But the endless hours of meeting with local officials, often with Mr. Macron doing most of talking, may have more successfully bludgeoned the Yellow Vests into submission than any number of riot police.

Only 22,300 people marched in the Yellow Vest protest across France Saturday, the lowest turnout yet, and less than a tenth of those who took part in the first marches on Nov. 17 last year. And only about 35 percent of the French still support them, less than half the figure at the movement’s peak.

Mr. Macron, by going week after week deep into the country and standing for hours on end lecturing and taking questions, has clawed back some of the popularity he lost at the height of the Yellow Vest movement.

He is now supported by some 29 percent of the French, according to an IFOP poll last week, around his level of support at the beginning of the protests. After weeks of trailing Marine Le Pen’s far-right Rassemblement National party, formerly the National Front, in polls for May’s elections to the European Parliament, Mr. Macron has finally crept out in front.

“Renewing dialogue and deflating the anger — in one sense, he’s succeeded,” said Chloé Morin, a public opinion expert at the Ipsos consultancy in Paris. “But, it was just one part of the French” who participated in the “Great National Debate,” said Ms. Morin.

“It was a certain category of the population, and not necessarily a representative one: city-dwellers, those who are reasonably off. So, it’s been a relative success,” she said. “He’s managed to regain his base of popularity — with his electorate, and with the right.”

But the large segment of the population that once identified with the Yellow Vests is another matter.