On Sunday, in the pretty village of Noyers-sur-Serein, in Burgundy, the mayor, wearing her sash of office, presided over the voting in the Presidential election from behind a table set up in the stone town hall. She was flanked by two women, one of whom checked names off a voter roll. As the town’s citizens filed in—three hundred and eighty out of four hundred and sixty-three who were registered to vote—they politely greeted the officials. After being ticked off the roll, each walked over to a table on which there were two stacks of folded paper ballots, one for Emmanuel Macron and the other for Marine Le Pen. The voters dutifully picked up ballots from both stacks before going into one of the two curtained booths, where they marked the ballot they favored and discarded the other in one of two plastic trash bins. The ritual, as the officials explained to me, is aimed at reinforcing the appearance of voter open-mindedness up to the very last, and to avoid influencing potentially undecided voters in the room.
In the end, the votes from Noyers uncannily reflected the over-all national tally: a hundred and ninety-nine votes for Macron, a hundred and twenty for Le Pen, and forty-three blank ballots.
After watching the solemn ritual of voting in Noyers, I headed up, by train, to Paris, where Macron’s held a victory celebration at the Louvre on Sunday night that was Gallic in its grandiloquence. An hour or so after the electoral results were made public, the new President-elect of France entered the magnificent esplanade of the museum—alone and on foot. A delighted exclamation of surprise erupted from the crowd of well-wishers awaiting him, his approach cinematically reproduced on four giant screens. As he strode purposefully through the great stone emptiness, his face carefully illuminated and his shadow thrown long upon the noble ramparts, his heels made a percussive staccato rhythm against the strains of Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” The moment seemed to go on and on.
When Macron finally stepped up to the stage that had been erected in front of I. M. Pei’s glass pyramid, the crowd roared its approval with gusto and waved tricolor flags. He walked up to a microphone set on a podium draped in the red-white-and-blue colors of France. After thanking the crowd for being there, he said, “You won. France won.”
In a ten-minute speech, Macron reassured the French people that he would try to be a President to all of them; to those who had voted for his right-wing rival, Marine Le Pen—thirty-four per cent of the electorate—he said that he was “mindful of their anger,” and he added, tactfully, that they had his “respect,” and that he would do everything in his power to insure that they would “never feel the need to vote for the extremes again.” (His mention of Le Pen elicited a chorus of boos, but otherwise the atmosphere was merry.)
The event ended with Macron’s family and closest supporters climbing onstage to join him. They included his wife, Brigitte, who is twenty-four years his senior, her children from her previous marriage, and her grandchildren. After assuring his audience that he would “serve them with love,” Macron and his retinue vanished. After Macron left the Louvre, a d.j. appeared onstage, and there was music. This time, a performance seeming to have more in common with the Eurovision Song Contest than an august Presidential event, a troupe of scantily clad women wearing red-plastic monster masks gyrated onstage.
There was, throughout the evening, an odd sense of ahistorical detachment from the issues that challenge France, and the new President. Immediately after Macron’s win, Cris Cab, an American singer, had come onto the stage to sing a few songs, including Sting’s “An Englishman in New York”—the lyrics of which he changed awkwardly to “An Englishman in Paris”—and, when he was done, he shouted, “Congratulations, Emmanuel! Congratulations, Paris! I love you guys!”
Even Marine Le Pen, having suffered a considerable defeat, seemed spirited. After giving her concession speech, across town, in the Chalet du Lac, a legendary tearoom and dance hall that she had hired for the night, Le Pen was seen dancing to the strains of the Village People’s “Y.M.C.A.” along with some of her supporters, apparently resigned to the fact that they wouldn’t, after all, be rescuing France from the clutches of a dictatorially multicultural Europe Union.
On Monday, French reality resumed its brooding normalcy. In Le Monde, the prominent essayist Raphaël Glucksmann warned about the need to overcome the divisions that still polarize France, writing, “We have avoided clinical death but the disease remains.” In an interview with Radio France, the left-wing philosopher Régis Debray was churlish about Macron’s victory, saying, “Emmanuel Macron is the product of Americanization, of postmodernism; the primacy of the image,” and he warned that, while Macron may have been a necessary “lifeboat” to save France from Le Pen, he should not be regarded as an “admiral’s flagship.” Later, over lunch in a Saint-Germaine restaurant, Debray conceded that, despite his misgivings about Macron’s Americanized “business” style, the President-elect was clever and seemed aware of his own inadequacies. He might yet be able to find the political tools necessary to govern France.
The French political choreography continued, as well, on Monday. Under gray and chilly morning skies, Macron today went to the Arc de Triomphe with François Hollande, whom he is replacing. In a ceremony to mark the seventy-second anniversary of the end of the Second World War, the two men laid a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and relit its eternal flame. French television commentators covering the event observed, benignly, that the ritual represented a tradition of “Republican continuity.”
If Le Pen had won yesterday’s elections, “continuity” would surely not have been the word to describe the atmosphere at the Arc de Triomphe. The France Culture radio journalist Frédéric Martel told me that, while it remained an open question whether Macron would be able to effectively govern (the outcome of next month’s legislative elections will determine that), he was fairly confident about France’s political stability for the near future. “I think it’s safe to say we’ve been saved from the extremes of left and right for another five years, at least.”