For Emmanuel Macron, it's always been about the audience.

His campaign rallies as much theatre as theory.

Is that you understand the murmur of the French? A president who seemed to create a movement out of thin air and charm his way to the top

without anyone really knowing him at all. Who is the real Emmanuel Macron?

Ha! That's the question.

I don't think there is such a thing as a true self, different from what you can see on television.

I think he didn't have a lot of friends.

Maybe he had zero real friends.

It was very difficult to cross the border of intimacy. He was in a way hiding something.

Telling perhaps that when he was 15 it was acting, not politics that really fired him up,

and that he only ever wanted the main role, the lead, the star, the hero.

Fast forward 20 years. the was elected president last month and has also secured a majority in Parliament with his new political party barely a year old.

Not bad for a man dismissed as a fast-bursting champagne bubble when he first announced his election campaign.

I'm Lucy Williamson, and as the BBC's Paris correspondent, I followed Emmanuel Macron's rapid political rise, watching

him at press conferences, meeting his staff, and speaking to him on the campaign trail.

For this programme on the BBC World Service, we'll be taking a closer look at the man who rewrote the

rules on winning power in France, a man who seems to charm so many but confide in so few.

He does think you are always in a way acting in front of people

shaping their image you want to give them and I think it was already true when we

were 15. In some ways being president is a consolation prize. Macron's teenage

dream was to be a writer and he's good at telling stories.

Born in the northern provincial city of Amiyan, into a solidly middle-class family,

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