PARIS—Speaking at the annual gathering of the business and political elite in Davos earlier this year, French President Emmanuel Macroninvoked the spirit of one of his favorite early-20th-century thinkers, Joseph Schumpeter.

The economist is the father of “creative destruction,” the theory that innovation sustains growth by destroying old business models. The embrace of such thinking has made Mr. Macron, an investment banker turned head-of-state, a darling of the globalist set. But this time, Mr. Macron warned that disruption was descending into a battle for the survival of the fittest.

“Schumpeter is very soon going to look like Darwin. And living in a completely Darwinian world is not good,” Mr. Macron said.

France’s president is on a mission to save globalism from itself and, lately, that has become a lonely road.

There is no shortage of leaders—from China’s Xi Jinping to Germany’s Angela Merkel—preaching the virtues of an international system of trade underpinned by multilateral cooperation. But few of them have offered a full-throated rebuttal to U.S. President Donald Trump’s “America First” agenda and its critique of globalism as a system that lavishes the spoils of free trade on the globe-trotting urban elite at the expense of the rural working class.