He answers, among 400 personalities, questions like “How do you read?” and mentions among other things the bad books he would have read. President Emmanuel Macron returns to the magazine Rules of the Game, to be published on February 2, on his thwarted vocation as a writer, explaining that he has “little daring” to be read.
“A bad book is probably a book that was not necessary”, he says in issue 75 of the review founded by Bernard-Henri Lévy. “And so, whoever the author is, when I have this feeling, I stop reading and I abandon the work. It is probably also for this reason that I dared so little to make public this that I could write. If there is no necessity, it is better to be silent”, he concludes.
Emmanuel Macron is the author of a single book, his programmatic book for the 2017 presidential election, Revolution (XO Editions, 2016). But he frequently spoke of his love of literature, transmitted by his teacher grandmother Germaine Noguès, and fueled by the one who was to become his wife, Brigitte Trogneux, a French teacher in her high school in Amiens. She says she often thought he would end up a writer.
A biography of Brigitte Macron in 2018 revealed that he had written a novel at the age of 16 that got lost. A neighbor typist who had typed him called him a“dared”. Emmanuel Macron had also confirmed in 2015, on the program “Special Envoy”, having signed at 17, as claimed by a former classmate, a picaresque novel set in pre-Columbian America, which he kept for him. At the end of 2018, at the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, he confided in front of writers: “I write every day.”
In Rules of the Game, the Head of State reiterates his passion for the novels of Gustave Flaubert, in particular Madame Bovary. “His requirement. His absolute language”, he explains. He also quotes Stendhal, who has “exchange [sa] Life”, Earth Foods by André Gide, “the book of [son] adolescence” and Rene Char, “the poet who taught me the most about the unspeakable”.