Emmanuel for All Seasons

The failure of the big parties seemed to confirm the analysis of Macron, Le Pen, and Mélenchon: A self-serving elite had lowered France’s productivity, hampered its ingenuity, and placed the nation on short rations of the gloire to which it is accustomed. Voters repudiated the old parties, producing a runoff between Macron and Le Pen, two populists who insisted that they were “neither of the left nor the right.” Macron easily won the center ground and took two-thirds of the vote.

Macron, like Barack Obama in 2008, took his election as a license to reshape the system for a generation. And voters certainly encouraged maximal ambition: In June’s elections to the National Assembly, they delivered a whopping majority to his new party En Marche! and its allies. The following month, he summoned legislators to the Palace of Versailles and delivered an unprecedented 90-minute speech in the style of a State of the Union address. Attacking the immobilisme of his predecessors, who include his erstwhile mentor Hollande, Macron outlined proposals to reform France’s notoriously sclerotic labor market and education system; to reduce the “spread of bureaucracy” in the European Union and the “growing skepticism that comes from that”; and to end the state of emergency, declared after the November 2015 Islamist attacks in Paris. To accelerate the legislative process, the number of members in the National Assembly would be reduced by one-third. French citizens would get an unspecified “dose” of proportional representation and more opportunity to push items onto the parliamentary agenda by petition.

“It is,” Napoleon said, “not in the French character to insult kings.” So when Mélenchon accused Macron of acting like “a pharaoh” for staging his speech at Versailles, the insult was uncharacteristic. Really, Macron was acting in the tradition of Napoleon Bonaparte and Charles de Gaulle, a captain who became an emperor and a colonel who became a president. The constitution of the Fifth Republic gives the president quasi-imperial powers. The French do not object in principle to their use. In this, Macron’s moves were not a break from tradition but in keeping with it.

“Our history has made us children of the state, and not of law, as in the United States, or of maritime trade, as in England,” Macron theorized in his pre-election autobiography, which bore the Gallic title Révolution. “It is both a splendid heritage and a dangerous one.”

In the last six months, Macron has demonstrated the splendid and dangerous aspects of his executive powers. He has begun his promised combat with regulation, taxation, and vested interest. He has also demonstrated a peevish sensitivity to criticism and a highhanded coldness as unsuited to populism as it is damaging to his goal of reunifying a divided and demoralized electorate.

In October, Macron cut France’s wealth tax, first imposed by the Socialist president François Mitterrand in 1982, and imposed a flat-rate 30 percent tax on capital gains. To balance deregulatory and pro-business policies at home, Macron has demanded protectionist concessions from the European Union. In early November, a poll pronounced that Macron was “the president of the rich.”

This populist blend of pro-business deregulation at home and pro-labor protectionism abroad is not the only resemblance between Macron and Donald Trump. Both presidents emerged from the top of society but campaigned against it. Macron is an énarque, a graduate of the École nationale d’administration, France’s high-prestige school of government. Before serving as Hollande’s minister for economy, industry, and digital affairs, he worked as an investment banker for the Rothschild Group, no less.

While Trump antagonizes the affluent left with ostentatious philistinism, Macron shows a market-oriented contempt for the weak. He speaks of les gens qui réussissent and les gens qui ne sont rien, “those who succeed” and “those who are nothing.” He dismisses dissent as “cynicism” and objectors as les fainéants, “the lazy.” France, he says, must choose between le monde ancien and le monde nouveau, the old order and the new.

* *

In Paris, people kept giving me the same advice: If you want to understand Macron’s plans for France, go to Station F in the quartier de la Gare. There you will begin to grasp the new president’s dreams of a digital, entrepreneurial, innovative France.

Station F is southeast of central Paris, across the Seine and behind the Gare d’Austerlitz in the 13th arrondissement. The quartier de la Gare, as the name admits, is one of those 19th-century neighborhoods made and ruined by the railway. The trains pulling in and out of the Gare d’Austerlitz circulate grit into the surrounding streets. The tracks to and from the station run parallel to the river and cut off most of the area from the Seine and central Paris. Recently, the waterfront sliver to the north of the tracks has been redeveloped for prestige buildings—a hotel, the Bibliothèque Nationale, university buildings. Rather than elevate the neighborhood, these developments have only reinforced its geographical isolation.

Those developments are also a reminder that vast economic ambition has been a hallmark of many of Macron’s predecessors. In another age—the 1970s and ’80s, to be precise—the French government embraced the idea of state-driven innovation. It completed the world’s largest purpose-built business district—the skyscraper-punctuated neighborhood known as La Défense, just west of central Paris. It launched a pioneering computer network. While Americans still hefted printed telephone directories, the French had the Minitel, a computerized listing with a video terminal small enough to nestle on the phone table. Since then, France, like the rest of Europe, has fallen behind in tech innovation.

