VÉLIZY-VILLACOUBLAY, France — On a brisk evening in March, French Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau kicked off a campaign event with some politically incorrect jokes comparing his own rail-thin physique with that of the burly Senate president, Gérard Larcher, who seemed to take the ribbing in good humor.
Then, switching to key conservative talking points, the rising star and presidential hopeful of France’s battered center-right Les Républicains party slammed Islamic headscarves as symbols of oppression and stressed the importance of protecting “the great conquests of the West.”
The audience inside the packed 800-seat venue gobbled it all up, relishing another punchy turn by a charismatic provocateur, who promises to restore France to its old glories. “What we believe in sometimes leads to controversy — and that’s a good thing,” Retailleau told the adoring party loyalists.
The gathering in the well-off Paris suburb of Vélizy-Villacoublay was a stop on Retailleau’s campaign tour to become the next leader of Les Républicains, the once-dominant center-right party. The successors to Charles de Gaulle have now been relegated to political purgatory after the election of Emmanuel Macron upended France’s political landscape.
The vote to appoint the next leader on Saturday is only open to about 100,000 of Les Républicains’ card-carrying members, but the electric atmosphere that night and during Retailleau’s other campaign stops is encouraging party insiders to dare to hope they have finally found someone who can challenge Marine Le Pen of the National Rally to be France’s most powerful right-wing politician — and, potentially, win the presidency.
“We haven’t seen this much enthusiasm since [former President Nicolas] Sarkozy,” said a campaign official, granted anonymity due to internal campaign protocol.
With France’s next presidential election less than two years away, Les Républicains are dreaming of a return to power behind a candidate who fuses economic liberalism with an anti-immigration policy that veers close to that of the far-right National Rally, but without Le Pen’s legal or historical baggage.
For the moment, Retailleau seems to be that man, primed to capitalize on France and Europe’s shift to the right. But he’s an enigmatic figure. The bespectacled 64-year-old practicing Catholic languished for years on the backbenches and sheds his somewhat bookish, studious persona each time he steps up on stage as a fiery culture warrior.
Little surprise then that he has a pedigree in play-acting and dressing up. Before imagining Retailleau amid the gilded interiors of the Elysée, we should take a trip back to a dilapidated castle more than 300 kilometers southwest of Paris to understand how he developed his political identity — and learned a thing or two about the dark arts of showmanship.
Enter stage right
When Retailleau was just a teenage horseback riding enthusiast, he volunteered to take part in a show being staged in the small town of Les Epesses, a few kilometers away from his hometown.
The production was organized in 1978 by a 27-year-old named Philippe de Villiers, a descendant of one of the aristocratic families that survived the French revolution. Lanky and with a distinctive, theatrical manner of speaking, de Villiers was a civil servant at the time for the eastern region of Vendée.
Authorities there had a year prior purchased a castle falling into disrepair in Les Epesses with the hopes of turning it into a small museum.
But de Villiers dreamed of something bigger.
He wanted to create a form of entertainment that celebrated the Vendée’s fierce counter-revolutionary history and deep Catholic heritage. He started by organizing a Disneyesque spectacle infused with royalist nostalgia — complete with fog machines and sword fights — called “Cinéscénie,” and it was an immediate hit.
Local news reports at the time said a crowd of 30,000 flocked to Les Epesses to attend the first performance. Young people signed up in droves to volunteer, with hundreds participating — including Retailleau, who served as one of the show’s 20 horseback riders dressed in medieval costumes.
Cinéscénie was such a smashing success that by 1989 — a few years before Disneyland Paris opened — de Villiers inaugurated a medieval theme park to accompany the show, named after the castle, Puy du Fou. It now attracts millions of visitors yearly and ranks among the most visited theme parks in Europe.
At its core, Puy du Fou was — and remains — deeply political. Historians have criticized its portrayal of the French revolution in Vendée as a sanitized version of history that romanticizes royalist and Catholic values.
Volunteering at the park was a formative experience for Retailleau. De Villiers took a particular interest in the now-interior minister, who was more than 10 years his junior, and became something of a mentor to him.
The two complemented each other well. Retailleau had an unassuming, subdued charm (or so it seemed) that didn’t appear to upstage the bombastic de Villiers.
The pair would go on to form a decades-long professional, political and personal bond that would see them reach some of the highest offices of French politics.
