The office of the president has been at the forefront of the state's response to the gilets jaunes. Unlike presidents of the Fifth Republic before Sarkozy, Macron has opted for an engaged and ever-present role for himself as the leader of the administration. The old style of presidency – a quasi-monarchical office created by De Gaulle in 1958 which combined popular control through seven-year election cycles and a certain distance from the day-to-day politics of running the state, which was typically managed by the prime minister – suited the time and the man that created the office. But the majesty that surrounded the office was exemplified by De Gaulle's infamous saying of 1958, “je vous ai compris” [I have understood you], a vague formulation that maintained distance from the nitty-gritty of the political compromise France was going to find for Algeria, combined with a reassuring message that a solution would be found. Placing the presidency above and beyond the dirty business of politics, De Gaulle created a sublime function in the Fifth Republic. This sublime function has now largely disappeared, with three successive presidents (Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron) each playing their part to get rid of the distant character, necessitated by an engaged and participating president. By turning the president into the architect of everything that happens in French politics, these three presidents have managed to take all the credit for France's successes, as well as suffer all the blame for its failures. This shift away from a sublime office had already been theorized by Edmund Burke, considered the founder of modern conservatism, in both his Reflections on the Revolution in France written in 1790 (Burke, 1790/2001), and his aesthetic work on the sublime and the beautiful (Burke, 1757/1990). In this conclusion, I show that the whole business of the gilets jaunes has revealed another side of this aesthetic story: it has unearthed the ugliness of day-to-day politics. By juxtaposition, the once-sublime office of the president has itself been made ugly, with farreaching consequences for the social contract established under the Fifth Republic in France.

The beautiful and the sublime

Burke, though himself critical of social contract theorists in many regards, conceded that ‘Society is, indeed, a contract. […] It is a partnership in all science, a partnership in all art, a partnership in every virtue and in all perfection.