Bonapartism

Mr. Duhamel, the political commentator, identified Macronism as “a civil and democratic Bonapartism, where everything goes up to the leader, and there is a quest for disruption and reform, through the whip.”

Zemmour’s detractors often link him to the Rassemblement National — formerly the National Front — but his true allegiance is to Bonapartism.

He is, perhaps above all, a significant figure owing to the fidelity of his republicanism: from a background that in most places and circumstances would have led, in crisis, toward some form of Bonapartism, he remained a faithful believer in the norms of democracy, in oscillating governments and principled resignation.

In Le Monde, the comparatively sober political philosopher Philippe Raynaud argued that, for all Macron’s “soft Bonapartism,” the Affaire Benalla is hardly a French Watergate, as the far left had been insisting.

Others used the terms “Bonapartism” or “Caesarism”.