Macron’s Napoleon complex is unlikely to serve him well in the battles ahead

The French president will need to stand firm against the mob if he is to avoid meeting his own Waterloo

Coming to power in their thirties by defeating an ultra-right attempt to take over France, these handsome politicians were well-read and highly intelligent, having enjoyed the finest education that the country had to offer. Their ambition to enforce the unity of continental Europe involved isolating Britain, from where they wished to entice back hundreds of thousands of exiles from the previous regime. Believers in the meritocracy that brought them to the top, they promised root and branch reforms intended to unleash the genius of the French people hitherto held back by the sclerotic governments of the past.

There are other similarities between President Emmanuel Macron and Napoleon Bonaparte, not least in their attitudes towards their wives. Macron is presently facing the humiliation of a petition which garnered nearly 310,000 signatures and destroyed his proposal that his wife Brigitte become the “First Lady of France”, a position unknown to the Constitution of the Fifth Republic. That Constitution, written in 1958 by Charles de Gaulle, whose wife Yvonne did good works but felt no need for an official public role, did not countenance the kind of spending on the president’s wife that Madame Macron already enjoys, of over £400,000 a year, let alone the vast amounts that would have been involved if she had become first lady.

Napoleon also saw both his wives, the Empress Josephine and Empress Marie-louise, as a charge on the public purse, and when he divorced Josephine in 1809 it was largely the French state that picked up the bill of around 2 million francs. On occasion Napoleon would settle Josephine’s enormous bills from dress-makers, milliners and cobblers by recourse to the French Treasury, an enormity at which even Macron might baulk.

Yet Napoleon always set his face against allowing the women in his life – including his 27 mistresses – any say whatever in the running of France. He had seen the doleful effect that the Bourbons’ women – be it their mistresses like Madame de Pompadour or their wives like Marie Antoinette – had had on French politics, and he always denounced what he called “petticoat government”.

Both men used the Palace of Versailles. Macron held a joint meeting of the Senate and National Assembly there in order to make a vainglorious speech about his aims in government, hoping that the magnificent surroundings might overawe the parliamentarians, despite most of them hailing from his own En Marche! party. Napoleon had a more domestic purpose, eschewing the main palace itself but living in the Grand Trianon there, as one of his 39 residences.

Yet it will be in his attitude towards the uprising of the common populace that Macron will either be seen to emulate Napoleon or, like so many presidents of the Fifth Republic before him, show disastrous weakness. Once his proposed reforms to the working week, pension age and other aspects of employment law come to longoverdue fruition, and when the trade unions pour on to the streets of Paris in huge numbers, burning car tyres (and possibly even cars themselves), erecting barricades and hurling projectiles at the riot police, Macron will face his great test as President. What will happen?

Napoleon faced this in an even more violent way when elements opposed to the Revolution and the Republic – at least in the form represented by the corrupt Directory that employed him – attempted to march on the Tuileries palace in October 1795. Commandeering cannon from the nearby Sablons gun-foundry, he positioned his guns at tactically key places around central Paris, and, as the rebels crossed the Seine, gave them what was later dubbed a “whiff of grapeshot”, killing between 300 and 400, and ending the uprising overnight. The mob, an ever-present feature of French politics since it had stormed the Bastille in July 1789, was not heard from again in Paris until the revolution of 1830.

While Macron is unlikely to use actual cannon on violent strikers who will soon try to wreck the central policy of his administration, he may well use water cannon. Equally, he may well do what Nicolas Sarkozy, François Hollande, Jacques Chirac, François Mitterrand and so many other Fifth Republic presidents have done, which is to opt for the quiet life and try to effect lesser reforms elsewhere. The result is predicable; a French economy so skewed against employers that it continues to perform feebly. Will Macron be another Margaret Thatcher, or just another French politician content to go along with the consensus?

The opportunities for punishing Britain for Brexit are ones that would have had the Anglophobic Napoleon salivating. His Continental System of 1806-14 was designed to force the British, whom he memorably wrote off in a letter to the Shah of Persia as “a nation of shopkeepers”, to make peace. Instead what happened was that Britain, cut off from her traditional markets in continental Europe, looked elsewhere, establishing huge new trading opportunities in India, Asia, Africa and South America that were to produce massive income throughout the Victorian period and beyond.

The attempt to punish the despised islanders boomeranged badly against Napoleon, who discovered that in trying to hurt Britain after 1806 by destroying her trade, the ultimate losers were European consumers who either had to smuggle British produce, which they did in vast amounts, or go without. One wonders whether Macron has worked out that curtailing trade is a zero sum game for his own people, or whether he will follow the Colbertian protectionist principles followed by Napoleon, which led to a collapse of 15 per cent in French GDP in the last five years of his reign.

Although there undoubtedly is such a phenomenon as the “Napoleon complex” – a sense of hubristic megalomania that takes over successful men and drives them to make terrible mistakes – Napoleon himself did not in fact suffer from it. His invasion of Russia in 1812 may seem hubristic in retrospect, but he had beaten the Russians twice before, had no intention of going all the way to Moscow, had twice the number of men as the Russian armies facing him, and wasn’t to know that a hundred thousand men in his central striking force would die of a disease, typhus, that was not to be diagnosed for another hundred years. He moreover left more time for his army to get to Smolensk from Moscow than it had taken him to get from Smolensk to Moscow.

Emmanuel Macron, by contrast, seems already to be exhibiting all the signs of a Napoleon complex, not least in the photograph he caused to be taken of himself in his opening days in office, leaning back against his desk in a macho manner, surrounded by the accoutrements of his new-found power. A Napoleonic propagandist painter of the calibre of David or Ingres could hardly have conjured a more potent image of a great man contemplating his own destiny. “Vive l’empereur!” seems to be the caption that is intended, though perhaps what really awaits him is his very own Waterloo.

Andrew Roberts is the author of “Napoleon the Great” follow Andrew Roberts on Twitter @aroberts_andrew; read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion