Since 1945 three presidents of France have arrived in the Elysée Palace with a clap of thunder and set out to fundamentally change their country. Charles de Gaulle in 1958. François Mitterrand in 1981. And now Emmanuel Macron, elected one year ago this week.

De Gaulle set about modernising France by using state power to invest, to plan, to rationalise, to pay fair wages. For a nation that had suffered defeat and occupation during the Second World War and then humiliation as first the Vietnamese and then the Algerians snuffed out the last remnants of the French empire, de Gaulle gave back to France its self-confidence and sense of grandeur.