The Rest Is History - 179. French Presidents: 1981-2022

Episode Date: April 26, 2022

In the second of two episodes covering France's post-war presidents, Tom and Dominic drill down into the remaining historical statesmen, bringing us right up to the current day. François Mitterrand, Jacques Chirac, Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande, and Emmanuel Macron - there are some incredible stories... Join The Rest Is History Club (restishistorypod.com) for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. Producer: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. hello welcome back to our uh french president special uh we've done de gaulle we've done pompadour we've done destang uh all of whom were on the right um and now we come to the first left-wing president françois mitraud who came to power in 1981. But, Dominic, he did not begin as a left-winger, did he? No, he didn't, actually. It's funny because actually Chirac, who succeeded him, began on the left.

He was a communist. And Mitterrand began on the kind of conservative, nationalist, Catholic right in the 1930s. I mean, Mitterrand and Chirac are both, they are two immensely kind of vulpine feline cynical men who make british politicians i think looks like absolute paragons of principle um so so meet and wrong born in 1916 uh comes from a catholic conservative family in the southwest in the charlotte you were talking before the break about the war. I mean, Mitterrand has quite a dubious war.

He does. He spends the first half basically working as a civil servant in the Vichy regime. He's a PAW, isn't he? He gets captured. He is. And he escapes, in inverted commas, and then, before you know it, is working in the Vichy government. Yeah.

And there's the definite whiff of something that doesn't entirely hang together there. But then he flees to london in 1943 and is involved with the resistance so he sort of i mean most people i think would say about me to rise he has a foot in both camps and actually you know what we could easily beat up on him about that but most french men and women had a foot in both camps one way or another i mean the lines were not the golden exactly clear well okay the gold in the 19th but apart from the goal and apart from a handful of people, most people are sort of treading a fine

line between collaboration and resistance. But I just mentioned that because Mitterrand does kind of, you know, he moves to the left and he kind of makes a name for himself as someone who is the anti-de Gaulle. Yeah, that's right. Absolutely. So when de Gaulle came in in

1958, re-does the constitution, sets up the Fifth Republic, Mitterrand is quite outspoken in opposing him. And Mitterrand is also the person who stands against him during De Gaulle's first kind of national sort of democratic presidential election.

Do you see this, that Mitterrand was also accused at this point of faking an assassination attempt against himself? Yes, yes. The observatory affair very very weird and to go refuses to make political capital out of it on the grounds that mitra may end up becoming president and therefore yeah to do so would uh lower the dignity of the uh i saw that story and

i thought that sounds to me like a story that mitra was told himself to go wouldn't use that against me because he knew that one day i would be president of France. Well, no, because that would imply that Mitterrand was up to no good. So I don't think Mitterrand would have originated it. But did De Gaulle really say, one day that young man will be, I don't know, that sounds very kind of like Alfred the Great going to Rome to me? Well, absolutely. I mean, but it exemplifies De Gaulle's elevated sense of the presidency. Maybe. Ultimately, the standing of the presidency is greater than the political rivalry between left and right. Maybe. So I think it's a kind of paradigmatic story. Well, Mitterrand

comes in in 1981, and he's been in French politics forever. And he's very good at, I think, playing the president. You know, I think that sort of Hollywood. The hauteur. Yeah, the hauteur. He, of course, has pretty good relations with Margaret Thatcher, contrary to what everyone thinks. He famously says she has the eyes of Killer Giller and the lips of Marilyn Monroe. He's a great pal of hers in the Falklands War.

She handbags him in European summits and he doesn't really mind. He's got this sort of charming lounge lizard side that I think French presidents should have and actually generally do have. But he starts off incredibly to the left, doesn't he? Yeah, and then abandons that basically. And he kind of nationalises everything. And then he kind of gets forced into a corner by the men of Zurich.

