Chapter 5 applies the argument of this book to the beginning of the Macron presidency. Initially, Macron implemented a series of liberalizing reforms, notably of taxation, collective bargaining, and the national railways, often over the opposition of strikers and demonstrators. However, after just eighteen months in office, simmering resentment erupted into the so-called yellow vest protests, a movement against higher gasoline taxes that spiraled into a broader contestation of the government itself. Chapter 5 shows that both the social anesthesia state and skinny politics contributed to the yellow vest movement. In a context of scarce fiscal resources due to the social anesthesia state, Macron’s desire to bolster French business through tax cuts while reducing France’s budget deficit necessarily entailed tax increases and cutbacks in public and social services for the general population. Further fueling contestation, Macron adopted an extreme form of skinny politics, disdaining negotiations with political elites and the social partners, and imposing reforms from above. The combination of unpopular reform, much of it liberal in nature, and skinny politics sparked the yellow vest protests. In the end, the yellow vests forced Macron to backtrack from his agenda, sent his approval ratings plummeting, and weakened his capacity to govern.

Chapter 6 analyzes Macron’s attempt to rebound from the yellow vest protests. On the one hand, signaling a shift in governance, Macron launched two initiatives, the Grand National Debate (GDN) and the Citizens’ Climate Convention (CCC), that offered an opportunity for ordinary citizens to voice their concerns and preferences. In the case of the CCC, 150 citizens were given the chance to craft legislative and regulatory reforms that Macron pledged to implement. Both initiatives were popular, revealing a strong desire among the French to be listened to and participate in key decisions affecting their lives. On the other hand, rather than serving as a template for a new agenda and mode of governance, the GDN and CCC remained isolated exceptions. In all other matters, Macron continued as before, pursuing an unpopular liberal economic agenda via top-down, skinny methods. Chapter 6 uses Macron’s two most important initiatives during this period, a tightening of unemployment benefits and eligibility conditions along with an overhaul of the pension system that included a controversial increase in the retirement age for many workers, to demonstrate the continuity of Macron’s agenda and approach to governing. Both reforms triggered significant contestation, and the pension reform was ultimately abandoned.

Chapter 9 explores the recent re-politicisation of religion in France in more detail and finds that it was less linked to a revival of Catholicism than to the emergence of a new identity cleavage in French society, which itself is partly rooted in France’s rapid secularisation and Catholicism’s demise. Under the pressure of this new identity divide between cosmopolitans and communitarians, France’s political system has undergone a fundamental transformation, leading to a new bipolarity between the liberal-cosmopolitan camp of Macron’s La République en Marche and the populist-communitarian camp around the Rassemblement National and Éric Zemmour.

Chapter 11 explores France’s Catholics’ reactions to the religiously laden references of the Rassemblement National (RN) and Éric Zemmour. It finds that in spite of historical animosities and the abiding policy clashes between the far right and Catholic values, beliefs and institutions identified in Chapter 10, French Catholics’ traditional religious immunity to the far right has begun to erode since the mid-2010s. Whilst this development chronologically coincided with the emergence of the conservative Catholic movement around the Manif pour Tous, the analysed evidence suggests that Catholics’ electoral opening towards the populist right was primarily driven by political and religious supply-side factors. In particular, the narrowing of electoral alternatives for Catholics and the softening of the bishops’ language against the populist right, in the context of the church’s gradual shift from a politically engaged national church, towards a more inward-looking minority church, have contributed to the relative dédiabolisation of the RN and Zemmour amongst Catholics.