FINANCE, ADRENALINE AND BOREDOM: WHAT IF FRENCH POLITICS WAS JUST A REMAKE OF THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR?

Travel with our experts - N°2 
Macond’Eau 

French greatness: a visible paradox 

I was recently having lunch with my friend Macond'Eau and we were painting the world with our words as usual, eventually agreeing that France remained a great and admirable planetary power. Not because of its status as a permanent member of the UN Security Council and the only EU member state with nuclear weapons. No, France certainly knows how to bring together the great men of this world in magnificent and solemn ceremonies. After the ceremonies of the 80th anniversary of the D-Day landings, the opening and closing of the Olympic Games, the sumptuous reopening of Notre Dame came to close a year 2024 in which France's budget deficit had no visible impact on its greatness, at least in the eyes of foreign viewers. 

We agreed at the time that orchestrating such grand planetary events is blissfully insulated from the chaos of countless global geopolitical factors—hence France's undiminished excellence in this arena. This, however, inevitably brings us to a stark contrast: an international landscape where, since the summer, France has struggled to assert its presence amid a relentless cascade of crises, while Europe hurtles forward at breakneck speed. 

It was then that Macond'Eau told me about his complex relationship with his financial advisor, whom he described as a highly intelligent person, suspecting him of being a high-potential individual. The kind of person who can analyze, all night long, the latest international developments and who’s perfectly capable of explaining to his clients - including my friend Macond'Eau - why the investments that had praised them two years ago didn’t stand their promises. 
A brilliant, hard-hitting, very friendly person, gifted with a real talent for bold perspectives, but always explaining to you that geopolitics and the commodity market, not to mention pandemic virology, remain a complex and deeply unpredictable science at the origin of your poor investment returns. 

Truly resilient, Macond'Eau confided that his encounters with his financial advisor unfailingly recalled the televised addresses of Emmanuel Macron—a Mozart of finance, undeniably intelligent, yet frequently floundering when faced with the harsh realities of how international developments impact France. 

Between boredom and adrenaline: the Thomas Crown risk 

Macond'Eau confidently asserted that his financial adviser had not yet descended to the ultimate depths of boredom—the kind that might inspire him to orchestrate the robbery of his own bank branch, à la the majestic Thomas Crown.
This led him to the inevitable conclusion that The Thomas Crown Affair had forever convinced him that boredom is the greatest threat facing high potential financiers in search of adrenaline, particularly in a financial world ruled by the whims of a lunatic rating agency, aptly named in French. 

Like a stone disrupting the calm of a stream, Macond'Eau sharply heightened my unease by pointing out the immaculate three-piece suits and Ray-Ban sunglasses, unmistakably channeling Steve McQueen, with which Emmanuel Macron was recently photographed. 

This reference to the Thomas Crown Affair made me brutally aware that in less than a month poor Michel Barnier had seen his political project stall like the police investigation of the valiant Eddy Malone, unable to suspect that the bank robbery, the subject of his investigations, had been organized by its owner in search of adrenaline.
But what can be done to remedy this improbable situation? 

French politics, an open-air chessboard 

On a strictly psychological level, with the Seine now healthy and safe in Paris, we couldn’t help but conclude that the Prime Minister might do well to gift Emmanuel Macron a jet ski—purely as a precautionary measure, of course—so he can satisfy his adrenaline cravings without further complicating matters for the rest of us. 

Perhaps wrongly, this jet ski seemed to us a remedy more in line with our image of the character than a course of chess lessons, even given by one of the many great French masters of this noble and sleepy discipline. On a strictly political level, the question would therefore boil down to identifying with which partner Emmanuel Macron could lead a game of chess, worthy of that of the Thomas Crown Affair, whose "checkmate" fate would seal once and for all the political orientations of the next thirty months. 

Framed this way, the political dilemma could effortlessly lend itself to a referendum—a chance to pull France out of its current quagmire of chaos and uncertainty. The question would be delightfully straightforward: who gets to play Faye Dunaway in our distinctly French remake of The Thomas Crown Affair? Marine Le Pen or Mathilde Panot?