Basically, exactly, yeah. He has a thing called the 110 Propositions. So he has a wealth tax, and he's going to increase the minimum wage. He's going to nationalise lots of things. Very kind of Benite, to use a British term, programme. He comes in with that in 81, and by about 83, 84, he's abandoned that, and they have this thing called the turning towards rigor, which is actually masterminded by his finance minister, Jacques Delors,

later boss of the European Commission. Jacques Delors. Yeah, as the son. It's good to see you ventriloquizing the son, Tom. I think you should do that more often. We've had gotcha, so that's the other famous headline. So he sort of moves back towards the centre, which is quite a common thing, I think, for French presidents, that

over time, they start with great ambitions, whether on the right or the left, and over time, they basically end up being to survive, they become kind of technocrats. But it's more than that, isn't it? It's also that if you are truly to be president of all the French, you have to be in the centre. Yeah, there were lots of French friends because you you're playing a kind of monarchical role yeah

that's so if you know if you're very party pre if you're very much of the right very much of left you it's harder to do that yeah i think that's true i think that's fair enough um but the other thing with me to wrong is that he he conforms to all the sort of stereotypes of french presidents so first of all he publishes false reports about his health and does so from the very beginning, I think. So it's still, I think, not entirely clear how long he was ill for. So how long he had prostate cancer, which eventually killed him. So how long he had that for during his presidency. He also gets up to various sort of dodgy things.

He wiretaps journalists. Bizarrely, Tom, did you see this? One of the people he wiretaps is the Bond girl, Carolol bouquet from for your eyes only why was he doing that i think she was going out with a journalist at the time or something right um but anyway we should do a podcast about bond girls to have been wiretapped yeah to clear that up yeah um but but also he um he builds i mean he he builds paris yes uh so the Pyramid in the Louvre and what else does he do? I can't remember. Yeah, he does lots of…

Musée d'Orsay, all that kind of stuff. Right, he does lots of stuff in Paris. But also… Jacques Lange, his culture minister. He is his culture minister. Yeah. But also, there are two other things about Mitterrand that I think are entertaining. So one is the fact that he's obviously got the secret family life.

Now, this is absolutely extraordinary. Actually, at first you think, oh, it's actually quite a touching story, but then when you look into it, it's a really dodgy story. He has this relationship for 33 years with the Louvre's sculpture expert, a woman called Anne Pangeot, I think her name is. And you sort of think, oh, he's got this very French behavior. He's got this other family, and he's got a daughter with her and stuff. But actually, when I looked into it, they met, Tom. Did you see this? He was in his early 40s, and she was 14.

So French presidents and women of a very disproportionate age this is another thing because i get this they met because he her father played golf with him at the seaside and brought him back to the house afterwards for a drink or something and said oh i'd like to introduce my my my 14 year old daughter 14 year old barely teenage daughter they ended up having a 33 year relationship and having a daughter called Mazarin, who only basically emerged into the public spotlight in the 1990s when she was already in her 20s. So that side of things is… But he had a son as well, didn't he?

Yes, I can't… A Swedish journalist. That's right. He was called. He did indeed. Which is a very improbable name for the son of a French president. It's a sort of very Viking name, isn't it? Yeah, it is. It's actually under the northman but then there's also tom mitterrand's

sort of you know mitterrand shuffling shuffling off this mortal coil so he leaves office in 1995 but he's already basically terminally ill and he dies on the 8th of january 1996 but before that he has a last meal yes have you Have you studied Peter Ron's last meal? I knew about this. As you'll know, I'm very keen on conservation. Yeah, on birds. And not killing endangered birds. So he has oysters and foie gras.

Foie gras already controversial in some quarters. And he has this great sort of French delicacy, an autolong bunting. You know these birds? These endangered birds. And the way they eat them, they force feed them first. That's very French culinary behavior. Then they drown the bird in Armagnac. I mean, they literally drown it, sort of Duke of Clarence style.

And then the way you eat it is the bird is roasted. You take the bird by its head. And you put a napkin over your head. Right, a napkin or a towel over your own head. You eat the bird whole, crunching all the bones. Then you have to spit out all the bones underneath your towel. And this is the most tremendous. It is apparently the most rapturous culinary experience.

Is it? Apparently. I think all the most rapturous culinary experience. Is it? Apparently. I think all the stuff about the bones puts me off for one thing. Eat an autolat and die, which is what Mitterrand did. Well, it is what he did. Because that was his last meal, wasn't it? I think the thing about putting a towel over your head, I mean, is that going to catch on? Surely not.

Supposedly that's because you can't. Some people claim that's because it intensifies the aroma and others say it's because you can't you know what you're doing is a sin and god can't see you doing it uh i think both of those are entirely plausible um yeah well i think i think we've summed up the key events of metron's presidency there absolutely yeah he eating birds soaked in armagnac. Hanging around with teenagers. He had two illogical children. And did he do anything else, Dominic?