Can Station F arrest the decline? Descending from the elevated Métro line at Quai de la Gare station, you see Turkish kebab shops, a Communist party shopfront, and government offices, but no signs for Station F. This is not happenstance. The Press page on Station F’s website has no telephone numbers or email addresses, only enthusiastic press releases. The Contact page has a picture of a cat and the words “Send us some love,” but it is not cuddly. It is a Contact page without contact details.

Station F was built in the 1920s as a freight-handling outpost of the Gare d’Austerlitz. Now, a telecom billionaire named Xavier Niel has turned it into “the world’s biggest startup campus,” a 366,000-square-foot space housing “a thousand startups,” about 2,600 employees, and “even a post office, to see what came before emails.”

Station F’s publicists describe it as “the only startup campus gathering a whole entrepreneurial ecosystem under one roof.” This may be true, if only because the benign climate obviates the need to roof over Silicon Valley. California is never far from Station F’s hive mind. The whole place is an artificial simulation of the California state of mind, an attempt to hothouse the French equivalents of the American tech giants. Station F is one of three such sites in the city, all apparently named for nightclubs from the 1990s. (The related sites, Cargo and Spark, are sponsored by the city of Paris and Microsoft, respectively.)

The front half of Station F is called the Share Zone. The rear, separated by two glass walls, is the Create Zone. The roof is a single-span concrete arc of surprising delicacy, and the skylights that run along the center of the roof suffuse the space with cool light. You can see down the entire length of the space, a deep vista of beanbag chairs and potted plants. Double stacks of white-painted shipping containers run down both sides. Each container has had its end replaced by a glass wall, allowing people on the floor to watch the Sharing of ideas between the conceptual upper class of Creators and carefully vetted visitors from the Outside. I look up and see a large group squeezed into one such container; it is as though IKEA has gone into the people-smuggling business.

A black-suited young man sits at the front desk as the Sharers swipe in. A large sign reads Bonjour.

“I’ve come to see Station F,” I say.

“No.”

“Can I speak to a press officer?”

“No. There is no press officer here.”

“Can I speak with one on the phone?”

“No. She has no telephone. We use only text and Internet. You have to be invited. You put your name into our computer, called Hal, and then maybe we let you in.”

I remember Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey and HAL, the computer that takes over from the humans.

“Have you seen A Space Odyssey?”

“No.”

Back outside, the supplicants stand around smoking. Some are keying themselves up for meetings, others trying to work out how it went. They could be auditioning for a tech musical called Zuckerberg! None of them uses the café by the door. This may be because, like the Press and Contact pages of Station F’s website, the café’s design superficially appears to welcome, but functions as a repellent. It offers only soup, tea, and coffee. By French standards it is not a café at all, more like catering for rescue workers after a natural disaster.

The café also looks like IKEA, down to the soiled cushions and beanbags. Another glass wall shows the neighboring compartment, in which a visibly awkward group of middle-aged white men in business suits are being counseled by a youth in a denim shirt before a whiteboard reading Savoir-Faire.

“This is only the outer circle,” a petitioner tells me. A tech consultant from Paris, he lives and works in London. “I like the layout,” he says, “very Californian.” He nods towards the Create zone, where some old colleagues are working. “The heavy work goes on back there. You can’t get in, and you can’t speak to anyone.”

“Philippe” has also come from London. He too is encouraged by what he sees.

“There’s been a shift in recent years from a Paris-centric society,” he says. “Macron’s election was the necessary spark, to light a wave of French business and innovation that had already been building up. As a country, we’re able to merge high levels of technical and academic training with a philosophical core of values. We value positive societal impact alongside profit.”

Macron hopes that when the French tech economy closes the innovation gap, it will also close the social gap. Station F’s recruiters solicit Founders, companies who will rent spaces and fund startups. Station F also seeks individual “Fighters,” the “killer entrepreneurs who simply have not had the same opportunities as the rest.” These “might be from an underprivileged background, an immigrant or a refugee.” The people I met at Station F are not Fighters, but seasoned and multilingual entrepreneurs—the kind of people François Hollande chased to London by raising taxes on “faceless finance,” people Macron now wants to woo back.

“There’s currently a tax war going on around the world, Trump’s tax bill being an excellent example,” Philippe says. “So France is undertaking the required measures to be competitive.” France, he points out, is already benefiting from Brexit-related uncertainty. “The current environment of low interest rates is promoting increased investment. In recent quarters, France has overtaken the U.K. for the first time in venture funding. And the state is deploying numerous initiatives, like the French Tech label that gives startups increased visibility and access to resources.”

Around the corner, crowds of Sharers take lunch in what must be the Californian way, grilled cheese and soup from food trucks. On a bench, a team of young consultants gamely nibble sandwiches filled with Tex-Mex sludge. They are advising “established companies” in the insurance business how to foster white-collar “diversity” by working with startups.

I enter the lobby that connects the Share Zone to the Create Zone, but a security guard runs up, arms waving. We are standing between two glass walls, but there is, it seems, nothing to see—other than the interface of government money and digital dreams.

