Davos Man—not the actual men (and many fewer women) who flock to the World Economic Forum every year but the stock image of the event—has become the symbol of what’s variously called neoliberalism, or globalization, or, sometimes, the Evil Élite. This year, both Donald Trump and Emmanuel Macron are making the journey to Switzerland, and the juxtaposition between them has grabbed everyone’s attention. The Davos attendees, we’re often told, are Voltaire’s children, a transnational and fatuously progressive elect that Trump the nationalist is there to upbraid—though he is making the pilgrimage to do it—while Macron the internationalist will try to rejuvenate them.

Macron has not exactly been lacking in self-confidence in the run-up to this confrontation. On Monday night, he addressed a gathering of a hundred and forty C.E.O.s—including executives from Goldman Sachs, Google, and Facebook—at Versailles, over a meal prepared by Alain Ducasse, the greatest living French chef, with Paul Bocuse now gone. And he addressed them, in part, in English. It was an audacious gesture, as though Macron were saying to his critics, “You think I’m inclined to acting like a king? Just watch me.”

Macron’s politics are so much more world-embracing, and in essence so much more optimistic, than anything available in the White House that many Americans are hoping, at least on an emotional level, that he might become less a king than a new Lafayette to come help save American democracy again. Those who do, though, are, so to speak, whistling past the Yorktown fortifications. People debate whether Macron is on the left, in the center, or, indeed, on the right. Yet to hear him speak at length—with French journalists, or at Versailles, or in an exceptionally in-depth interview conducted last week with Andrew Marr, of the BBC—is to recognize at once the specific voice and tone of the best of the French haute fonctionaire class, the administrative and managerial actors of the French Republic. He is neither left nor right nor center—merely and entirely haute.

Macron loves structured organization of thought. His answers to Marr’s questions instantly call to mind the old joke that students at the École Normale Supérieure, a stockpot of the French administrative élite, were taught to draw three lines on the exam paper—dividing the answer into three parts even before they saw what the question was. Any answer to anything was necessarily divided in three. (Those at the rival Sciences Po, which Macron attended, it was said, only divided the paper, more radically, into two parts.) Barack Obama, who represents a similar meritocratic type and temperament, projects an American propensity to break down abstract propositions into specific cases and parts. Obama’s constant interjections of “Look” always preface an investigation of particulars. Macron represents a French inclination to break down an abstraction into two or three still finer abstractions. Discussing the future of Europe with Marr, Macron easily threw off the slightly astounding abstract confection, even while arguing for a more concrete organization of the European Union, that what was needed was a new Europe, with a series of inner circles for inner policies at “the core,” while “the very inner circle is an open avant-garde, where we decide to have a much stronger integration: more sovereignty, more unity, more democracy.” The abstract formulation of this “open avant-garde” cannot entirely conceal its own contradiction: sovereignty and unity—nationalism and internationalism at the same time, which, some might say, is the predicament, not a plan for its solution.

Ultimately, Macron seems unlikely to be the savior of Western democratic politics that some would like him to be, not that this is a role that any leader who has been cast for it, from John F. Kennedy to Tony Blair, has ever played credibly. Macron, for all his bilingualism and his planetary vision, remains very much a national figure—not provincial, certainly, but specific to France and its history. The internationalism that he preaches is an especially French form of it, one that assumes the assertion of sovereignty and identity alongside a global reach, achieved less by ideological clarity than by a constant delicate nudging and balancing of its more obstreperous German and American allies. Macron has now marched over to align with Angela Merkel, while remaining surprisingly open and, for good or ill, officially respectful of Trump. Macron did make a small gibe at him at the start of his Davos speech on Wednesday, saying that all the snow in Switzerland makes it hard to believe in global warming, but that this year, at least, the organizers hadn’t invited someone skeptical of global warming—an obvious joke not just about Trump’s climate denial but about his use of every cold snap as a refutation of the climate curve.

Yet those who find the patterns of French politics themselves fascinating, if only as an instance of a kind of parallel evolution—producing an ecology that is so like ours, yet so unlike it—must be struck by how ably Macron has managed his own problems, not least in comparison with the new American President. Macron has survived his first eight months in office, with their accompanying manifs—street demonstrations—rather nimbly and rather fully. It has been the fate of one French government after another to make stabs at reform and then, in effect, to be forced to accept the veto of the street, even when that veto was essentially the act of smaller, self-interested groups, hardly expressing a majority view. The governments of both Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy fumbled in the face of demonstrations, to which they had no response that rang with authority.

Macron has escaped that fate, despite bringing in labor reforms designed to make hiring and firing more flexible. (The changes, though spoken of by the left in France as a horrible neoliberal infection, are in truth minimal and, by American hire-and-fire-at-will standards, leave the overseeing French providential state still almost entirely intact in its protection of workers.) In “France’s Long Reconstruction,” a fascinating new history of the Fifth Republic, the historian Herrick Chapman makes the case that this dynamic of palace versus the street was, in essence, not a bug of the system but a feature of it. A state driven by expertise, with more and more effective authority placed in the hands of the managerial and administrative élite, could only be checked and balanced by emphatic displays of the popular will. By accepting that an important measure of popular will would have to rise from the street, Chapman writes, “the state in the Fifth Republic served as much to sow as to quell disorder.”

In other words, a centralized state that leaves little to lesser provincial governments—no regional elections every two years, or much power left in the hands of the départements—was compelled to listen when people pounded the pavement. The fact that Macron so far has managed to sidestep this kind of disorder suggests that there is something to be said, in an administrative state, for putting the power in the hands of the brightest administrators. In a way that, indeed, dates back to the days of royal Versailles, the usual French pattern has been to have both a remote monarch and an executive cardinal: a kingly figure as President with an effective intellectual and administrative figure as Prime Minister, a King Louis XIII with a Cardinal Richelieu. (This was certainly the case with President Chirac and his first Prime Minister, Alain Juppé.) Now the voice of an administrative fonctionaire of the most haute kind is at the helm.

One of the duties of the chief minister of France has always been to placate and outmaneuver the other great powers. Macron appears to have been able to convince Trump that he admires him; Trump, in return for last year’s Bastille Day visit to Paris, where he got to goggle at French tanks, has invited Macron for the first official state visit of his Administration. Macron obviously thinks that he is being shrewd in “handling” Trump with the necessary mix of flattery and seeming respect. (He shrugs and dismisses Trump’s tweets as unimportant—just the kind of thing you’d expect an American to do.) He seems to have assumed that the small joke he told at Trump’s expense in Davos is either too trivial—or, perhaps, too obscure—to upset their relationship; he may also know that bullies only respect those who, at least occasionally, flick their earlobes in passing. He clearly imagines that he is manipulating Trump, Trump being too slow to manipulate him. How far this attitude will take him, and Europe, is anyone’s guess, but it is exactly the kind of thing that the princes of French diplomacy always prided themselves on pulling off. Today in France, a cardinal—a seminarian of strategy and self-conscious erudition—is running the show. For now, he looks like an effective king.