The smile is glittering, the young face shines, lined with sweat, the grey-blue suit is shiny too, like armour. Tricolours flying, and the stage around the young man is crowded, people are all but falling off it, his blonde wife is, as always, at his side, a little older than he (24 years!), but with a Bardot styling. The crowd is going wild. They have a very French way of doing it, a sort of sudden excitement that goes from poise to infinity in no time at all, a jigging and dancing, in good suits, seamed stockings and high heels.

There’s triumph on the stage, triumph and relief. For the people, lefties, I’m watching it with on a shaky tablet, merely relief. It’s the first round of the assembly elections, and Emmanuel Macron, the new president, has seen his Instagram party En Marche! win through to the second round in hundreds of electorates. Triumph, because most of them will win the second round in a week’s time. Relief because there was every possibility that they might not make it through; that however many people were willing to divert their vote to the 39-year-old centrist, they would return to their party loyalties in the assembly. That would leave Macron a reforming president without a party, and unable to get anything done on the issues that leave the gates of the Élysée Palace open to the National Front (FN): global offshoring, terror and the nightly spectacle of boatloads of Africans turning up on the European shoreline—or failing to.