Nearly ten years after the birth of En Marche!, the promise of overcoming divisions has dissolved into a fragmented landscape, saturated with anxiety and resentment.
Nearly ten years after Emmanuel Macron’s movement En Marche! was created, the question remains: what will remain of it? The remnants of a pragmatism built on a floating ideological corpus? A modernization (or regression, depending on perspective) of the presidential function?
The debate is increasingly shifting to the record and its social consequences. Macronism is indeed at the root of a disaster: it has resulted in “a narrowing of civic mechanisms and a growing sense of popular frustration” as denounced by Marcel Gauchet. In this game, the Macronist promise failed: the one to restore a sick democracy and simultaneously spark collective momentum. French society is further fragmenting, undermined by negative affects co-opted by certain political parties. Now minority since the dissolution of the Assembly in June 2024, Macron’s troops face offensives from the right and far right. The movement that originally built itself on the oath to transcend political divides seems to slide toward a more defensive logic dictated by electoral urgency and parliamentary power relations.
Politics no longer regulates fears
This repositioning has particularly shown itself on immigration: by intensifying rhetoric about deportation efficiency, the executive seems to yield to a security agenda it claimed to keep at bay. Worse, administrative instruments become emotional markers, signals to an opinion already shaped by insecurity and fear. Political scientist Anne Muxel and Pascal Perrineau co-published Inventaires des peurs françaises, finding that political discourse no longer regulates fears but produces them.
The National Rally (RN) embodies this two-headed monster that has been feeding on these fears for years. Marine Le Pen’s party has developed a verbal machine that mobilizes a precise social imagination: insecurity, identity uprooting, unemployment threat, demand for authority. The RN mobilizes ordinary passions and formulates them catastrophically. “Politics is not a profession, it is an art. It is not the art of responding to needs but to passions,” said J-M Le Pen. This well-rehearsed crowd psychology aims primarily to capture the sensitive part of opinion. It is most often about simplification and inventory, not rationalization. This modus operandi reflects a political radicality more concerned with asserting its point of view than addressing real social demands. “Today, it is very clearly the sad passions (anger, resentment) that dominate, to the detriment of other positive affects like joy, enthusiasm, desire, hope,” adds Anne Muxel. But what are the causes of this affective explosion?
Since Sarkozy’s Grenoble speech in 2010, linking immigration and delinquency has installed itself in political discourse. This security homily has opened a breach that keeps widening. He laid the foundations for an imaginary nourished by inequality, racism and xenophobia. Today, this discourse of natural inequality has a foothold on the street, where France appears as a Far West in need of a sheriff to restore order.
This morbid fascination with order and violence also saturates media channels. The media apparatus seems to have taken on the mission of accustoming us to the idea of inner war as well as outer war. A March 2025 Reporters Without Borders study shows that “rearmament and security issues” are the second topic on LCI (16.8%), third on BFM-TV (10.3%) and France-Info (12.2%). As Acrimed explains, media “rearmament” is not only material, it is also moral. This approach contributes to a political current: nationalism.
In this ecosystem, continuous news channels play authority, validating interpretations of crisis. Social media are an echo chamber, turning each incident into national crisis. Platforms work by emotional algorithm: the more anger, fear, or disgust a story generates, the more it is shared and amplified. Four days after the death of national activist Quentin Deranque (Lyon, February 2025), decontextualization dominated media. Far-right influencers, including Damien Rieu, publicly exposed a left-wing activist. Cyberharassment followed. In this stories, fear mends confusion and lies; it sharpens and mobilizes.
This segues into the question: why this emotional credibility replacing reason, if not as a hyper-economy of affect? The uncontrolled information market is key. It is no longer mediated by few hierarchized institutions; it flows in a deregulated media body where everyone can produce and amplify content. A false coup d’état video in December 2024 — viral and fabricated by a Burkinabé teen with AI — is one example of how this economy feeds fear.
EU regulation may ban practices like biometric surveillance and credit scoring, but it must also build common public citizenship conditions. We live in a cozy “information jar”: behind screens, common ground is weakening. When groups no longer share facts, they cannot agree on realities. If disinformation thrives in deregulated space, who then organizes common world? Who defines visibility and emotional architectures? As the state retreats, other powers fill the vacuum. Is technology replacing politics?
We were never isolated beings; we are always part of shared spaces: villages, cafés, schools, bars. The digital disrupts them, reconfiguring and multiplying ties. It does not erase links but alters them. In this process, refuge spaces fragment and deterritorialize. The Observatoire du bien-être notes that France lost 18,000 cafés in 20 years; when a café closes, the commune loses a meeting point. Counter-talk is replaced by isolated digital encounters and polarized media confrontation. Feelings of interchangeability and alienation feed resentful political figures.
We are thus caught between anxious authority and constant exposure. This does not mean emotional anorexia; emotions are not enemies. They arise from chains of causes and effects, not from code. Technique is a milieu of individuation: as in Twin Peaks, fear travels in a system. The phone promises connection but gives only distance, a desire that is never satisfied.
Digital is now a spectral organ: we look at distant faces, listen to recorded voices, are affected by absent presences. It has little impact on our lived world.
What remains might be a more demanding gesture: individual disobedience, an emotional infraction against automatisms that try to think for us.
Originally published on arseneferret — read online, do not download.