Macron's Last Bastille Day: Building Europe the RN Opposes

On the eve of Bastille Day, water-bombing planes from the Mediterranean were flying sorties over the Île-de-France for the first time in their history. The fire in the forest of Fontainebleau, an hour south of Paris, had taken some 800 hectares, closed the A6, cut rail traffic on a holiday weekend and pulled in close to 400 firefighters. Interior Minister Laurent Nuñez said it had started in several places at once and might well have been set deliberately. Twenty-five million people were under heat alert; EDF had powered down three reactors — Golfech 2, Bugey 3 and Chooz 2, about 3.65 gigawatts, roughly six percent of the fleet — because the rivers were too warm to take their cooling water.

That was the backdrop to a week in which Emmanuel Macron behaved like a man building something he will not be around to run, and may be handing to someone who does not want it.

Hours before his traditional July 13 address to the armed forces — his last — nine European governments signed a declaration in Paris alongside Volodymyr Zelensky establishing an Integrated Anti-Ballistic Missile Coalition. France, Germany, Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Norway and Sweden committed to common operational requirements, joint technical working groups and a roadmap toward a first capability, with Ukraine's experience of intercepting Russian ballistic missiles written in as the founding expertise. Macron then told the soldiers that go-it-alone national defence had become an "absurdity", that "to be free in today's world, one must be feared", and that before his term expires he will publish a ten-year defence vision, to be unveiled at the 150th anniversary of the École de Guerre. He pointed to a defence budget doubled since 2017, to 64 billion euros. A ten-year vision, written in the final year of a presidency, reaches deliberately past the 2028 defence white paper that a successor would normally use to write his own doctrine.

On July 7, the Paris Court of Appeal had upheld Marine Le Pen's guilt in the European Parliament assistants case but cut her ineligibility from five years to 45 months, 30 of them suspended — and the 15 firm months, counted from her first-instance conviction on 31 March 2025, had already run out. It handed her three years, one of them to be served under an electronic bracelet. She went on television the same evening: "Tonight, I am a candidate for the presidential election." She intends to run for the presidency of the Republic wearing an ankle monitor, and Jordan Bardella, groomed for a year as the understudy, stands down.

What followed is what changed the shape of 2027. Ifop, polling for Le Figaro and LCI on 7-8 July, put Le Pen at 36 percent in the first round, against 19 for Édouard Philippe, 15 for Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 9 for Raphaël Glucksmann and 8 for Bruno Retailleau. It then had her winning every runoff it tested: 54-46 over Philippe, 55-45 over Gabriel Attal, 70-30 over Mélenchon. Elabe put her first-round score a little lower, at 34 to 35.5 percent; Toluna Harris for M6 and RTL made the Philippe runoff far tighter, 51-49. The pollsters disagree about the margin. They no longer disagree about who wins. For thirty years the second round was the wall. This week it started polling like a formality.

The wall was never a number, though. It was a habit — the reflex of centre-right and left voters to hold their noses for one another — and the place to watch a habit is the National Assembly, not the cross-tabs. There, on the police firearms bill, the government, the mainstream right and the RN voted together, 313 to 199, to create a presumption that officers acted lawfully when they open fire, rebuttable only by evidence to the contrary. The left calls it a licence to kill; a petition against it on the Assembly's own website passed 500,000 signatures on 9 July, enough to force a floor debate, and the text has gone to the Senate. In the same days parliament definitively adopted Gérald Darmanin's criminal justice reform — minus the plea-bargain that had sunk it in committee — extending departmental criminal courts to recidivists facing life and legalising the use of private genetic-genealogy databases in investigations. The RN is not storming the institutions. It is being written into their majorities, one law-and-order vote at a time.

