Live well, live hidden, goes the old French saying. Financial success is always a little suspect. Money is like God: best not mentioned in public. “Pro-business” remains an insult. Macron, the young disrupter and ex-banker, has been challenging an old country to adjust its self-image, embrace risk over security. Many have tried to do that. Many have failed.

So the domestic honeymoon is over, like the coziness with President Trump that could not stop Trump trashing international agreements dear to Macron (Iran, climate). The rekindled thrill at Macron’s Gaullist pomp has ceded to irritation at his airs. A scandal involving his security chief, Alexandre Benalla, who was caught on video beating up a protester, was handled badly enough to become an “affaire.” Macron can be peremptory when his convictions are challenged. The business of politics engages him less than the burdens of history.

This month, Macron made history — again. He was courageous — again. He challenged the consensus — again. Just as in his presidential campaign when he embraced the European Union at a moment when that looked like the death knell for any political ambition.

I allude here to Macron’s decision to admit to France’s systematic use of torture in the Algerian War and acknowledge that the French Army had tortured and killed a young antiwar intellectual, Maurice Audin, in 1957. “In the name of the French Republic,” Macron said on Sept. 13, he recognized that “Maurice Audin was tortured and then executed, or tortured to death, by soldiers who arrested him at his home.” He then went to the home of Audin’s 87-year-old widow, who had pursued the truth for decades, to ask for forgiveness.

For decades, there were two skeletons in the French closet — Vichy and the Algerian War. The shame of France — for its World War II collaboration, for its brutal colonial war — eluded honest accountings. Such lies and evasions are ticking bombs in the fabric of any society.