Emmanuel Macron’s global (and globalist) admirers have suddenly gone very quiet. As protests shake France, and the President’s approval ratings sink to 29 per cent, his cheerleaders are slinking awkwardly away.

Until last month, Macron was the centrist’s centrist, the sensible superhero, the moderate who could move the masses. He won the French presidency in 2017 with two thirds of the vote, delighting Euro-integrationists and technocrats around the world.

British Europhiles, still in trauma after their referendum defeat, fantasized about him in a way that bordered on the indecent. Every week, some breathless columnist would take to the pages of the Financial Times or the Guardian to rhapsodize about the need for a “British Macron.” Lord Mandelson, the strategist who with Tony Blair led the Labor Party to the political center-ground, dubbed the young ex-banker the “heir to Blair.”

Now Macron stands amid the ruins of a riot-stricken Paris, radiating that lordly disdain that has characterized his occupancy of the Élysée for 19 months. Try as he might, he can’t hide his sense that the French people have let him down. The demonstrators, who were initially protesting against a rise in fuel tax, have become a front for that large majority of French citizens who loathe their head of state.

Yet Macron, rather than seeking to understand their grievances, dismisses them as a “brown plague” — “brown” as in Brownshirts or in other words neo-Nazis.

The pundits and politicians who lauded Macron as an antidote to populism had misunderstood his technique. A centrist can also run as an anti-systemic rabble-rouser with simplistic slogans. Consider the criteria that usually define populism. Promising to transcend the old party system? Check. Claiming to be “beyond Left and Right”? Check. Seeking first-time candidates “untainted” by politics? Check. Focusing on the leader rather than the party? Double-check: Macron’s party was actually named En Marche to share his initials.

Macron’s policies were chosen almost arbitrarily. He promised to overhaul France’s bloated welfare system, but also to increase spending for certain interest groups; to be a free-marketeer and at the same time a Euro-protectionist; to revive France yet to submerge it within a federal European state. The only consistent theme in his philosophy is Führerprinzip, the emphasis on the special authority of the leader.

One of his first acts was to summon members of France’s two legislative chambers to the Versailles Palace where, flanked by soldiers in antique uniform, he harangued the parliamentarians about the need to recover “the spirit of conquest”, before informing them that he would be pruning their numbers.

There has always been a market for autocracy in France. The two Napoleons were the most obvious beneficiaries, presenting themselves, Macron-like, as national saviors who stood above the bickering politicians. But the yearning for a strongman didn’t go away with the Bonapartes. It came back in the form of Boulangism, Pétainism, even Gaullism. The names changed, but the appeal didn’t.

“The political parties have failed you,” French people were told over and over again. “You need a man with vision who can unite all the patriots.”

Macron himself, in an interview given long before his presidential candidacy, spoke in telling language about this tendency. France, he said, had been haunted for more than 200 years by the ghost of its murdered king. Executing, rather than simply deposing, the hapless Louis XVI in 1793, was an act of parricide that left France troubled and neurotic. That neurosis, Macron believes, finds expression in the longing for a quasi-monarchical leader.

Suddenly, Macron and Macronism make sense. He has deliberately and tactically sought to position himself as the father of the nation, whose grandeur might somehow rub off on France as a whole. He hopes that, like de Gaulle, his very aloofness will translate into a measure of popularity.

But consider the difference. General de Gaulle had helped save his country from the Nazis. His aloofness, reinforced both by his great height and his awareness of his halitosis, seemed to lend dignity to his office. Macron has all of de Gaulle’s self-importance but with none of his achievements.

Once the electioneering had worn off, it became clear that, far from incarnating the nation, he personified the political caste that ordinary French people loathed. His supra-nationalist elitism has as little resonance in la France profonde as Hillary Clinton’s had in middle America.

Even those Frenchmen who yearn for a strongman don’t want a smug énarque in that role. One of the orchestrators of the anti-Macron protests, Christophe Chalençon called on television last week for the civilian President to be replaced by a “real leader,” naming the recently retired General de Villiers.

Oh dear. Is there a more pitiable sight in politics than an unpopular populist?

