The declaration lasted a few minutes and was made against a backdrop of the French, European and Ukrainian flags. It was Thursday February 24th, a few hours after Russia had launched its offensive against Ukraine. Emmanuel Macron faced the camera with a solemnity that was not just for show. War had come and France was “ready” he stated. The head of state then declared: “We will respond to this act of war without weakness, with cold blood, determination and unity.” Decisions on actions were due to follow after meetings of the G7 and European Council and a NATO summit.
In this brief address to the nation the French president did not hide or overdo his concern. “The events of last night are a turning point in the history of Europe and of our country. They will have deep and lasting consequences for our lives,” he declared, calling for the whole country to unite at a difficult time when the “ghosts of the past are rising again” and when there would be many attempts to manipulate opinion. These declarations came during a national public debate in France that is obsessed by the current presidential election campaign, during which several of his political opponents have accused him of making too much of his own involvement in the diplomatic efforts to stop the war.
“I've seen the photos of Emmanuel Macron unshaven, his head in his hands, and that's all very artistic but it's not a serious way to communicate” said far-right candidate Marine Le Pen on February 22nd, referring to a series of recent images of the French president. The president of Rassemblement National (RN) said at the time of Macron's talks with Vladimir Putin in Moscow in a bid to prevent Russian intervention in Ukraine that the French head of state was “using this diplomatic episode to support his entry into the campaign”. Macron has not yet officially declared himself a candidate for the April presidential elections, though that announcement is expected soon. The candidate for the right-wing Les Républicains, Valérie Pécresse, meanwhile said the president was “using an international cause for electoral ends”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
On Thursday 24th February Russia's invasion of Ukraine was universally condemned by all the candidates in the French presidential election, as electoral considerations were put to one side. But the earlier criticism of the president's “nativity”, “public relations” exercises and “personal posturing” had visibly angered the Élysée, which kept pointing to the collaborative nature of the French actions. “These diplomatic efforts were collective,” a member of Macron's entourage repeated on Wednesday evening. “The lesson has been learnt,” explained the former French ambassador to Russia, Sylvie Bermann, referring to Putin's visit to the official state residence the Fort de Brégançon in the south of France in August 2019.
For while the French president has indeed been consulting ever more widely with international partners in recent weeks, that was not always the case. That well-known episode at Brégançon, which had enabled the French head of state to portray himself as one of the “rare intermediaries” of the Kremlin boss, had indeed irritated many European partners, starting with Germany, former ambassador Bermann said. “He made a mistake,” said the philosopher Michel Eltchaninoff, author of 'Dans la tête de Vladimir Poutine' ('Inside Vladimir Putin's head') published by Actes Sud. “He thought he was able to maintain a privileged relationship with Vladimir Putin without really keeping his European partners informed.”
“Brégançon was the original sin,” said Marie Dumoulin, director of the Wider Europe programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR). “There was perhaps an element of delusion in the way that Emmanuel Macron dealt with Vladimir Putin.” Yet while there may have an element of delusion involved the president had not been naive insists this former diplomat, who points out that Macron was one of the main victims of the attempted Russian interference in the 2017 French presidential campaign. When Emmanuel Macron entered the Élysée that year he was “not spontaneously a 'Putinophile' but sought to establish a personal relationship with Vladimir Putin to obtain diplomatic results,” she said.
Emmanuel Macron understood that France didn't carry any clout.
The approach in fact worked for two years, according to Sylvie Bermann, who was in post in Moscow until December 2019. “Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin maintained a working relationship with mutual respect,” she insisted. “They always had in-depth discussions.” Jean-Robert Raviot, professor of Russian and Soviet civilisation at the University of Nanterre in west Paris said: “At the time Emmanuel Macron thought that he could unblock things through his personal contact. But this time reality caught up with him. He understood that France didn't carry any clout.”
“It was French naivety to think that Moscow considers us anything other than a wedge to be driven against the United States, but Emmanuel Macron is not alone in that,” said Frédéric Charillon, professor of political science and a specialist in international relations. On the other hand Michel Duclos, a former ambassador and a special advisor at the Paris-based think tank the Institut Montaigne, thinks that the French president “overestimated” his power of persuasion over Vladimir Putin.
That is also the view of the Estonian prime minister Kajas Kallas, who in relation to the French president's efforts at diplomacy with Moscow recently told the Financial Times: “I feel there is a strong wish to be the hero who solves this case, but I don’t think it’s solvable like that.” When Emmanuel Macron went to Moscow and Kiev at the start of February he was fully mindful of this concern, and ensured he had numerous conversations in advance with the American president Joe Biden, fellow EU leaders and British prime minister Boris Johnson.
When someone lies to you and speaks about peace texts, it is difficult to imagine that he's in the process of preparing for war.
The French president had been given reassurances before his trip east. “I'm waiting for you, I want to have a substantive conversation. I want to get down to the bottom of things with you, you're an intermediary of quality,” his Russian counterpart told him on the phone before his arrival, according to comments relayed at the time by the Élysée. But once Macron arrived in Moscow he discovered an atmosphere that was glacial. And the discussion between the two men, which lasted nearly six hours around a vast table, dashed Paris's illusions.
The French president himself admits that when he met him that day he did not recognise the Vladimir Putin that he had known. “At the Kremlin he found a Putin who was both stiffer and more isolated, and who had basically drifted off on some kind of ideological journey,” the Élysée said on February 21st, just after the speech in which the Russian president recognised the independence of the pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine. “After Brégançon Emmanuel Macron had got the impression this was someone he could convince,” said Michel Duclos. “Here, he actually found a different Putin.”
According to everyone to whom Mediapart spoke, the Kremlin boss has largely cut himself off from the rest of the world in the last two years. “He doesn't want people to approach him, he is scared stiff of Covid,” said one diplomat. “He's travelled less, he has limited his contacts with the outside,” said Marie Desmoulin of the EFCR, who nonetheless saw in Putin's speech “many things that characterise his relations with the West”. Sylvie Bermann said: “When I look at Putin I see a very different man from the one I knew. Everyone was taken by surprise.”
Given his changing character and knowing his previous history – in 2014 the then German Chancellor Angela Merkel was already of the view that the Russian president had lost “all contact with reality” - did Emmanuel Macron get ahead of himself first of all by declaring that he had agreed with Putin the “need for de-escalation”, and then by announcing he had arranged a summit between the Kremlin boss and Joe Biden? “When someone lies to you and speaks abput peace texts, it's difficult to imagine that he's in the process of preparing for war,” said former ambassador Sylvie Bermann.
“Emmanuel Macron perhaps underestimated the difficult nature of the character involved,” said Marie Desmoulin. “His gamble failed but it was a necessary one.” Several diplomats made the point that all the possibilities for dialogue had to be explored with the Kremlin boss, if only to avoid the latter being able to claim later that his actions were simply the fault of the West. “We went as far down the road as we could go,” the Élysée said on February 21st.
Contrary to the claims of some French opposition figures, all the diplomats and specialists to whom Mediapart spoke thought that, in the words of Michel Duclos, Emmanuel Macron had “done his job”. Academic Frédéric Charillon said: “We have a tendency in France to see every diplomatic effort as a 'stunt', as if it were a personal initiative. Yet Emmanuel Macron occupies the presidency of the European Union: it would have been quite unthinkable not to try to negotiate with Moscow. It failed. Should we blame the president for not having stopped Putin, or Putin for not having respected the attempts at dialogue?”
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- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter