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PARIS — Emmanuel has stunning blue eyes. Angela’s wrinkles inform a narrative. Donald refuses to concentrate. And the hero of the piece, Bruno, is a bit like James Bond.
No, not characters from season 2 of “Emily in Paris” however the observations of French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire who, regardless of coping with the worst well being disaster in many years and combating his personal case of COVID-19, discovered time to jot down “L’Ange et la Bête” (“The Angel and the Beast”), a 345-page chronicle of his work beneath President Emmanuel Macron, revealed in French on Thursday.
The title is a reference to seventeenth century thinker Blaise Pascal, identified for his pessimistic — or reasonable, relying on how you are feeling — view of human nature.
However, the e-book is not any philosophical treatise however the lowdown on the minister’s tough negotiations with the U.S. on a digital tax, and together with his European counterparts on widespread debt issuance, together with insights into Macron’s time period in workplace to date.
A prolific author, Le Maire already has a number of memoirs beneath his identify — and has authored erotic novels beneath a pseudonym. He has usually used writing as a political weapon to shoot down unflattering accounts of his political actions and the brand new e-book is not any exception; it sees the minister settle scores with the Dutch over their resistance to coronabonds, with digital giants and their overarching powers, in addition to with the EU and its forms and purple tape.
With 15 months earlier than the following presidential election, Le Maire’s e-book additionally oscillates between starry-eyed reward for Macron and opportunistic criticism of him, maybe setting the stage for a run on the prime job.
Here are some highlights:
Macron’s ‘blue gaze‘
Le Maire is positively gushing about his boss. His handshake is “surprising by its firmness”; his angle “charming, seductive, mixing caution in his political comments with real boldness in his vision.” But Le Maire’s poetic impulses actually take over when he’s describing the president’s eyes: they’ve “a blue gaze tinted by metallic sparkles, like a lake burdened with sunshine whose surface it would have been impossible, under the scintillating reflections, to pierce.”
Their working relationship is depicted as “simple, fluid and straightforward,” however the minister implicitly criticizes the president’s response to the Yellow Jackets disaster, whereas offering his personal evaluation of a scenario through which he believes the federal government lacked coronary heart.
Le Maire additionally attracts parallels between absolutely the monarchy of the seventeenth century, which led to the French Revolution, and the present Fifth Republic, which he says must be reformed due to its outdated practices.
“2022 will mean restoring public authority against the rampant disorder that has accompanied Emmanuel Macron’s entire term, by affirming a powerful regalian state, but this time under the control of the people,” Le Maire writes.
Mr. Handsome
The e-book will get much more caustic on the subject of Donald Trump — with Le Maire likening the president’s arrival by helicopter in Davos to “Apocalypse Now.”
Recounting negotiations over a digital tax on tech giants, which occurred throughout a G7 assembly in Biarritz, Le Maire describes Trump “listening with a distracted ear and staring” at him earlier than telling Macron: “You have such a handsome minister, Emmanuel!”
While Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin was negotiating, Le Maire says the U.S. president was “not listening” and “refusing to speak” earlier than tapping his hand on a tray that had been set down on the espresso desk.
“’It’s so black’ [Trump said of the tray] and, as if carried away by a strange word association, segued into a speech about Africa,” Le Maire writes.
The awkward scene ended with the American president asking his spouse Melania: “Isn’t he handsome, the minister?”
Merkel’s wrinkles
In a e-book stuffed with highly effective males, Le Maire has a couple of pages for a “cenacle of women who have changed politics by bringing their pragmatism, their listening capacity, their modesty and their efficiency: Christine Lagarde, Ursula von der Leyen, Margrethe Vestager and Angela Merkel.”
An total chapter is devoted to the German chancellor, through which Le Maire praises her energy, her daring coverage decisions on immigration, her power and the “imponderable restraint from which she never departed, her gentleness spread out in the voice.”
The French minister additionally goes into element in regards to the German chief’s wrinkles: “The corners of her lips fell in two deep furrows, like acts of perpetual contrition for the past faults of Germany, of which she had an acute knowledge.”
The man of the hour
The protagonist of the e-book is in fact Le Maire himself. He depicts himself as a fighter, providing fierce resistance to Mnuchin in Davos, who may have began a commerce conflict over tax on digital giants. The minister clearly remembers — and writes down — compliments paid to him by the world’s elite in addition to by French individuals on the road.
In pages tinged with self-irony, he sees himself as a monk or a “bureaucratic James Bond” — with out a license to kill — and writes vividly about his battle with coronavirus.
“I didn’t know this yet, but the virus circulated in my body,” he stated about his bout with COVID-19. “It would make me go through a moment of distress … I felt my infected lungs were in a tightening noose and I thought I would die suffocating. It would exhaust me. It would also force me to write the last pages of this book.”
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