* *

The French buzzword du jour is désintermédiation. The term comes from banking and describes the elimination of intermediaries between producers and consumers. Macron has applied this concept to the press. Previous presidents tolerated constant surveillance by a free-for-all pack of reporters; previous press secretaries sought to manipulate it. Macron, however, uses a “pool” of one news reporter, one cameraman, and one radio reporter. Opportunities for questions are reduced. So are opportunities for catching the president in the kind of “hot mike” errors and casual admissions that might dent his media image.

“The disintermediation strategy is a way for Macron to involve himself directly with the French without passing through the prism of media,” says Jean-Daniel Lévy of the polling company Harris Interactive. “The idea behind this is that the media could deform some of his message and that therefore it would be better to interact directly with the people.”

In France as in every other Western democracy, the established parties have failed to protect middle-class workers. The media, while priding itself as a watchdog, is seen as a lapdog.

“What’s striking today,” Lévy observes, “is the absence of confidence among the French with regard to the media. There is strong criticism of journalism. There’s also an idea that it could be done differently.” Macron did not pioneer désintermédiation in French politics. “Look at what happened before Macron,” Lévy says. “Mélenchon, the candidate of the left, created Le Média, a YouTube channel. There’s now a global sense of creating your own content as you form your political frame of reference.”

Access to the Create Zone of Station F, as I discovered, is strictly controlled. Tech people may find virtue in the “disruption” of other people’s businesses, but they seem very keen not to be disrupted themselves. But this is still France. Beyond the food trucks, dozens of Creators flagrantly disregard their health and the security of all our futures. It is illegal to smoke indoors, so they take their cigarette breaks outside, secure zone or not.

“Do you want to know about Xavier Niel?” a young Creator asks, referring to Station F’s creator. He looks around nervously, as if he has just given away the identity of a Bond villain. His face is gray from too much coffee, tobacco, and refined pastry.

“Not really.” I explain that I have come from the land of giants, of Zuckerberg and Jobs. We have many Xavier Niels, and the streets of our coastal cities are jammed with food trucks, their flanks streaked in Sriracha sauce. I want to know how Station F works.

“Security is really tight in there,” he says. He has been working here for a month, and the excitement is wearing off. “We can’t even have visitors in the Create Zone,” he complains. “We have to register them, then meet them in the Share Zone.” He shakes his head and lights another cigarette. “Of course the press officer is here. They just don’t want anyone asking questions.”

Any of the young petitioners by the door to the Share Zone could walk down the side of Station F and pitch their ideas to the Creators during their cigarette breaks. None of them does. Instead, they wait, orderly and compliant, in the rain. Is this the old Gallic rigidity or a new variation, the docility of a generation trained in online protocols, passwords, and gaming environments, where correct procedures are rewarded with entry to the next level, and unsatisfactory responses lead not to disruption, but exclusion?

* *

The third phase of Station F is still under construction. Behind the Create Zone, where Facebook has its Startup Garage Paris (“to empower data-driven startups in France”) and ex-president Hollande fiddles with the WiFi codes for his new foundation, there will be apartments, or “dorms,” for the winners, with a sports complex and a restaurant in two ironically converted railway carriages. Once this phase is operational, there will be no need ever to leave the campus.

In La Nouvelle Gare, a café by the gate to Station F, a few old people are eating lunch at the interior tables. On the terrace, similarly underemployed teenagers are drinking sodas and smoking. A poster by the bar depicts Vermeer’s Astronomer, stroking the planet as if anticipating globalization.

“C’est bon,” says the patron when I ask about Station F. “Good for the quartier, good for the 13th, good for la France.” Good for business, too. As we talk, a couple of Station F habitués come in for lunch. But will they still come in once Station F’s on-site restaurant is open? How far will France’s digital wealth trickle down?

Similar claims for revitalization and gentrification were once made for the Quatre Temps development at La Défense in the 1980s and for its City of London rival, Canary Wharf. But the wealth generated by those developments has not trickled down to the neighbors. The low-income housing of the Paris suburbs persists in a parallel world to La Défense. Tower Hamlets, in the shadow of the City of London, is still one of the poorest boroughs in Western Europe. In San Francisco, tech money has slowly expelled the poorer residents from the city.

Macron wants to change the French mentality, to cure the French of what he calls “les passions tristes,” negative thoughts. But Station F seems instead to be incubating the worst traits of Silicon Valley, paranoia and passive aggression. Once, France’s “people who are nothing” were limited by the glass ceiling. Now, they will be excluded by the glass wall, more translucent than transparent.

I went to Paris wondering if Macron was the Tony Blair to Nicolas Sarkozy’s Thatcher, a faux-radical who inherits and extends the other party’s market reforms. I returned with the impression that Macron is an Emmanuel for all seasons, a post-ideological insider who wants to replace one unaccountable elite with another and strengthen the state with the resources of digital technocracy.

“Is it good that political authorities like Macron communicate directly with the French?” Jean-Daniel Lévy asks. “Or is it a shame that the media can no longer play their part, which is to transmit or to give a perspective on results and debates?”

Dominic Green, a fellow of the Royal Historical Society, is a frequent contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD.