Emmanuel Macron, a paradox in executive form, was sitting in his office at the Élysée Palace, eight days after the European Parliamentary elections, a loss that was really a win. He was the President of “neither the right nor the left,” the youngest leader of America’s oldest ally, a grassroots campaigner who managed in a top-down style, a hyper-rationalist in a time of passions, the great liberal hope who tried and failed to be Donald Trump’s B.F.F. Last year, the Times declared that Macron had “laid claim to the mantle of leader of the free world.” Since his election, in 2017, he has emerged as the European Union’s strongest advocate and the most forceful defender of global progressivism.

Macron is coming off a stretch of domestic instability that has constrained his options, if not his ambition. There have been months of demonstrations by the gilets jaunes, a leaderless and often violent movement of social fury, much of it explicitly directed toward his person—“We squeezed Macron like a lemon,” protesters wrote on their yellow vests. “Macron, eat your dead.” Europe is in a tough spot, as it tries to reconcile the rise of populism with the need to confront migration, climate change, the digital revolution, the structure of its governance, and an eternal Brexit. In a number of countries, far-right parties have increased their share of the vote, helped along by Russian meddling and propagandists such as Steve Bannon, the former Trump adviser, who set himself up in an Italian monastery with dreams of building an international nationalist alliance. It had thus been a relief when, in the European elections in May, Macron’s party, La République En Marche! (L.R.E.M.), finished second to Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National by less than a percentage point. The green party also made a surprisingly strong showing. But Macron’s base had held. In the dicey, regressing world order of 2019, maintenance qualifies as progress.

It was early evening, and a muted light filled the Salon Doré, where Madame de Pompadour entertained and General de Gaulle worked. The gilding looked soft enough to eat with a spoon. Macron was in his shirtsleeves, an arm slung around the back of a black leather sofa. He was drinking coffee from a glass, which had been delivered by a majordomo to a warm “Merci.” I asked for his analysis of the election.

“What is new at the European scale is that the rise of extremism, especially coming from the far right, is everywhere,” he said, speaking in English (his choice). “A few months ago, a lot of people thought that this new coalition of the far right could have a majority or could block any majority at the European Parliament, which didn’t happen,” he said. “This is, for me, one of the positive outcomes of these elections, even if they were very much helped by foreign influences.”

I wondered if he counted Trump, who recently described Europe as a “foe,” among those influences.

“No, because I don’t totally mix or assimilate Trump and Bannon,” he said. “What is certain is that we have some ambiguities, especially when you look at Trump’s position regarding Brexit, and the fact that he promotes a hard Brexit.” He continued, “I think he has to clarify his position vis-à-vis Europe.”

Macron is the most transformative French President since François Mitterrand. Mitterrand captured the Presidency in 1981, at the age of sixty-four, after two defeats, uniting Communists and Socialists to bring the left to power for the first time since the establishment of the Fifth Republic, in 1958. Macron came to office by way of a fission of certainties, picking through the bombed-out middle to win his first election—for anything, ever—at the age of thirty-nine. He promised to remake politics, but people weren’t sure what or whom he represented. His habit of saying “en même temps” (“at the same time”)—less a tic than a reflection of his thought process—didn’t help. One best-selling book, “The Ambiguous Mr. Macron,” treated him as a Tom Ripley figure, an unnerving manipulator of dodgy provenance. “Qu’est-ce que le macronisme?” has become a staple headline in the French media. So what is Macronism? Stanislas Guerini, the head of L.R.E.M., told me, “First of all, it’s an audacity. And the capacity to take risks by telling the truth to the French.”

In 2006, as a participant in the German Marshall Fund’s transatlantic-leadership program, Macron visited America. NASA

The theme of risk runs briskly through Macron’s life and career. The first big chance he took was starting a relationship with a teacher at his high school, Brigitte Auzière. (She is now his wife.) Armchair psychology may not be the most penetrating method of analyzing politicians, but, in this case, it seems appropriate: imagine the tolerance for, and even the disposition toward, exposure that one might develop after having gone up against a potent taboo and won while still a teen-ager. In finance, where he worked in his early thirties, Macron took on risk in the literal sense. Then he decided to become a politician. As minister of the economy in a country that is, at best, capitalism-ambivalent, he said things such as “We need young French people who dream of becoming billionaires.” When he ran for President, he circumvented and ultimately destroyed the two political parties that had dominated France since the de Gaulle era, launching his own party, which drew from the traditional left and the traditional right while undercutting them both. Macron had no shame about betraying former President François Hollande, who had given Macron his big break by appointing him to his cabinet. In an omertà-flouting passage of “Revolution,” Macron’s memoir, he wrote, “I was amazed to observe the naivety with which those who sought to bring me down were thereby admitting that, for them, politics essentially followed the law of the underworld: obedience in the hope of being personally compensated.” I asked the writer and economist Jacques Attali whether he thought that Macron, whom he knows well, has an appetite for risk. “No,” Attali answered. “Transgression.”

En marche means “on the move.” In Macron’s view, globalism is a fait accompli. The role of the state is to get people, goods, and capital moving at an optimal pace in the right direction. (It’s not an accident that Macron enjoys strong support among French expatriates.) Metaphors of movement suffuse his philosophy: “We are less the victims of our enemies than of our own inertia,” he writes, in “Revolution.” But, to his opponents, Macron is rootless. “I think he’s the President of flux,” François-Xavier Bellamy, a philosophy teacher who led the center-right ticket in the European elections, told me.

Macronism isn’t a lockstep vision of progress. Macron believes that inequality is unjust if created by circumstances, but acceptable if created by conscious choices. Perhaps his most fundamental belief is in the primacy of individual rights. “Today, it’s very difficult to harmonize or equalize all the different destinies or perspectives or situations of all our people,” he told me. “But, for societies to be sustainable, at least you have to restore the equality of chances.” This view is realistic, but it can also seem like a dereliction of the “social” part of Macron’s professed social-democratic beliefs. He spent much of his first two years in power pursuing economic reforms. This month, he announced that his Presidency is entering “Act II,” a phase in which it will focus on ecological and social justice. This is an opportunistic move, but not necessarily a hollow one. Macron is less interested in putting forth a grand vision of society than in taking bits of preëxisting ideology and recombining them so that traditional political demarcations no longer make sense. “I think that, in his heart of hearts, Macron is liberal,” Aurélien Taché, a deputy from the left wing of L.R.E.M., told me. “But, as President of the Republic, he has to face a part of public opinion that’s very hostile on these questions, and so he tries to have it both ways.”