Since his impulsive decision to dissolve parliament in 2024, which led him to lose his relative majority, Emmanuel Macron has been an impotent president. Far from being a new Charles de Gaulle, he is more like those presidents of previous regimes whose only role, as Georges Clemenceau once quipped, was to open flower shows. Or in the case of Macron, to “Panthéonise”.
The Panthéon, an imposing domed building in the Latin Quarter of Paris, was a church before the Revolution turned it into a burial place for heroes of the Republic. That tradition was resumed when Victor Hugo was buried at the Panthéon in 1885. Émile Zola’s ashes were transferred there in 1908. De Gaulle had the remains of the Resistance hero Jean Moulin moved there in 1964.
No one has more actively “Panthéonised” than Macron, who has overseen the transferred remains of six people. The most recent ceremony of his presidency took place on 24 June, for Marc Bloch. The great historian, though aged 53 in 1939, joined the French army in the Second World War. After witnessing first-hand France’s defeat in 1940, he wrote a classic analysis of the disaster, published posthumously after the war, under the title Strange Defeat. Bloch, who was Jewish, joined the Resistance, was arrested by the Gestapo and summarily shot on 16 June 1944. His burial in the Panthéon honoured a great intellectual, a courageous soldier, a Resistance hero and a Jewish martyr.
A Panthéonisation is a grandiose ceremony, attended by the great and the good, and by leaders of all political parties. In the case of Bloch’s, there was one notable absentee: Marine Le Pen, leader of the Rassemblement National (RN). The Bloch family did not want her there. The Front National (the party’s original name) was founded by her father, Jean-Marie, and has its roots in the French extreme right. Le Pen père hated De Gaulle, admired the Nazi collaborator Philippe Pétain, and was unapologetically antisemitic. After taking the party over in 2011, Marine worked to “detoxify” its brand, including changing its name. She pays her respects to De Gaulle’s tomb every year and has distanced herself from antisemitism.
In choosing to honour Bloch, Macron was sending a not-so-subliminal message about where the values of racist nationalism can lead – even if today it’s directed against Muslims rather than Jews. The refusal of the Bloch family to allow Le Pen to attend the ceremony demonstrates the limits of her detoxification strategy, but it has been successful enough to put her in a strong position to succeed Macron in next year’s presidential election.
Her rise has been inexorable. France’s race for president requires a second-round run-off between the top two candidates in the first round. Le Pen has twice got through to the second round, on both occasions facing Macron: in 2017 she won 34 per cent against him; in 2022, it was 41 per cent. Opinion polls have consistently made her the favourite to win the next election. Then came the shock court ruling in March 2024 which found her guilty of embezzling European Union funds to finance her party. She was sentenced to four years in prison, two of which were suspended and two of which would be spent under house arrest with the requirement to wear an ankle monitor. She was also pronounced ineligible to stand for public office for five years.
Le Pen’s reaction was to accuse the judges of a politically motivated attempt to muzzle the voice of “the people”. This was straight out of the Trumpist and Faragist playbook, and reminiscent of the Daily Mail headline in 2016 that declared High Court judges to be “Enemies of the people”. It was also ironic because the RN had long denounced the corruption of other parties and demanded that politicians found guilty of breaking the law be declared ineligible for office. Such a law was voted through in 2016 – and applied to Le Pen in 2025.
Her attempt to rouse the people against the judges fizzled out when the RN discovered that it had another future – possibly even a better one – in the form of Le Pen’s number two, Jordan Bardella, whose popularity started to outstrip hers. Still aged only 30, Bardella has been an FN/RN activist since his teens. He knows no other life. Bardella is the perfect TikTok-generation politician. He is smooth-talking – as long as someone gives him prompt cards – and his plastic looks have unexpectedly made him a sex symbol for some younger voters. At public meetings, people sometimes shout “à poil” (“get your kit off”).
As someone from a underprivileged background, with few educational achievements – unlike Marine Le Pen – Bardella appeals to the party’s populist and anti-elitist base. He is also the anointed darling of the right-wing billionaires who exercise a strong hold over the French media. His vacuous 2024 autobiography Ce que je cherche (“What I’m Looking For”) was heavily promoted by the most active of those billionaires, the reactionary Catholic Vincent Bolloré.
Le Pen seemed to accept that her hopes of reaching the Élysée were dashed. She appealed the 2024 verdict, but was adamant she would not stand for election if it meant campaigning with an electronic tag, a hypothetical commitment given that she was ineligible to run. Since no one expected the appeal court to overrule the conviction, the road seemed open for Bardella.
On 7 July, that court offered her a possible escape route. It upheld the guilty verdict while reducing the penalty. The ineligibility period was shortened from five years to 45 months, and since the clock on it started ticking after the first judgement, the revised ban meant she could run for president in 2027. Plus, the total length of the sentence was reduced to three years in prison, including two suspended and one to be served at home with an ankle monitor. This has allowed Le Pen’s lawyers to pull a rabbit out of a hat: the RN leader announced she would appeal the verdict to France’s highest court, the Court of Cassation. Pending that final appeal, she is deemed innocent, and therefore will not need to campaign wearing an electronic monitor.
Has Le Pen walked into a trap – or has she set one? She had been careful not to repeat the incendiary language she used after the first ruling, but has said that, since she will stand for election, it will be for “the people to decide”. The Court of Cassation only pronounces on whether a subordinate court has applied the law correctly and not on the content of the case. More than 70 per cent of the time it upholds the previous judgement. If the court was to confirm her guilty verdict after an election that Le Pen wins, France enters uncharted legal territory: does presidential immunity apply retrospectively? But if, as everyone expects, the court pronounces just before the election, and if the guilty verdict is upheld, she will fight the last stage of the campaign as a criminal, wearing a tag. How would the electorate view her?
The only certainty is that she has returned to the presidential frame, while Bardella has been firmly pushed back to his place as number two. In their first public appearance together after the announcement he was stony-faced. The question is: does Le Pen’s resurrection increase or diminish the RN’s chances of winning the next election?
Le Pen and Bardella share the same racist ethno-nationalism, but on economics Bardella had started to suggest he wanted to move the party towards more liberal, and less populist, economic positions – for example on pension reform – to make it more acceptable to bourgeois conservatives. That line will now presumably be abandoned, a decision that would probably be reassuring to the anti-RN base.
Although Bardella seemed to overtake his former mentor in popularity, he hadn’t come under real scrutiny. Elections are not won entirely on TikTok. He might well have crumpled in the second-round debate, which is a gruelling exercise. Despite being coached by his minders, it is striking how he was savaged under forensic interrogation by the Macronist Gabriel Attal at the 2024 European elections (though that did not stop his party coming top). Although Le Pen was outclassed by Macron in the presidential debates in 2017 and 2022, she has more intellectual weight than he does. She will probably perform better in this exercise than Bardella.
Bardella, who once seemed to have perfect political antennae, may have lost his touch. He has been photographed with Princess Maria Carolina of Bourbon-Two Sicilies, an Italian socialite descended from the French Bourbon monarchs. Some of his ordinary voters might have felt a frisson of pride that their “boy” had made good – until Bardella’s absence from the marches taking place all over France in memory of Lyhanna, an 11-year-old girl whose rape and murder in May revealed glaring errors in the French police and justice system. Bardella was photographed at the same time as the protests sipping Champagne at the Monaco Grand Prix with his Instagram princess. He defended his misstep clumsily, saying, “There are marches every day.”
The young leader might have put this “let them eat cake” moment behind him, but Le Pen would never have made such a mistake. She has distanced herself from the sulphurous heritage of her father by transforming her public image into that of a cuddly, grandmotherly cat-lover rather than the abrasive hater of Muslims and immigrants she remains underneath. There is some reason to think she might have had more staying power than Bardella. But does anyone want a convicted criminal as a grandmother, as would be the case if Court of Cassation upholds the guilty verdict?
The crucial question regarding the election is different: who will be the other candidate facing the RN in the second round? When Jean-Marie Le Pen caused a seismic shock in 2002 by becoming the first candidate of the extreme right to reach the second round of the election, against the Gaullist candidate Jacques Chirac, it was because the French left had sabotaged itself by presenting a proliferation of candidates in the first round – which is when voters choose their favourite candidate in the expectation of being able to vote for the one they dislike least in the second. In 2002 this expectation turned out to be an act of irresponsible self-indulgence, since there were so many left-wing candidates that the left vote was split. In the run-off, there was no left candidate to vote for.
There is a risk that, at the next election, something similar might happen, but in a different way: there may be such a proliferation of candidates across the political spectrum that the 74-year-old Jean-Luc Mélenchon, head of the hard-left party La France Insoumise (LFI), will be let through. Mélenchon came a close third in the first round of both the last two presidential elections, and thinks his time has now come.
Until recently the extremism of many of his positions, allegations of antisemitism and what appear to be authoritarian tendencies – he admired Hugo Chávez and has a soft spot for Vladimir Putin – seem to have ruled him out. But some recent signs point in another direction. He is an effective speaker, and his advantage is that he knows exactly what he wants to do and where he wants to go, even if his current polling only stands at around 15 per cent. While other parties are squabbling over who their candidates will be, Mélenchon has already announced his candidacy. He is so toxic to many voters that, if he manages to get to the second round, they would either abstain – refusing to choose between plague and cholera – or vote for the extreme right.
The only chance of the RN being beaten at the second round is if a plausible centrist candidate emerges. But French politics has shifted so far to the right that it would need to be someone of the centre right: right wing enough to appeal to conservatives still reticent about voting for the RN (though there are fewer and fewer of them), but not so right wing that he (it will be a he) puts off the left. The person who best fits that description and who has the necessary gravitas is Macron’s former prime minister Édouard Philippe. But it’s not yet clear he would get through to the second round.
It is still very early days for the next presidential race, and in past French elections early front-runners have later fallen away. There is a danger that a proliferation of candidates will split the first-round vote and allow Mélenchon to slip through. To prevent this, voters will need to be tactical, and politicians will need to show a sense of responsibility. In Strange Defeat, Bloch was very critical of 1930s French politicians for their navel-gazing, self-indulgence and complacency in the face of extremism. Will his message be heard this time?
Julian Jackson is emeritus professor of modern French history at Queen Mary University of London and the author of A Certain Idea of France (Penguin)
[Further reading: Meet the people who handle the King’s billions]
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This article appears in the 15 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, After Keir Starmer
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