I mean, he was very – he negotiated with Thatcher. He blew up the Rainbow Warrior. Yeah, he blew up the Rainbow Warrior. But he played a key role in the end of the Cold War. Yeah, German unification. German unification. Yeah. And he had a moving ceremony, didn't he, with Chancellor Kohl?

They held hands. They held hands. Yeah, very sweet. And stood in the rain together. Yes. As a symbol of Franco-German amateurism. Chancellor Kohl, I think, is a man who would eat a bird. But I don't think Chancellor Kohl was a man of such.

Although Chancellor Kohl actually ended up in later life, as some listeners may remember, being sort of imprisoned by his – The evil nurse, didn't he? Yeah. So – Yeah. I'd rather have Mitterrand's fate, I think. It's all – I mean, the more you do this, British politics just looks – So tawdry.

No, I think it's incredibly sensible by comparison. Yeah, it looks – yes, it looks bourgeois, doesn't it? None of this happens to John Major. I mean, he's never eaten a bird with a towel over his head. Well, and talking of bad behaviour, the next president is none other than Jacques Chirac, who we mentioned earlier. And he's absolutely a constant, isn't he?

I mean, he is there the whole way through. Yeah. Like a kind of bad smell. Chirac basically got involved with politics when he was about two or something. Yeah. And was constantly sort of plotting and being prime minister and... So he's prime minister twice. In the 70s.

Yeah. And he falls out with Giscard. So he's prime minister under Giscard and then he's prime minister under... And Dmitri. And Dmitri. And that's the first example of cohabitation which you mentioned. Where you have people from different parties kind of once a prime minister and once the president yeah and in between that

he was also mayor of paris well shirak is so so shirak is is too young to have been involved in the war he's born in 1932 his father was an aircraft company executive he was a communist as you said when he was young and and uh he went to sion's po he went to Sciences Po. He went to Ennard. So he's another Ennard. He's from those elite kind of training colleges for French politicians. He worked for Pompidou. Pompidou called him the bulldozer. But I think the thing about Chirac is Chirac.

In English? Le bulldozer. So he's le bulldozer. Yeah. The thing about Chirac is his absolute world-class cynicism, I think, isn't it? I mean, he is an absolutely shameless, graftor, completely corrupt kind of will, you know, is the way – well, he changes the constitution, doesn't he, so that the term of office will be five years rather than seven. Yeah. But also to kind of stiff the left, he makes it easier for the far right to participate in the electoral process. And the far right basically means Jean-Marie Le Pen, who we'll come to in due course.

And it's under Chirac that you have the kind of the development where Jean-Marie Le Pen makes it to the second round in the 2002 election. And so people vote for him. They say better to vote for the crook than the fascist. Yeah, better the crook than the fascist. He, and I think everyone, had been expecting that the man who had served as his prime minister, in a second experience of Cohabitation, Lionel Jospin, the socialist leader, would make it through.

And I always adored Jospin because he looked exactly like a baby owl. Do you remember him? I do remember Jospin. Adorable little, imagine him falling out of a nest. He looked a bit like that guy, Jolien Morm. Didn't he? Yes, but more like an guy, Jolien Morm. Didn't he? Yes, but more like an owl than Jolien Morm. Okay, all right.

Well, the two things about Chirac that I think are more... Obviously, he opposed Iraq. Yes, so he opposed Iraq, and he was very rude about British cooking. Cooking. He said only Finnish cooking was worse. And I think Finnish cooking is now very fashionable. So Chirac looks at all. It is, yeah.

But Chirac was colossally corrupt as mayor of Paris. He was mayor of Paris from 1977 to 1995. It was a new job. He did a bit of a kind of Boris Johnson. So he took this sort of this new job running a capital city, and he used it as a platform to advance his kind of national ambitions. But when he was running Paris, they had vote rigging, they had tons of kickbacks on public housing, lots of people had made up fictional jobs, sort of dozens of fictional jobs that

actually were, you know, he was paying money to people in his party. He spent hundreds of thousands of euros on um gardening for himself and members of his own party and he spent would you believe 15 million euros a year tom on um on food which seems even if you're buying those birds yeah that's a lot of that's a lot of birds the auto layer well i i remember i was um i was writing rubicon duringicon during this period of Chirac's presidency where lawyers were kind of sniffing around his record. And there were all kinds of talks of bringing him to trial for corruption. And basically he wanted office in 2002 because it would continue to give him immunity. And that's very like Caesar in Gaul having to keep up his term of office so that he can't be brought to trial. And I remember that as a kind of a parallel.

