“Bonjour, Macron!”
At Le Prem’s, a small bar in western France that sells lottery tickets and tobacco, this greeting has become a running joke since President Emmanuel Macron dropped by unannounced the other day and bought a round of coffee for everyone, save the customers who opted for a bracing midmorning sauvignon blanc.
“He did not come to scratch!” said Christophe Jacques, the cheerful bar owner, alluding to the betting games he offers on scratch cards, where winning numbers are revealed by scratching off an opaque covering. “He came to chat.”
Chat the president did, for more than an hour, about health care and jobs and salaries and other day-to-day concerns of an anxious French people. Perched on a bar stool against a backdrop of cigarette packets warning, “SMOKING DIMINISHES FERTILITY,” he seemed happy to shoot the breeze. It was a break for Mr. Macron from building Europe into a credible military power, now that the United States often seems less friend than foe.
Some regulars — and the bar has many, especially among retirees — were so shocked that they initially thought he was a Macron doppelgänger.
“I was studying the form for a horseracing bet, turned around and was face to face with Macron!” said Jean-Claude Turpault, a farmer. “Could not believe it. I’d imagined him more arrogant, but he was easy to talk to.”
A screen showed horse races. Newspapers hung from a rack, looking like relics. A scratch card game called “Carats” did a brisk business. Black-and-white postcards were on sale. Mr. Macron drank two espressos without sugar at the zinc bar, where people lingered. They were not in a hurry; there was nothing to hurry to. Le Prem’s felt like the France of the movies, where romance is kindled in faded bars, minus the smoke.
Since taking office eight years ago, Mr. Macron has struggled to overcome an image of lofty remoteness, which has earned him the sobriquet “Jupiter.” He has tried, but to little avail, various remedies, including a three-month listening and talking tour of the provinces after the Yellow Vest protests, sparked by a fuel price hike, erupted in 2018.
Now, dispensing with the press, with cameras, with his entourage and with any advance warning, Mr. Macron has taken to dropping in solo on random bars, mainly so-called “PMU bar-tabacs,” the only places in France licensed to sell tobacco and handle betting. They are distinguished by the orange diamond-like symbol on their facades, colloquially known as “the carrot.”
These outlets for gambling on horses and much else, while having a drink and enjoying what’s left of community camaraderie, are often among the few commercial survivors in villages and small towns across France. Countless bakeries, cafes, post offices, train stations, banks and Mom-and-Pop stores have closed as online retail, big-box hypermarkets and pressure on municipal budgets have taken a toll.
Thouars, a town of 14,000 inhabitants with a pretty setting on the Thouet river, is no exception.
The once bustling Rue St.-Médard at its center is now a procession of shuttered stores. Alexandre Fleveau, a hotel owner, described the main square as “an airport parking lot” before the centrist mayor, Bernard Paineau, embarked on a bid to “vegetalize” it with tree plantings and other improvements that, for now, have turned it into a construction site. A new cultural center, offering movies and exhibitions, will open soon.
“I pay taxes for all the people here doing nothing, and there are a lot of them,” said Mr. Jacques, the bar owner. He is looking to sell the bar and move to the Camargue region in southern France.
Mr. Macron, with two years left in his presidency, wants to get close, at last, to the French people, who sometimes call him “extraterrestrial” for his technocratic and intellectual bent. The two French presidents most fondly remembered in recent decades are François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac, because they demonstrated a bond with the people — and the cattle — of France. The incumbent is aware of this.
“He’s looking for more proximity, simplicity, away from the cameras and media pools that make sincerity impossible,” said a close adviser to Mr. Macron who requested the anonymity under which officials at the presidency customarily speak. “People are worried by Putin, by Trump, by the cost of living, and he has a unique ability to reassure.”
For Mr. Macron’s critics, and there are many, this is no more than “authenticity in kit form,” as the right-wing JDD Sunday newspaper put it recently.
Still, the Macron who pops in at Le Prem’s feels different, a man who gives shorter speeches, projects authority in a crisis and devotes greater attention to the “périphérie,” roughly, the flyover country, where a sense of abandonment has led voters to reject mainstream parties. Viewed as a lame duck last year after a succession of blunders, including an abrupt dissolution of Parliament that led to chaos, Mr. Macron has reacquired a raison d’être.
Two recent polls, for the newspapers Le Figaro and JDD, showed Mr. Macron’s popularity surging four percentage points, to nearly 30 percent, a respectable showing in a country of strong egalitarian spirit, where scathing attacks on the president are a national pastime and single-digit approval ratings are not unknown.
Although he is term-limited and toward the end of his presidency, Mr. Macron has assumed a more important role since President Trump took office because he is widely seen in France and beyond as one of the most experienced orchestrators of an effective European response to the new American distance from, and contempt for, the continent. Mr. Macron’s quest for more contact, as in Thouars, forms part of his push for a rebirth.
“You know a barman has to be a psychologist, a confidant” said Nicolas Cossard, who works at Le Prem’s. “You listen to people newly widowed, to old people talking about their gardens, their billiards, their Bingo, their car. Macron has been absent for me. But when I shook his hand, my sense was he was not just trying to gain credit.”
Alain Duhamel, the author of a book about Mr. Macron, said that the French president had adjusted his style, if not his essence, to appear as “the sober rather than the theatrical seducer.”
In Thouars, Mayor Paineau, who is also a successful entrepreneur, was alerted to Mr. Macron’s visit when the president was already at the bar, so he rushed over, delaying his appearance at a lunch for older people. On leaving Le Prem’s, Mr. Macron insisted on accompanying the mayor to apologize for the delay. He stayed through the meal.
“The band struck up the Marseillaise at the end, everyone rose, it was a moving moment,” the mayor said. “He did not have to do that.”
Mr. Macron went on to visit Asselin, a local company that has provided beams for the reconstruction of Notre-Dame Cathedral. Thouars is struggling but not moribund.
At the bar, life goes on, albeit a little changed. An espresso is now known as a “petit Macron.”
Mr. Jacques, warming to his role, said, “We are awaiting Putin next week.”