It helps that everyone else's authority is leaking too. Nicolas Sarkozy persuaded the European Court of Human Rights to declare admissible his challenge to the Paul Bismuth wiretaps, reopening a corruption conviction that was meant to be final. Senator Francis Szpiner, formerly mayor of Paris's 16th arrondissement, was charged with passive corruption over a social flat allegedly traded for sex. Bardella's own Patriots for Europe group was cited at the European Parliament for financial and ethical breaches and, Libération reported, looks likely to escape sanction thanks to an arrangement among the right-wing groups. Macron's nomination of the conservative senator François-Noël Buffet as Defender of Rights — a man who opposed same-sex marriage and abstained on writing abortion into the constitution — has drawn 113,000 signatures against him from Planning Familial, Inter-LGBT and Greenpeace France. When every camp is compromised, the moral asymmetry the republican front runs on stops doing any work.

And the week kept handing the RN its material. On Saturday night in Sarcelles, a suburb with one of France's largest Jewish communities, police acting on a tip about a possible Islamist attack found a Kalashnikov-type rifle with magazines and a loaded pistol in a car 500 metres from the synagogue; around 300 people were evacuated and the national anti-terror prosecutors opened an investigation. No arrests. It landed days after the first national day of remembrance for Alfred Dreyfus, 120 years after his exoneration, where Macron unveiled a statue and warned that antisemitism has not gone away. A Paris court handed down the first conviction in the capital's school-abuse scandal, an 18-month suspended term for a 25-year-old leisure-centre monitor, in a year when the city has suspended 132 aides, 52 of them suspected of sexual abuse. In Avignon, Mélenchon joined performing-arts unions protesting culture cuts, armed with a Lapas survey of 286 companies showing a 37 percent collapse in performance dates. Insecurity, institutional failure, and a state that arrives with aircraft after the fact — the RN's campaign is being written for it by events.

So the real question hanging over Macron's week is whether structures bind successors. Cécile Alduy, of Stanford and Sciences Po, has argued in Foreign Affairs that Le Pen treats commander-in-chief as an essentially honorific title, and that the levers that decide French foreign policy — the military budget, ambassadorships, treaty ratification — run through a parliament the far right would dominate. The Carnegie Endowment is harsher, and closer to the mark: the RN has never seriously thought about what France is in the world, and uses foreign policy as "a reservoir of wedge issues" — for higher defence spending, against common European defence, still formally committed to leaving NATO's integrated command, and unlikely to keep Macron's plan to extend French nuclear cover to European partners. That is not a doctrine that tears up the Paris declaration on day one. It is a disposition that lets it starve.

Which is why the money matters more than the communiqué. The European Commission and MBDA signed grant agreements this week for HYDIS, the three-year concept phase of the AQUILA hypersonic interceptor backed by France, Germany, Italy and the Netherlands, with Avio on the rocket motor, Lynred on the infrared seeker and GKN Fokker fitting it to the Mk41 naval launcher. The European Defence Fund will put 100 million euros behind a single endo-atmospheric interceptor in 2026 — HYDIS or the Spanish-German HYDEF, not both. The Franco-German institute at Saint-Louis flew its electromagnetic railgun outside the laboratory for the first time on 9 July. The DGA finished qualifying 68mm laser-guided rockets on the Rafale, a cheap way to shoot down Shahed-class drones, with initial capability due at the end of this month. Contracts, industrial consortia and a Charles de Gaulle newly home in Toulon after 166 days and 3,400 catapult launches are much harder for an unenthusiastic president to unpick than a text signed at the Élysée.

The next fixed point is legal, and it is close. Le Pen has until 20 July to lodge her appeal with the Court of Cassation, and she maintains that lodging it suspends her sentence. The prosecutor-general, Rémy Heitz, says the appeal does not revive the harsher first-instance ineligibility; other specialists warn that the five-year ban could come back into force, and that it is not even settled whether a cassation appeal suspends anything at all. She is running a campaign whose legal foundation the state's own lawyers cannot agree on, before a court expected to rule only shortly before the first round. Meanwhile the Senate takes up the firearms bill, the École de Guerre speech is still to be written, and the Fontainebleau investigation will determine whether France spent its Bastille Day weekend fighting the climate or a man with a lighter — a distinction the High Council for Climate, which reported this week that the country is 2.2°C warmer than a century ago and unprepared for what is coming, would say is smaller than it looks.