He's a very, very high class. In that side of his life, he's a very high class Silvio Berlusconi. Berlusconi was the same. Using political office to protect himself. He also has this, again, this sort of colourful sex life. So his wife, Bernadette, he and his wife called each other Vu instead of Chu. It's the ends of their lives.

Very formal. Which you might think very formal, but also I think was a reflection of their slightly strained... Because she basically said after he died, you know, I stayed with him. I didn't really want to. He treated me very badly. His chauffeur would take him on all these assignations.

And I've read two different versions of this. So one is that the chauffeur would call him Mr. 15 Minutes, shower included. Yes. And the other was that they called him Mr. 3 Minutes, shower included. But either way, anyway, it wasn't flattering. And, yes, so Ch sure it was his most spectacular um liaison was supposedly with the actress claudia cardinale who was in the leopard and once upon a time she starred with alan delon tom yeah so it all it all it all connects yeah it all

connects um but he must i mean he had achievements as well i think actually the funny thing is he looks like a french president when you see him at those they all do he has that kind of french president knows that destang had that meter or have that shirak had yeah and then sarkozy's who follows him lets aside down well shirak hated sarkozy because sarkozy had backed one of his rivals in the 1990s a guy called edouard ballardier but before we get into Sarkozy, let's quickly take a break for some publicité. See you in a sec. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

Welcome back to The Rest Is History. So Dominic, Sarkozy succeeds chirac in 2007 uh sarkozy is obviously a different generation is 1955 and and actually i think the french president starts to become less interesting from this point because i think sarko is pretty interesting but sarko is is as a ludicrous character isn't yes but i mean he's nothing but a ludicrous and corrupt character. Well, so he wears platform heels. Yeah. I mean, he again has a kind of great, great marital record. Because he has three wives, doesn't he? Of whom the most famous is Carla Bruni. Yes.

Yeah, that's right. Who's about three feet taller than he is. But he was also married to a model. Yeah. And he married someone else who's's and one of their sons is a hip-hop producer i saw that yeah it's it's so he kind of made his name his president bling bling partly as a sort of hardline interior minister so when they were high yeah he basically says um i think it's about 2005 he says i will clean up this scum. I will clean this scum off the streets with basically a pressure hose.

Yeah, so that's in the Bollywood, isn't it? And there were three boys and they get kind of electrocuted in a power station or something. That's right. A whole series of riots. And Sarkozy was the Home Minister at that time. That's right. And he said he wanted, he called them rakai, so scum. Yeah.

And said that he wanted to apply a pressure hose to them um and and so that was actually i mean it got him lots of of blowback from the left but lots of votes but um yeah and and that of course is i guess a kind of growing theme in french politics is a kind of you know a kind of a hard right edge to narratives about race and particularly Islam. Yeah, I think that's true because Islam was not really an issue in French politics in the 1970s and 80s, even though there were lots of settlers from, I mean, when I say settlers, I mean there were lots of Pieds-Noirs and there were also lots of what the French would call Arabs because that's the word that they would often use that wasn't that wasn't a theme in the 70s and 80s it was anti-immigration theme but it wasn't

anti-islamist or islamic but that obviously became a much bigger issue from the 1990s well so so um sarkozy's interior minister during the um the decade after 9 11 yeah uh and actually kind of islamist attacks in france are probably the worst the worst of the continent worse in europe so that is kind of his his forging ground and it i think the reason why you say he's a he's a comical character is that an important part of his image is this kind of hard man pressure hosing the bonlieu all that kind of stuff and yet he's he's very small wears platform heels and can't quite carry it off yeah because the harban thing is posturing um political posturing i think the first thing he does when he i mean such sarcasm behavior sort of the first thing

you know the first thing he did when he became president was to double his own salary which i think is exactly what you would expect. And obviously he then is involved in the most, again, more hideous scandals, wiretapping. He's accused of taking 50 million euros from the Libyans, from the Libyan government, which, I mean, when you think that he was the great- Well, he joins with Cameron, doesn't he?

