Why France’s Center Does Not Hold

I n 2017, when French voters first elected Emmanuel Macron as president, pundits hailed him as the antidote to their nation’s “decline.” The term, in the parlance of that moment, seemed to encompass a condition that was not just economic and cultural but existential: France, as an idea and ideal, was decaying as surely as its national debt was deepening.

Nearly 10 years later, as Macron’s second presidential term comes to an end, the French are nearly unanimous in their belief that their country is still on a downward slope.

In a recent Ipsos-BVA poll , 85 percent of French respondents said that France was in decline, and 98 percent were dissatisfied with the present state of the country.

One might have seen such numbers in the spring of 1789, if opinion polls had existed then.

In that prerevolutionary time, France was burdened with staggering debt, skyrocketing prices, and in a sclerotic state overseen by a clueless and corrupt elite.

Today similar factors, together with the memory of past glory, are driving the public’s belief that France’s Fifth Republic is faltering.

And declinism, in turn, seems to be fueling the rise of extremist radicals intent on remaking the republic itself.

G allic morosity might be easy to dismiss.

After all, few peoples are more inclined toward claims of national decay than the French.

Members of the country’s political and intellectual elite point to auguries of its descent throughout the 19th and 20th centuries—a sweep of time punctuated by the rise and fall of authoritarian states (whether Bonapartist or Pétainist) and republican governments (from the Second to the Fifth).

Charles de Gaulle’s assertion that France could not be France without la grandeur could be said to channel a certain anxiety as much as pride.

Soon after de Gaulle’s death in 1970, le déclinisme was again on the rise.

Thirty years of economic growth came to an end with the global energy shocks and financial crises of that period.

In 1976, the distinctly non-Gaullist president, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, declared that France was no longer a fully autonomous power as it had been in the past, but was instead what commentators have described as a “world middle power”—an observation that angered his opponents across the political spectrum.