Emmanuel Macron is a “war leader”, according to a policeman who commanded operations against the Bataclan terrorists and is now preparing to do battle as a parliamentary candidate for the president-elect’s party.

Jean-Michel Fauvergue, a former paratrooper and martial arts expert who went into the Bataclan ahead of the officers under his command to end the Isil massacre in 2015, is standing in a constituency in the eastern Paris suburbs.

He was among hundreds of the party’s candidates, half of whom are political novices, who attended a seminar on the arts of campaigning in a museum near the Eiffel Tower on Saturday.

Mr Macron believes his presidential victory a week ago proves that candidates who, like him, have never before run for office, can win in the parliamentary elections next month.

“He’s a very good general and it’s important to have a general,” Mr Fauvergue, 60, told the Sunday Telegraph. “I often describe him as a war leader because he’s been able to create a whole political movement behind him in just a year, and because he’s put together a political programme that takes into account all the problems facing French society.”