Yeah, he was the great sort of progenitor of the attack on- On Libya. Yeah, and with Sarkozy and then with his success you basically get two failed presidencies two people who don't play the the ghoulish part and who don't represent in any way the grandeur of france i mean sarkozy because his ambition i think is too naked and because he is he is nothing but pure ambition in many ways agreed agreed and then he has succeeded in 2012 by a man who basically,

he bills himself as Mr. Normal. That's the phrase he uses. But the phrase that most people use to describe François Hollande is Monsieur Flamby. And Flamby is kind of, that's like a kind of creme caramel, like a custard pudding. Kind of wobbles, doesn't it?

Yeah. And he's. Although he has an excellent name. What? And do you know the name of his eldest son? Tom Hollande? Oui. Thomas Hollande.

Thomas Hollande. Yeah, it's an excellent name. But Tom, he brings the Hollande dynasty into slight disrepute, doesn't he? No, so we point out that he has an E on the end of his name. Right. Because otherwise, you're right,

he would bring shame on the name of Hollande. Because he really is a less... He's, I think, the least interesting of all French presidents because he was a special, he was an anarch. He was a special advisor to Mitterrand, spokesman for Jospin. Well, and he's married to Céline Réal. Who had been beaten by Sarkozy in 2007.

Yes. Yeah. And who, in a way, is kind of a much more interesting dynamic figure. Yeah. And something we haven't mentioned up till now is that all these presidents have been men yeah and singling royale was was supposed she was the one who was supposed to become president but to launch i had a look at on some campaign website tom from uh 2012 if you click on francois alonso.com or.fr or whatever do you know what it is it's actually now a website selling air conditioning units said it all about holland's because he became so when he became president

we talked this thing about the grandeur he was inaugurated during this terrible rainstorm and there are the most hilarious images of him he looks kind of an unprepossessing bloke anyway but he's absolutely drenched mean, he's standing there with this very Clouseau-like sort of sense of dignity, as though someone's basically, as though God is pouring a bucket of water over his head. It's kind of Monsieur Hulot. Yeah, it is that. Kind of quality.

Do you know the nadir of his approval rating? The French public? 14% or something? No. 12%? 4%. 4%? Goodness.

4%. Was that because he also, I mean, considering that he's not the most prepossessing of men. No. I mean, Chirac, Mitterrand.

I mean, you can see there's a kind of suavity. There may be the cocktail lounge of a mid-century bar. They are like foxes in a chicken coop. Yeah. But very, very kind of spectacular. He splits up with, a chicken coop. Yeah. But very, very kind of spectacular. He splits up from Royale.

Yeah. She throws him out, I think, because he's been carrying on with a journalist, Valérie... Trier-Vaillé. Yeah. And then he dumps on her. He does. With an actress, Julie Gayet. Yeah.

And he was photographed, famously, wasn't he, on a kind of little moped. A scooter. A scooter, wearing a very, very unprepossessing crash helmet. But the great thing about that was that the guy who was driving the scooter, he made him stop off to buy some croissants. You sort of think this could be invented by some terrible 70s British sitcom writer. What know what I'd love to hear is an equivalent to this podcast doing the same to British prime ministers. I mean, I'm sure they'd seem equally risible. Maybe they would.

I don't know. Yeah. Maybe they'd concentrate on the same really crucial issues that we've been concentrating on. Their love life. Do we have anything to say about Hollande's policies beyond the fact that he got wet, got rained on? No, I mean, obviously Holland is in power in the second half of the 2010s a pretty wretched period i suppose you would say for the sort of western democratic world anyway um and and pretty soon after he's inaugurated i think the french make up their

minds he's a busted flush and of course he has this young industry minister who he's recruited from Rothschilds, who is Emmanuel Macron. In 2016, I think it is, so Hollande hasn't been there very long, Macron founds his own party, En Hollande, despite the fact that he's so young and frankly so strange, is brilliant at playing. He plays the grandeur of France in a way that Hollande and Sarkozy weren't capable of doing, don't you think? Well, I do. And I think that Macron, although he, I mean, he immolates the socialist party that had been led by Hollande and of yeah of which uh macron had been a minister he also emulates the goalless party because the goalless candidate francois fion gets caught up in a inevitably a scandal um involving his welsh wife penny that's right um who uh had been supposedly employed as a secretary and had been paid quite a lot for secretarial services.

