The death, on Saturday, of the poet Richard Wilbur may make one—a Francophile “one,” anyway—reflect on the supreme qualities of his English translations of Molière. Over the years, Wilbur translated most of the masterpieces of the seventeenth-century French writer, the Mozart of comedy, and not only are all of them among the finest translations of anyone by anyone that we possess but they also work, beautifully, onstage. What makes Wilbur’s translations technically astonishing is that, whereas most prior Molière translations had been written in prose, in order to keep the plays playable, Wilbur’s imitate the rhyme schemes with which Molière wrote, and manage to do so without any of the merry-go-round self-consciousness, the Gilbert and Sullivan chiming, that efforts to reproduce French or Italian rhyme can often produce in rhyme-famished English. Wilbur’s Molières read, and play, as smoothly as prose, without a forced or unnatural rhyme in their scenes. (Stephen Sondheim, in his slightly perverse way, placed Wilbur’s one-time-only Broadway lyrics, for “Candide,” alongside those of DuBose Heyward, the one-time-only lyricist, for “Porgy and Bess,” at the top of the American theatrical pile.)

Thoughts of Molière can, in turn, put a Francophile in mind of the big televised interview—it was actually called that, “Le Grand Entretien”—that President Emmanuel Macron gave at the Élysée Palace on Sunday night. Macron is, famously, a Molière lover—almost, one might say, a Molière fanatic: in a hallucinatory moment, he once engaged in an exchange of the proto-romantic Alceste’s opening lines from “The Misanthrope” with a journalist, who took up the accompanying role of Philinte, Alceste’s best friend, who represents simple common sense.

The recent interview, which was broadcast live and conducted by three well-known journalists from TF1 over the course of an hour and a half, was an unusually self-explicating and even, in some ways, defensive performance for a French President. François Mitterrand would loftily peek down at journalists on occasion—Charles de Gaulle rarely did even that—and subsequent French Presidents have tried to imitate that hauteur. Macron, instead, talked and kept talking, at length, in long, beautifully circuitous but finally pointed sentences, the syntax stretching out to accommodate his thoughts but snapping back at the end to catapult his purpose home. It was a hugely scrutinized event, with the right-wing morning paper Le Figaro annotating the objects and the works of art that Macron had chosen to display in his office, including a variant image of Marianne, the feminine symbol of the French Republic, which was originally designed as a street mural by Shepard Fairey, the familiar artist of the Obama era.

What was powerful and, in a way, poignant about Macron’s performance was the part that Molière, in fact, would have sympathized with, and probably managed to humanize: Macron was trying to make the middle way, the sane path forward, look vital, urgent, radical, and even glamorous. He was speaking in Alceste’s voice, but offering Philinte’s views. Fixing his gaze relentlessly on his auditors, he hammered home, with a kind of frowning rapidity, what were, on reflection, a set of simple and middle-of-the road social reforms. Far from being either the Thatcherian radical of his left-wing opponents’ imagination or the technocratic statist imagined by his right-wing enemies, Macron was speaking for common sense. The changes that he was introducing were, in truth, for all the fears of incipient hyper-neoliberalism, well within the usual Fifth Republic boundaries of the welfare state and a government-supervised social contract. The “social partners”—i.e., the salaried workers and the unions, as well as the stockholders and the management—should always be consulted in hiring-and-firing policymaking. Wise and successful firms include their employees as stakeholders in their success. Education and sound early “formation” are essential to ending the French crisis of unemployment; apprenticeships are a good solution. The gap between élite and popular education has to be closed. Rich people should not be driven out of the country by confiscatory taxes but, rather, be encouraged by the tax code to reinvest in France. Foreign-born terrorists and criminals should be imprisoned and expelled, but ordinary immigrants should be assimilated. He also addressed the issues surrounding Harvey Weinstein (whose name one interviewer, rather disconcertingly, pronounced in a sinisterly Germanic manner: “Vine-shtein”), saying that a process was under way to rescind his Légion d’Honneur, but that the real problem involved in allegations of harassment and abuse was silence—the silence that women are forced into when they cannot trust the state to listen to their experiences. His general point, a hard one to dispute, was that modalities matter more than models, so that even those of us who may believe that the United States is desperately in need of more social protections (universal health coverage, stronger union participation) may find it perfectly logical to also think that France may be in need of less, at least of the kind that, for example, inhibits entrepreneurship by tying up new firms in endlessly finicky rules and regulations—something that has contributed to an exodus of ambitious young people out of France and, at least until Brexit happens, often to London.

Macron was cautioning against dogmatic answers to practical problems. He was, in short, speaking on behalf of Molière’s great theme: the folly of fanaticism of every kind, whether it be the religious fanaticism in “Tartuffe,” in which a self-seeking pseudo-holy man warps a family’s life, or the social fanaticism in “The Misanthrope,” in which the proudly plainspoken Alceste has to be instructed by his mistress and his friends that too much candor is egocentric and vain, and not admirable. In “Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme,” Molière makes fun of the aspirational fanaticism of the moneyed middle-class man who discovers, thanks to an expensive tutor, that he has been speaking prose all his life without knowing it, and in “The Imaginary Invalid” he makes fun of the hypochondriac’s desperate desire to be cured by some systematic, if entirely fake, doctoring. In “The Learned Ladies,” Molière’s proto-feminist point is not that the ladies should not be learned but that their natural wit—all that they know already from their own experience—is more profound than what their lecherous tutors, with their extravagant poetic pretensions, wish to teach them.

That French lesson—about the madness of finding a one-size-fits-all solution to a many-shaped and many-sized humanity—though delightfully convincing when presented as social comedy, is hard to make glow as social policy. So, on Sunday night, Macron was in the strange and contradictory position—one that made his performance on the whole as disconcerting as it was effective—of trying to stare down fanaticism fanatically. He held that the leftist belief in a kind of organized social revenge against the wealthy élite is just as destructive as the right-wing nationalist belief in an orgy of revenge against the educated élite. He spoke for the fierce urgency of not always being too urgent, for the glamour of moderation, for the eloquence of small-bore social engineering.

A larger issue here speaks not only to French literature and politics. Among progressives in the United States and the United Kingdom, “pragmatic centrist” has become an insult, entailing many jokes about only roadkill being found in the center of the highway. Moderation’s bad repute owes, in part, to a confusion cultivated by the false “both sides do it” middle way. The pragmatic path forward does not lie in simply mixing two ideologies together and then dividing them in half; it lies in paying attention to the evidence of what makes societies more peaceful and more prosperous and what does not. Sometimes, it means increasing regulation and the role of government; sometimes, it means reducing them. “Moderates” of Macron’s kind, as the President tried to explain during his hour and a half, are radicals of the real, determined to produce social reform that actually works—rather than the kind that sounds good on television and at rallies, but fails on the ground and produces only fanaticisms of more sinister sorts.

Comedy makes sanity look appealing and alive to our dramatic imagination; politics often makes it look weak and inadequate to our emotional hunger. It is the rare leader—America not very long ago had one—who can make small sanities resonate as inspiring ideas. France should be, and may be, so lucky.