Of books and politics: is change coming to a French tradition? 

Like cuckoos in spring, the first political books of the next election season are appearing in France ahead of what might be a historic battle for the presidency in 2022. 

Such books are not rare: France is a fiercely literary nation and its presidents, ministers, members of parliament and bureaucrats rank among the world’s most prolific political authors. They write a lot of fiction too. 

Edouard Philippe, President Emmanuel Macron’s first prime minister and one of the country’s most popular politicians, is the latest to join the fray with a quintessentially French account of his three years in office — discursive, elliptical and short of revelations about Macron but full of hints about how the country should be run by a centre-right leader such as himself.

Michel Barnier, the EU’s former Brexit negotiator and another possible presidential contender, will see The Great Illusion, on the four years that shook Europe, published next month. Finance minister Bruno Le Maire’s 10th book, The Angel and the Beast, came out in January. 

But it is Philippe — half of whose beard went white with the stress of managing the gilets jaunes anti-government protests and the start of the Covid-19 pandemic — who is the focus of political gossip in Paris. He is thought to be loyal to Macron but has not ruled himself out as a candidate in 2022; some suspect he could “do a Macron”, emulating his 2017 trick of wresting the Elysée Palace from the hands of the man who had appointed him.

In the past, French author-politicians have channelled the maritime musings of former footballer Eric Cantona (“When seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea,” he once intoned). Former prime minister Dominique de Villepin wrote The Shark and the Seagull (“the perfect alliance of opposites celebrated by philosophers and poets”). Far-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon examined the German economy in his book Bismarck’s Herring.

Although Philippe is mayor of the Channel port of Le Havre, he and his co-author, the MEP Gilles Boyer, have shunned the marine metaphors and chosen art and literature as the binding thread of Impressions et lignes claires (Impressions and clear directions). “If this book was a painting, it would claim to be Impressionist,” they write portentously, “with visible brush strokes, which taken separately can seem indistinct but seen together can sometimes portray a landscape, a person, an era.” 

Philippe and Boyer do disclose one ironic political secret: when advising presidential hopeful Alain Juppé four years ago, they suggested he choose Macron as prime minister and appoint Jean Castex to the post of secretary-general at the Elysée. Macron, of course, is now president, and Castex is the PM he named to replace Philippe. 

The rare personal anecdotes are more revealing. Philippe was so fearful of the responsibilities of prime minister that he lost 6kg in the 10 days before he started. And he had “cold sweats” during the peak of the Covid-19 crisis last year when it seemed like France would run out of medicines and intensive care beds. 

On the whole, though, the tone of the book is unlike anything usually published in the UK or the US. There are no toe-curlingly frank anecdotes such as in Sasha Swire’s Diary of an MP’s Wife, or even the pen-portraits of Barack Obama in A Promised Land, including his scathing description of then French president Nicolas Sarkozy with “his chest thrust out like a bantam cock’s”. 

Instead, the reader of a French political book is expected to relish the author’s literary pretensions and to be familiar with the cast of characters before reading the first sentence: Philippe does not refer to Macron by name until page 46. 

But maybe, just maybe, Philippe is the harbinger of a new, more populist style of French political writer. 

Along with the obligatory references to Churchill and de Gaulle and a series of French biographers and artists, he manages to pay tribute to Anglo-Saxon film and TV culture from Game of Thrones to Star Wars. Just visible in the cover photo of Philippe is a cufflink with the message: “May the force be with you.” 

victor.mallet@ft.com