Not for the first time, Americans appear to be slightly confused about events in France. The mass demonstrations that began as a protest against President Emmanuel Macron’s “climate-change” taxes gave comfort to conservatives here, and not without reason. The new levies on gasoline and diesel fuel—already steep in France—were seen as a sop to rich environmentalists at the expense of the working and middle classes. But then extremists on the left and right joined the fracas and, while taxes remained the focus of contention, the marches devolved into riots and vandalism against the established order, against modernism, elitism, globalism, whatever.
It was 1968 again. With a difference, however: Whereas in 1968 generational tensions in France were played out in a bipolar Cold War environment, the present turmoil is plainly a reaction to the abstract ideal of European unity. In a nationalist moment Macron is one French politician, among many, who seems to be most comfortable in a multinational world.
In that sense, things could not be worse for the 41-year-old banker-technocrat who, a little over a year ago, was elected France’s youngest president in history by a wide margin. With his impeccable credentials, boyish good looks, and older wife, Macron was at once glamorous, impressive, hip, and a feminist hero. Even his new, self-invented political party—La République En Marche!—seemed designed to appear to be all things to all Frenchmen.
But it was a delicate balancing act. Macron has managed to enjoy amicable, even productive, relations with our own mercurial president. At the same time, as his colleagues in London (Theresa May) and Berlin (Angela Merkel) began to falter, he crowned himself champion of the international order against a rising tide of nationalism, in Europe and across the Atlantic.
The fuel tax shattered that particular illusion. The French right is weary and wary of being governed by arbitrary, affluent bureaucrats in Brussels, and the French left is customarily in revolt against the powers that be. Whatever constitutes the French center is furious with Macron for losing control. The beleaguered president is now the object of bipartisan anger among people who resent global norms, distrust the cultural and political elites, embrace national sovereignty, and dream of destroying the power of finance and capital.
That instinct, of course, is called populism and, in Europe as in America, seems to draw strength from both sides of the barricades. The general assumption is that the populist wave that propelled Donald Trump into the White House, animated the Brexit vote in Britain, and has taken root in governments in Eastern Europe and Italy is an “irritable mental gesture”—in Lionel Trilling’s famous description of conservatism—that will soon be adjusted by sensible people.
I am not so sure. As we have learned in our own country, the post-1945 international order in commerce and trade has been immensely beneficial to the economy. But the benefits have not been enjoyed by all, and global markets sometimes disrupt domestic tranquility. Immigration is a case in point: The growth of the economy in recent decades has required the importation of hardworking, low-paid workers—who in turn have displaced American wage-earners. Man does not live by bread alone and, in the fullness of time, economic logic takes a toll on the social order.
In Europe, by contrast, the curtain on the drama parted suddenly. Violence in the Middle East has generated an army of refugees/migrants, and while Europe’s political leaders—for varying reasons—were happy to welcome them, the European public was less sanguine.
This might have played out in separate ways, depending on the special circumstances of particular countries. But Europe, as a whole, seems to have arrived at a crossroads of sorts about the E.U. project, especially its undemocratic evolution. Just as the Germans were wrestling with their consciences about refugees, the British were debating their own internal union and growing discontent about their governors in Brussels. Scandinavia was awakening to the cost of welfare states, Greek insolvency had strained the neighborhood resources, and countries once captive to the Soviet Union were swiftly rediscovering their national identities.
France, champion of Charles de Gaulle’s vision of European unity from the Atlantic to the Urals as well as Germany’s faithful E.U. partner, might have enjoyed some immunity from the virus. But events have a way of transforming placid landscapes: French market forces, too, have produced inequality along with wealth, and restive, segregated immigrant communities have undermined civil order in French cities.
It is a curious irony that Germany, a historic patchwork of ethnic states and principalities that remained disunited until 1871 and was fractured for four-and-a-half decades after World War II, has been remarkably cohesive in its modern incarnation. Yet France, a singular civilization since the fall of the Roman Empire, has been surprisingly unstable since its famous revolution (1789). In the 1930s, political order was shaken and weakened by conflict at the outer edges of left and right, and as recently as 1958—even, arguably, in 1968—France hovered dangerously close to civil war.
This does not mean that Emmanuel Macron is destined to lose his office, much less his head, or that the populist wave in the world is an irresistible force. The global order and institutions constructed after 1945 have proved to be resilient, and uprisings fail as much as they succeed. But human inventions don’t run forever and tend to grow rigid and self-satisfied with time. History is a series of centrifugal forces, shaking and shattering the plates when we least expect it.
