President Macron pledged to inculcate civic values into France’s often unruly children by giving them uniforms, teaching them La Marseillaise and forcing them to study the history of art, reports The Times.
He laid out his plan, which he said would help to unite a fractured nation, at a press conference touted by his spin doctors as the relaunch of his second term.
The two-hour event was broadcast live on six channels, whose executives scrambled to jettison evening news programmes, soap operas and comedies to make way for the head of state.
He was speaking a week after appointing Gabriel Attal, his 34-year-old protégé, as France’s youngest prime minister in history.
The president, 46, had hoped the appointment would turn a corner for his government after 12 months marked by protests over his decision to raise the legal age for a state pension from 62 to 64, riots over the fatal shooting of a teenager by a police officer and chaos in parliament over his attempt to crack down on illegal immigration.
Macron, who cannot run for a third term in 2027, is seeking to avoid a humiliating defeat at the hands of the populist right National Rally in the European parliament elections in June.
Attal’s premiership has got off to a difficult start, however, with those on the left of Macron’s coalition angry that eight of the 14 ministers have backgrounds in the centre-right opposition Republicans party.