On November 16, 2016, a couple, sunglasses and leather pants for her, fitted black suit and matching thin tie for him, slipped incognito under the central portal and arches of the basilica of Saint-Denis (Seine-Saint- Denis). Just after declaring himself a candidate for the presidential election, in Bobigny, Emmanuel Macron and his wife, Brigitte, sped a few kilometers away, without warning anyone, to salute the tombs of the 43 kings of France. Under the winter light filtered by the rose window of the south arm, the future president caresses the white marble of the recumbent figures.
Each takeover has its original scene. Saint-Denis is the crucible of the country’s royal past, the place par excellence of the national story. Other presidential candidates, lovers of long history, have also preceded Emmanuel Macron to draw a piece of legitimacy from this magnetic pole of monarchical ambitions: François Mitterrand with Mazarine’s mother, Anne Pingeot, at the fall 1980; Jean-Luc Mélenchon, quietly, in 2012… This day in November 2016, the journalists and the writer embedded Philippe Besson, then working on writing his book A character from a novel (Julliard, 2017), missed Emmanuel Macron’s escapade. But, on the way back, the candidate confided to his first admirer, the journalist-blogger Bruno Roger-Petit, the meaning of this visit to Saint-Denis: in the middle of “speaking stones »find yourself “alone in his destiny”.
A part of mystique must envelop the great journeys, Emmanuel Macron has always thought. “Since I entered the political field, I have lived [mon aventure] like a mission. There is (…) something that goes beyond you, that preceded you and that will remain. » On the images recorded in 2016 in Le Touquet (Pas-de-Calais) by director Pierre Hurel for his documentary So be Macron (2017), it is a young man with a soulful look who speaks. That same year, 2016, he also went out of his way to help environmentalist senator from Hauts-de-Seine André Gattolin to meet the Dalai Lama. in Paris, and waited for two hours in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel, where the spiritual leader of the Tibetan Buddhists was staying. “The most important meeting of my life after Brigitte”the senator heard him say.
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