So essentially, Macron, in a way, is the kind of the quintessence of a French president, because we're talking about the idea of the president rising above party politics in that kind of goalless sense. In a way, Macron is the most goalless president of all, because he actually destroys the party system. He has immolated the parties of the centre-right and the centre-left so that all that is left now in French politics are the two extremes of the left and the right. Yeah, I think that's fair. I think because Macron would say, I'm above such petty distinctions. I'm above ideology. I represent France, the grandeur of France. And he does, does yeah and I think probably I think

but Macron also has that thing of being slightly strange oh I mean indisputably I mean he's an he's another one for the um the kind of the weird age gap well I mean it works better for him because this time it's it's his wife he's 24 years older I think yes he met they met when he was 15 and she was in Amiens isn't it and she at school she was his drama Yes. They met when he was 15. That's in Amiens, isn't it? At school. She was his drama teacher. She was 39 and married with children. He was 15.

And, of course, you know, all his life he's basically had to cope with people laughing at that, sneering at it, whatever. But actually what is even more extraordinary, Tom, his best man at his wedding. Yeah. Did you see this? Yeah. His, his best man at his wedding. Yeah. Did you see this? Yeah. His best man was born in 1924. Yeah. So when I worked that, his best man is 53 years his senior.

So in other words, that means that if my son does a macaron, his best man is currently 63 and he's 10. Yeah. That's quite hard. But that's not going to happen is it well i've got i would be absolutely astounded if that if what if if arthur's future best man is is more than a decade my senior um i think macron macron clearly we talked right at the beginning about de gaulle writing that story about himself general General de Gaulle beating the Germans when he was 15. It was a very sort of Churchillian thing to do. Macron clearly has that sense. I mean, there are lots of stories about him saying to people when he was at school, well, I'm going to be president of France.

I'm going to lead France, all this kind of stuff. I think he is the embodiment of huge numbers of the trends that we've talked about in a kind of very, very self-conscious way. So he's been most recently in the news, aside from the election, for the role that he's played in essentially keeping lines of communication open with Putin. He wants to be the man at the end of that long table. He does, but he also wants to situate France midway between China, Russia, whatever, and the United States. So he said that NATO is brain dead. He's very keen on that. He's incredibly hostile to Britain. I mean, that's another kind of theme of, you know,

that's a kind of goalless tradition, I guess. He had a great grandfather from Bristol. Oh, really? Who'd fought in the First World War and who then cheated on his wife and ran off. That's why. That is a theory as to why he's but he also does relatively he also absolutely absolutely incarnates that thing that's to an anglo-saxon viewer of of treading that very fine line between being sort of impressive and being utterly ridiculous so wearing the hoodie

the power of french powers yeah that was very sweet i think he's much more impressive than ridiculous or posing in the last two days, Tom, showing off his bare chest. Have you seen this? His hairy chest. Yeah, but that's what the French do. I mean, what's his name? Jean-Claude Sarch didn't do that.

Bernard-Henri Lévy does it. Does he? He's always showing off his chest. Okay. Yeah, no. At least you're not going in for ludicrous. We absolutely haven't gone in for ludicrous natural stereotypes in this podcast.

That's one thing we've very much i think macros is um i mean i think he's the most impressive current western leader by a long long way i i think well i mean the competition i don't think it's been i don't think it's been i don't think it's necessarily been good for france because i think that uh a healthy democratic system depends on healthy parties of the left and the right yeah testing one another and i think that that that he has essentially by annihilating that i think he's put french democracy in quite a quite kind of treacherous state quite an awkward state but i think that as a political leader as an embodiment of his nation i think he's in indisputably impressive uh he's charismatic. You know, his achievement in becoming president at the young age he has done. There's a definite trend here, Tom, because you love Tony Blair as well.

Yeah, I think he's a very Blair Wright figure. He is a very Blair Wright figure. I do like these kind of, yeah, charismatic. You like kind of… Charismatic centrists. Charismatic centrists who undo too many buttons, basically. Yeah, maybe. That's what you look for in a man.

Well, don't you think he's impressive i mean he's more impressive than uh schultz or johnson or biden or but he's younger than biden um yeah i mean indisputably i think he could be his biden could be his best man good yes that's very true yeah he could be married to mrs biden that joe is his best friend yeah uh but you think i think he i mean i i agree it's not it's not a you know the current crop of western leaders aren't amazing but i think what's i suppose what i think is great politicians um or very successful politicians they have a profound consciousness of themselves being in the sort of the gaze of history and of playing a part.

You know, they walk onto stage and they're conscious that all eyes are on them and they rise to that. I mean, I always think there's an amazing clip, actually, of Macron, because he was very young.

He was president at 39. And there's a clip of him soon after he becomes president. And he's going on a walkabout. And there's lots of, there's all crowds. And there's kids, teenagers. And one of them shouts at him as he walks past, ça va, Manu? You know, how's it going?

And Macron stops with the cameras on him. And he goes back to this boy. And he says, basically, I'm not Manu to you. You call me Mr. President. And I thought, you know, in Britain, if a prime minister behaved like that, people would say, God, the prime minister, what a terrible arse. Well, John Prescott's the model for how to behave in a situation like that. You punch him.

He's got a mullet, which is a display, but that's a reference to John Prescott. Tony Blair's deputy prime minister, he got hit by an egg yeah who punched a protester exactly but macron doing that macron has this tremendous sense of his of the grandeur of france i think that we talked about at the beginning um and i think that's i mean it's terrible to generate to degenerate international stereotypes as much as we've done but obviously that is a key element of the french presidency it's monarchical sense but we said right from the beginning that that is what you have to measure up to and that by that standards a macro i think is is probably yeah the most impressive president since uh since the goal and so by the time you listen to this you'll know whether he has obtained

re-election or not i think that even if he does i think france is in a bit of a mess because I imagine that the Marine Le Pen will have done better than she did in the previous time that these two contests of the election. Last time, I think, didn't she? And we haven't really talked about the Le Pens, but they are kind of a shadow lurking in the background because the French presidency was set up by de Gaulle who defined himself against the Vichy tradition. And in a way, the Le Pens embody that kind of the Vichy tradition. So there's a sense in which there is a political tradition there that is antithetical to de Gaulle and therefore perhaps to the entire idea of the presidency as it was formulated by de Gaulle.

I think that's fair because actually, I mean, actually that goes back even earlier than Vichy, Tom, because Jean-Marie Le Pen, Marie Le Pen's father, who basically founded her party and founded her movement, even though they've fallen out with each other, he was first involved in politics with a group that was associated with a group called Action Française, which was a far-right movement, ultra-Catholic, ultra-royalist,

dating from the late 19th century, that was opposed really to the very idea of the republic. Yes, he's a monarchist, isn't he? In some ways, you could say that's what the Le Pen political movement represents. And also talking about the idea of being antithetical to what de Gaulle represents, Jean-Marie Le Pen was very, very opposed to de Gaulle's Algerian policy. Well, Jean-Marie Le Pen was very very opposed to Algeria de Gaulle's Algerian policy well Jean-Marie Le Pen was an intelligence officer in Algeria yeah and suppose you know there are rumors involved with torture or whatever so many people were so yeah there is a sort of people forget that before

the second world war French politics had been incredibly conflicted the very existence of the republic had been up for debate there had been talk of civil war in the 1930s and those kind of ruptures you know obviously they're very different now but the sort of i don't know i'm mixing my metaphors terribly but the kind of aftershocks of all that the the reverberations of it they're still there to this day and the le pen movement you know it's not just oh it's the left behind you know, it's not just, oh, it's the left behind, you know, people across that immigration or globalization or whatever. It has deeper roots, I think, that go back to the late 19th century, early 20th century France, the Dreyfus case and all this kind of stuff. Yes. And of course, someone who we haven't mentioned who definitely won't become president,

he's been knocked out, is Eric Zemmour, who, I mean, even though he's been knocked out is eric zamore who um i mean even though he's jewish has kind of chunted a little bit about um whether dreyfus was actually innocent yes extraordinary and has kind of chunted about whether vichy was really as bad as um people have said uh and marine le pen i mean we should say has um she has adopted a policy of uh trying to clear things up um so she has fallen out with her father he's she's expelled him from the uh from from from the party they've renamed um the front national the national front i can't remember what she's called it now but um changed the name um national rally i think it is something like that uh and she's always posing with her cats isn't she uh she she's a persian cat breeder is she alianzari would be

