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Macron and Napoleon

Posted May. 10, 2017 07:17,   

Updated May. 10, 2017 07:21

한국어

New French President-elect Emmanuel Macron is the youngest leader to lead France since Napoleon Bonaparte who was 35 when his emperor coronation was held in 1804. Macron is 40 years old when calculating based on Korean age. He was born on December 21, 1977. In Korea, age is calculated based on years only, but in the Western world, one year is subtracted if the current date has not reached the birth date. This means that Macron is in his 30s in Western terms.

Macron's wife Brigitte Trogneux is 63 years old, 24 years his senior. Trogneux was his high-school drama teacher. They publicly became a couple when Macron was 17 before high school graduation. One of her children with her former husband is aged older than Macron and another is the same age with him. In 1804 when Napoleon inaugurated, his wife Josephine was six years his senior. Napoleon fell in love with Josephine whose husband had died and after long efforts to win her heart married her in 1796.

Macron's victory over far-right Front National Party's Marine Le Pen can be compared to Napoleon's beating of the anti-revolution efforts by Royalist House of Bourbon. Napoleon aligned with the ideology of the French Revolution and won the hearts of French people who were getting exhausted with extremist Jacobin politics with a practical centrism. An official of the French socialist government, Macron pursued a market-friendly stance and is bringing relief to the public stifled with the economic democratization of left forces. Macron's new party En Marche, which means "march forward," feels like a march slogan for Napoleon's military.

The new French president's line is the French style of the third route that Bill Clinton of the U.S., Gerhard Schroeder of Germany followed. Macron's age is as attractive as being called as France's Kennedy. There are expectations that a young leader resembling Napoleon in many ways can become the new Napoleon who can rescue France from crisis.