to the grindstone and must look at the end of the road. For us, it was a headache, we corrected the situation daily,” remembers Franck Louvrier, “cons’com’” of the last right-wing president. Bernard Poignant says nothing else. “It’s hard, though, to keep a story going over time.” Same story for Jonathan Guémas: “The great difficulty is to remain coherent when the monster of the event arises.”
And if there is a universal rule for each of the tenants of the Élysée, it is the arrival of the “event”. It is cataclysmic, sometimes shaking campaign promises. Consecrates the hiatus between the theory and exercise of power. “Faced with the crisis, we are changing our approach,” summarizes Franck Louvrier. The event sometimes results from global unrest: Nicolas Sarkozy, champion of the value of work and its deregulation, left the Élysée with nearly 800,000 additional unemployed people; the fault, in part, of the global financial crisis of 2008.
The event arises episodically from a national drama: François Hollande, “normal president” has, over the course of his five-year term, become a warrior president determined to respond to the worst attacks committed in France, notably following those of November 13 2015. Finally, the event often emanates from a political crisis: a year later, in the face of demonstrations, it is the promise of constitutionalization of social dialogue that this same president buries on the altar of Myriam’s Labor law El Khomri.
For six years, Emmanuel Macron has tasted the experience. Yellow vest crisis, Covid-19 pandemic, war in Ukraine and Israeli-Palestinian conflict, massive demonstrations against pension reform, terrorist attacks… The president, a self-proclaimed revolutionary in 2017 with a “progressive” flavor, was forced to reconsider the copy of his epic. Some reversals are symbolic. This is evidenced by his clear concern not to want to create a rupture, during the presentation, last September, of ecological planning. During the speech in Marseille, on the eve of the second round of the 2022 presidential election, the candidate had nevertheless promised a “paradigm change” in this area. If the presidential campaign is an incipit, the Event gives the impression of a transformation into a preface, signed by another hand.
When the story is constructed after the fact
Seizing the event could, however, pay off. “For there to be history in a five-year term, there needs to be History,” defends Pierre-Henri Tavoillot. And the whole challenge of a president is to maintain the continuum of this collective History by adding his touch. It is a particular trait of France, where heads of state preside under the watchful eye of History.” The quest for transcendence at the head of state is not the prerogative of everyone. In 2016, while the former director general of the World Trade Organization was trying to convince Angela Merkel and François Hollande to “re-enchant” Europe, the German Chancellor boasted an eloquent statement: “I am not not a poet,” she said. Etymologically, the poet is the one who builds, and leaves ultimately its trace in History.
French presidents try to become poets. At the end of their mandate, the exercise of power is recounted in a book: the memoirs. The obligatory exercise where the president replays the history that he thinks he has lost on paper. The story is re-explained, justified, magnified. It sold several hundred thousand copies – success in bookstores varied. Last August, Nicolas Sarkozy published the second volume of his, The Time of Fighting (Fayard, 2023), 57,000 copies sold in six weeks, honorable score but down compared to the previous volume, The Time of Storms, sold 121,000 copies over the same period. “These shared moments, which many have kept in memory, constitute a part of our common heritage, our identity, our buried memories, but remain linked to moments of each of our private lives”, he wrote there, aged eleven after leaving office. What if we finally had to leave the Élysée to write the story of a mandate?
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