impressed by that baby yes um so uh she she has you know tried to tidy things up and i guess you could i mean one of the of course the other thing is that again seems very very striking actually looking the whole way back over these presidents is how very very right-wing france is yeah and we tend not to think of france as being right-wing i suppose because of the revolution yeah but you know the vast majority of these presidents have been on the right all of them except for um mitra and alond macron i mean he's clearly veered to the right i definitely to the right yes uh you could say about le pen although she's described as far right her policies you know her economic policies her social policies are very very uh left left wing well much more left wing than protectionist they're protectionist

um and since you know that is the intriguing element in this election is that uh melancholy who's the kind of the french corbin um picked up you know he came third just behind uh marine le pen where will where will his votes go because it's not immediately obvious that that macron would be more appealing to them yeah i think it's a globalist liberal um you know it's a very good point you make tom about um french politics and i think people often get that wrong particularly in britain because in britain where france is kind of the other um i think particularly people on the liberal left have a fantasy image of France. They think it's all kind of sipping rosé wine and leafy gardens and wearing polo necks and talking about existentialism. But in reality, I mean, I can remember very vividly just to end on a kind of note of utter self-indulgence.

When I was a language assistant in France in the mid-1990s. I remember once in 1995 or 6, so there were the Le Pen sort of bandwagon was really underway, but also the arguments about Islam were really sort of kicking off. And I can remember at one point very foolishly thinking this would be a good idea to have a conversation about this with my kind of 17, 18-year-old students. And they lived in an affluent sort of town in the south of France. I assumed utterly naively that they would think just like I did and my contemporaries in England, because obviously I didn't know anybody in England who was on the kind of far right. And I mentioned Le Pen in this sort of dismissive way, or gosh, isn't it shocking that Jean-Marie Le Pen gets so much support.

And I couldn't believe how many of these, you know, trendy, good-looking 17, 18-year-olds, you know, not at all left behind kind of people, thought Le Pen was tremendous. And actually the first thing they generally said was, well, he'll, you know, he'll clear up all the Arabs. They said that to you? Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Without the slightest sense of shame or in a way that I don't think a similar group of people in England. Or Scotland. By and large, the sense in England and Scotland is that people under the age, say, of 25 will identify with Jeremy Corbyn or with Nicola Sturgeon and see them as kind of progressive rifles. By the way, if you're Welsh, we haven't forgotten you. Yes, I don't know how. will identify with Jeremy Corbyn or with Nicola Sturgeon and see them as kind of progressive. By the way, if you're Welsh, we haven't forgotten you. Yes, I don't know how.

Yeah, I guess, I mean, young Welsh voters likewise would vote for Labour, I guess. You know, they'd be anti-Tory. They'd be anti-Tory. The assumption of young people are more liberal, which doesn't work in France. I gather that the overwhelming majority of under-25s in France are voting Le Pen. Well, we shall see if that happens. But historically, Tom, the Front National has done well with young voters. And that sort of turns on its head what Anglo-Saxons, as it were, believe. It's not Le Front National anymore, is it?

No, it's okay. It's not Le Front National, but it's basically the same. Right. Or is it? I mean, I don't know what you think about that so there is there is debate about that yeah about how how much it's changed okay no extent le pen fee would be i mean she's definitely a different order of politician to her father who was an incredibly sinister figure but the lineage you can't deny the lineage i do yeah um yes well maybe uh she's president now and we're talking about the new president but i don't think she she will be so um but and and that also is a kind of interest just to return to something i mentioned earlier the how masculine the french

presidency has always been yeah yeah um very true contrast there could i just also mention one other intriguing detail about the french president gone he is also the co-prince of andorra yes he is that's a great thing isn't it again it kind of unsettles our sense of i think the french republicanism i think he should make more of that i would make more of that if i was macron does i think macron is quite keen on the whole Prince of Andorra. I mean, Sarkozy looks like the Prince of Andorra. Yes, he does. He does.

Well, he's at home with the tag, Sarkozy. Have you seen this? He's got a suspended sentence for corruption. So he's got permission to spend it at home with an electronic tag. With Carla. Yeah, and Carla. And Chirac had a suspended sentence as well. It basically comes with the massive salary.

Yeah. Anyway, on that note. This has been an incredibly nuanced. A fair, reasonable, nuanced balance. A fair, reasonable, nuanced balance. And not in any way Anglo-Saxon take on the French presidency. Hope you've enjoyed it. Hope it complements whatever the result of the

election is. And we will see you soon. Au revoir. Au revoir. A la prochaine. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. That's restishistorypod.com. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment.

It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip, and on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes, and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.