Emmanuel Macron hopes to reinvent himself in 100 days

Duringhis audacious first bid for the French presidency, in 2017, Emmanuel Macron would scold supporters at campaign rallies who jeered when he name-checked his rivals. “Don’t whistle at them; let’s beat them!” the 39-year-old pretender urged the crowds with a smile, adapting a slogan borrowed from the high priest of political positivity, America’s Barack Obama. French politics, Mr Macron argued forcefully then, was in need of benevolence and collective endeavour not obstructive division. It was time to move an irritable, rebellious country to a more stable, consensual place.Six years later, France seems stuck in an impasse. The French are once again fired up by revolutionary rage and seem convinced that the country is run by an anti-democratic despot bent on destroying the bedrock of all that the French cherish. The opposition trades in a form of declinist . The grotesque effigies of the president’s head in a noose, or the burning of bins on the cobbled streets of Paris, glorify violent revolt. On May 1st an armour-clad policeman was set alight by a Molotov cocktail. It was the low point of the 13th one-day strike against Mr Macron’s modest decision to raise the minimum pension age from 62 years to 64, which is now law. Petrol-bombing troublemakers represent a minuscule minority. But 63% of the French want to keep up the struggle against the new law, and 72% say they are unhappy with Mr Macron as their president.