WHEN history recounts the remarkable rise of Emmanuel Macron, it might start and end in the town of Amiens. On the big-skied plains of the Somme, amid the woods and the fields of yellow rape that cover former bloody battlefields, this redbrick working-class city is the French presidential candidate’s hometown. With its soaring 13th-century cathedral, and charmless rebuilt central drag, Amiens is arresting both for its splendour and its banality. It is the place that shaped Mr Macron, and the town he fled. It was also the setting for a fraught encounter in the campaign’s closing days, which revealed much about the man who could soon be the next, and youngest-ever, president of France.
It was as a pupil at a private Jesuit school in Amiens, aptly named Providence, that Mr Macron met the drama teacher, Brigitte Auzière, fully 24 years his senior, who later became his wife. The bond alarmed his parents, both provincial doctors, who sent him to finish his schooling in Paris instead. The bookish student was at first in awe at the brilliance of the capital’s brightest. But he quickly learned the codes of the French elite, winning a place at the Ecole Nationale...Continue reading
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