De Villiers harnessed Cinéscénie’s success to take a role as a deputy to France’s culture minister in 1986, and Retailleau followed him into the world of politics two years later when he won a seat on the Vendée council. Press at the time called him “Philippe de Villiers’ man.”
A year later in 1989, Retailleau became chairman of the Puy du Fou theme park.
Waiting for his cue
For years, de Villiers and Retailleau worked well together operating the Movement for France, a small but vocal party that championed national sovereignty and Euroskepticism as well as outlawing immigration and same-sex marriage over the course of de Villiers’ two failed presidential bids in 1995 and 2007.
Ambition, however, tore their bond apart.
In 2009, then-Prime Minister François Fillon, a member of Les Républicains, was eyeing Retailleau — a French senator at the time — for a junior ministry. But de Villiers, still licking his wounds after barely scraping 2 percent of the vote in a disastrous presidential campaign two years earlier, could not stomach his protégé’s success. De Villiers vehemently opposed the nomination, and Fillon stood down to, in his words, avoid a “nuclear war” with an important political ally.
What followed was a very public falling out. De Villiers removed Retailleau as chair of Puy du Fou. Retailleau abandoned the Movement for France shortly thereafter, citing strategic differences, and joined Les Républicains in 2011 — eventually going on to serve as a key deputy to Fillon in his failed 2017 presidential bid.
For Patrick Louis, a former member of the European Parliament and secretary-general of the Movement for France who has remained staunchly loyal to de Villiers, Retailleau’s party change did not mean his beliefs had.
“Retailleau’s greatest strength is that he’s guided by a political philosophy,” Louis said. “I still believe he shares our mindset — we support free enterprise, but we’re conservatives who think society must stay rooted in its traditions, and cultural quality must be preserved.”
The timing would prove fortuitous. Though Sarkozy was nearing the end of his first term, he had shifted Les Républicains to the right from the days of President Jacques Chirac and was pushing for what would later be described as an “unapologetic right.”
Les Républicains would, however, fall into irrelevance in the decade that followed, with many of its moderate voters absorbed by Macron’s centrist pro-business platform and the movement’s more right-leaning members siphoned off by Le Pen and the National Rally.
Retailleau patiently waited, regularly appearing in the media in a vain attempt to garner name recognition beyond French political circles.
Things suddenly started to look up last summer, when Les Républicains somewhat miraculously returned to government after a snap election delivered a hung parliament. The conservatives struck a deal with Macron’s camp to form a coalition and block the vote’s surprise winner, the left-wing New Popular Front, from seizing power.
Macron appointed Brexit negotiator and conservative doyen Michel Barnier as prime minister in September, who in turn tapped Retailleau for the interior ministry.
It finally gave the horseman from the mock battles at Puy du Fou his moment in the spotlight — just as Macron’s centrist movement was at its weakest.
Showtime
In the months that followed, Retailleau’s popularity has skyrocketed.
Louis attributes Retailleau’s new fame to his authenticity. But on the campaign trail, Retailleau has publicly shed his earlier intellectual, measured reputation for the showmanship expected of a frontline politician. He clearly understands that, as Oscar Wilde famously put it: “The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about.”
Retailleau’s call to ban Islamic headscarves in athletics and reconsider birthright citizenship, as well as his comments that “there were also happy times” in France’s centuries-long colonization of Africa have kept him in the headlines since becoming interior minister.
That strategy isn’t without risk: Retailleau came under fire after being slow to respond when a Muslim man was stabbed to death in a mosque in France last month, drawing criticism even from within his own camp.
Retailleau is widely expected to win the Les Républicains leadership race and move the party deeper into right-wing territory when it comes to immigration and culture war issues. The National Rally, however, says it doesn’t see him as a threat when it comes time for the race for the Elysée.
“There’s no real electorate for Retailleau,” said one of Le Pen’s closest allies, who was granted anonymity in order to speak candidly. “He’ll seem too extreme for Macron’s voters, and not credible enough to win over ours.”
The next presidential election is still a ways off, and it’s still not a given Retailleau would represent the party in the contest.
A late April survey from pollster Odaxa shows Retailleau netting 10 percent in the first round of the contest. That score would be an improvement over Les Républicains’ previous candidate, Valérie Pécresse, who netted a dismal 4.8 percent of votes in 2022.
But with Le Pen scoring 31.5 percent and former Prime Minister Édouard Philippe coming in at 20 percent, Retailleau’s presidential hopes are still a long shot.
The post Bruno Retailleau: From medieval role player to French presidential hopeful appeared first on Politico.
