David Todd

The Marquis de Morès was an extraordinary villain in an epoch crowded with the vile and the louche. After he killed a Jewish officer in a duel in 1892, a prosecutor seeking his conviction for murder captured Morès’s scrappy life of endless reinvention: ‘Cuirassier in Saint-Cyr, meat merchant in Chicago, engineer in Tonkin, reserve second lieutenant in the dragoons, nightstick-major in the streets, marquis in the salons, anarchist in meetings, these are the trappings of ... a destroyer of Jews.’

‘He had one illusion – France; and one disillusion – mankind, including Frenchmen.’ John Maynard Keynes’s description of the political philosophy of Georges Clemenceau, who led France through the end of the First World War, applies even more to the country’s most illustrious leader of the 20th century, Charles de Gaulle.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s rise to prominence since 2015 has often been compared to the contemporaneous if more ephemeral success of Jeremy Corbyn in Britain and Bernie Sanders in the United States. But to the extent that La France insoumise looks to foreign models, it usually invokes the Five Star Movement in Italy, for its canny use of new media, or Podemos in Spain and Syriza in Greece, for their radical hostility to neoliberal capitalism.

How can we account for France’s historical wavering on race, between an extraordinary openness to assimilation and outbursts of unashamed racism? French revolutionaries held such extreme views, William Nelson argues, because the French Enlightenment pioneered scientific racism a century before adepts of Darwin built racist sandcastles on his theory of natural selection.

For the left, Macron conjures up memories of Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, who launched his 1851 coup by papering Paris with posters announcing: ‘I have dissolved [the National Assembly] and I make the entire people our judge.’