French Letter: A bloodied Macron cancels Charles and Camilla’s state visit

The last-minute decision by Emmanuel Macron to seek a postponement of the state visit to France by King Charles and the Queen Consort will have caused the President more personal anguish than any of the many misfortunes to have befallen him since he first entered the Élysée Palace in May, 2017. 

It is nothing short of a humiliation. 

But he really had no choice. France is in uproar. The people have not yet stormed the Élysée, but then, on July 13, 1789, they had not yet stormed the Bastille, and the arrival of a hereditary monarch and his queen in the midst of the chaos might only have added fuel to the flames. 

The ongoing revolt over Macron’s plan to raise the age of retirement from 62 to 64 is getting worse by the day. To outsiders, it may seem to echo the dispute in Gulliver’s Travels between Lilliput and Blefuscu over the proper way to crack open a boiled egg, but the dispute is deadly serious, pitting the Palace against the mob, which in France does not always end well. 

Getting Charles to come to Paris, with the intended high-point a state banquet in Versailles, complete with trumpets and, one imagines, the gallic equivalent of Riverdance, was a considerable coup. It followed Macron’s dignified and clearly heartfelt tribute to the King’s mother, Queen Elizabeth, delivered the day after her death last September.

The King, it is said, was much moved by the President’s words, as was the British Government (such as it was at the time) and even the Tory press. 

The resulting visit was to have been deeply symbolic, sealing the restoration of the Entente Cordiale between Britain and France that had fallen into such wretched disrepair in the wake of Brexit. 

But that was before Macron – increasingly lampooned as a luckless Roi du Soleil – chose to force his pension reforms onto the statute books without putting it to a vote in the National Assembly. Now, instead of Versailles, Charles and Camilla will make their way, first, to Berlin, where President Frank-Walter Steinmeier will welcome them to Schloss Bellevue, with dinner and speeches at the White House next up on the calendar. 

Paris will be pencilled in again as soon as circumstances permit, which could be in the summer or, more likely, the autumn. Britain’s monarch and his wife will have no wish to play the part, however vicariously, of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. In that event, will Macron still be in place, however battered, to act as host? Probably. His term does not expire until 2027. But with the people’s revolt continuing to grow, his survival cannot be guaranteed, raising the intriguing possibility that either Marine Le Pen, of the far right, or Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the French Jeremy Corbyn, could be among those welcoming the royal couple off the Eurostar at the Gare du Nord. 

As things stand, the capital is a war zone. The windows of banks, restaurants and shops were smashed during Thursday’s biggest-ever protest. Several of the city’s distinctive news kiosks were set alight. Everywhere, there are mountains of uncollected rubbish, not only attracting rats but providing raw material for the casseurs, or thugs, to set on fire as they bludgeon their way every few days to the latest 21st century version of the Place de la Guillotine. 

Nobody knows how it will end. The hundreds of thousands – more than a million – who took to the streets on Thursday across the nation all say that they are there because of the proposed change to the age of retirement. They say that Macron is sentencing them to hard labour for life, to be followed by an early death. The fact that the President is attempting to ensure future funding for pensions by bringing France more into line with its neighbours, including the UK, counts for nothing. If the communards had their way, not only would the idea of retirement at 64 be dismissed, but pensions would be paid, in full, from age 60 onwards. 

Trade union leaders in France are not stupid. They know that Macron is right to argue that as a result of population decline and increased life expectancy, the system will start to run out of resources by 2030. Most ordinary wage-earners know this, too. But in both cases their answer is simple: tax the rich. 

So how would that work out? At the last count, there were some 50 billionaires in France, including the world’s richest man, Barnard Arnaut, the founder and CEO of luxury goods group LVMH, purveyors of fashion to the world and suitcases to the gentry. But below the super-rich are the very rich, the rich and the well-off, numbering in the low millions. Macron would stress that between them this cadre of entrepreneurs, celebrities and up-market professionals already pay the largest chunk of income tax. He might add that at the other end of the scale a near-majority of French workers, while contributing to the cost of their healthcare and other benefits, including pensions, pay no income tax at all as their earnings fall below even the lowest tax bracket. 

To the latter-day sans-culottes, such logic is irrelevant. All they know is that after three years of Covid, followed by a period of rampant inflation, they are struggling to pay their bills while the wealthy and big corporations grow more bloated with each passing year. To take one obvious example, Total-Energies, one of the biggest oil and gas companies in the world, with its headquarters in a leafy Paris suburb, posted record net profits last year of $36.2 billion (£29.6bn), allowing it to ratchet up the bonuses of top executives and the size of dividends paid to shareholders. 

The average wage paid to highly-skilled operators at Total refineries in 2022 was €51,600 (£45,400). By contrast, the company’s CEO, Patrick Pouyanné raked in in excess of €6 million, 120 times the income of his senior employees. Would it make much difference to the French national exchequer if Pouyanné was made to pay a higher top rate of tax? Probably not. But it would take at least some of the wind out of the sails of the protest lobby, most of whose followers would regard €51,000 as a solid wage, never mind six million. 

And so it goes on – the people determined, the President defiant. At some point, the protest will end, if for no other reason than the fact that the masses are growing weary and running out of cash. Strikes cost money and demonstrations are sore on the feet, especially if you have to run from the CRS. Macron, though bloodied, could yet outlast his detractors and stagger on to the next fight. But only when he feels that it is safe to go back in the water (or to sit down to a feast in Versailles) will he pick up the phone again to the King.

I wonder what the royal response will be: “Oh dear, Monsieur le President – back again?”

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