Civilisation’s last line of defence runs through the Élysée Palace. Emmanuel Macron has been lambasted by his opponents for necking a beer with Toulouse rugby players to celebrate their victory over La Rochelle in the Top 14 final. The video of le Président chugging down the offending brew has got mustard up the noses of French legislators across the political spectrum.
The Times reports that Socialist senator Laurence Rossignol condemned Macron for ‘a macho cliché’ while Gilbert Collard, an MEP for the far-right Reconquête, dismissed Macron’s actions as ‘showing off’. Green deputy Sandrine Rousseau accused the president of engaging in ‘toxic masculinity’. Far be it from me to tell my granny how to suck les oeufs but if you’re French and yet somehow a booze-hating puritan, you’re doing it wrong.
Macron is in good company when it comes to politicos cracking open a brewski in public. The late Bob Hawke, prime minister of Australia in the Eighties, was famed for his beer-sculling abilities, once downing two pints in 11 seconds. So much so that he couldn’t go to the cricket without punters swarming him with great foaming goblets and cheering him on as he put away another ale in record time. Barack Obama was so fond of craft beer that, in 2011, he became the first US president to make his own home brew in the White House. Angela Merkel was incapable of electioneering without throwing back a stein or two. Seriously, check out the sheer volume of German election pics on Getty Images that are just Angie demolishing a Weihenstephaner while outlining her tax reform plans.
Beer is a true leveller, bringing the powerful together with the proles in thirsty appreciation of that crisp, hoppy nectar
If a British prime minister sampled his nation’s ales with such enthusiasm, he would be suspected of alcoholism or, worse, jingoism. While a taste for beer doesn’t guarantee political soundness or ministerial ability, it heightens the odds that the politician in question isn’t a total wrong’un. To paraphrase William F Buckley Jr – heavily – I would sooner be governed by the first 2,000 names on the Craft Beer & Brewing subscriber database than by the 2,000 most qualified public health experts, moral guardians, masculinity-watchers and assorted joy-sucking dullards in any journalist’s contacts book.
No scientist, inventor or philosopher has contributed as much to the betterment of mankind as the humble fermenter of grain sugars. Beer is a true leveller, bringing the powerful together with the proles in thirsty appreciation of that crisp, hoppy nectar. If we replaced politics and diplomacy with lager and beer, there would be no more class conflict and no more wars. Homer Simpson was only half-right when he described alcohol as ‘the cause of and solution to all of life’s problems’. The cause of most of life’s problems is not enough beer.
Far from Macron being guilty of toxic masculinity, it is those indignant at a brief scene of male triumph and celebration who are poisonous. ‘Toxic masculinity’ means knowing you’re a bloke but not knowing that you’re supposed to feel bad about that. Beer and maleness are obvious public enemies for an era of moral fusspottery and gender confusion. No matter how much you try to complicate them, beer and masculinity are simple and unpretentious. They are about the familiar and the reliable, about sweat and its modest reward. A man doesn’t need much for contentment; he finds it in beer as he does in sport, a job well done, and a family provided for and protected.
This straightforward sense of self and preference for uncomplicated gratification is at odds with our status-driven, over-educated, physically puny times. Beer is the ideal boisson for the ‘toxic male’: taken in moderation, it neither encourages pretension nor excites the emotions. The effect is warm contentment and the satisfaction of a thirst slaked. Chekov said that ‘a man who doesn’t drink is not, in my opinion, fully a man’. Amend that to specify beer and he was onto something.
Now, Macron is a politician and one whose approval ratings are pretty bleak these days, so the booze stunt was no doubt a bit of positioning, trying to pass off the elite technocrat as an ordinary French bloke. No one will be falling for that any time soon. But it says something happy and reassuring about France that the president feels he must be seen not only to enjoy a beer but to be robust enough to gulp down a whole bottle in 17 seconds. (In 17 seconds Bob Hawke could have drunk the bar dry, got the barmaid’s phone number, and started in on the pub next door.) If you’re going to drag Macron for anything, it should be his choice of beverage: Corona. Was there no cat’s piss available?
Beer is a staple of civilised man, the draught of the doughty and dutiful. All who know its quotidian pleasures should rise in defence of Emmanuel Macron for holding the line against the barbarians. Lévons nos verres. Vive Macron! Vive les hommes! Vive la bière!
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