President Macron’s speech on Monday to the combined houses of parliament in the Palace of Versailles proved how stunningly different are the French from the British.
Imagine our head of state promising to cut the size of parliament by a third. Imagine her, or even her prime minister, promising to renew the nation with ‘the spirit of conquest’, as M. Macron did. We are often accused of nostalgia for empire, but we would never say such a thing, or even think it. Imagine the ribaldry which would descend upon M. Macron’s equivalent — if our constitution could have such a phenomenon — for striding though the marble halls past a guard of honour holding their swords erect, and then dumping more than an hour of grandiloquence upon the assembly.
I laughed out loud. The occasion’s pride perhaps presaged, I couldn’t help wondering, some mighty fall, as did Louis XVI’s gathering of the Estates-General in Versailles in 1789. Yet one would not have wanted it otherwise, because its Frenchness was mesmerising. Although M. Macron is pint-sized, his preposterous, magnificent performance reminded me of watching lofty de Gaulle on television when I was a boy. Pure theatre, which the republic surely needs.
This is an extract from Charles Moore’s Notes. The full article is available in this week’s issue of The Spectator.
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