Macron has succeeded in changing France — and it may lead to his undoing.
The end of French exceptionalism isn’t to be mourned. The French were exceptionally moribund economically for decades, holding on to a model whose time passed in the 1960s. Their haughtiness on the world diplomatic stage was rooted more in their traumatic 20th century than any past glory. De Gaulle nurtured a myth of French grandeur to try to heal the trauma of French debasement — first at German hands in both world wars and then in losing its empire and global power pretensions in an American-shaped postwar order. For the past eight decades or so, France was led by a small elite, mostly educated at a single mandarin-training school called ENA.