This is CBSi and the world. I'm John Bachelor. It's a great pleasure to speak to Sophie Peder, the

Paris Bureau Chief for The Economist magazine, author Sophie Peder of Revolution Francais.

And this is the story of the President of France, Emmanuel Macron,

who is extremely well educated and in fact graduated from the supremely important

school, college, university in France that brings us all of the leadership of France. He graduated, it's called the ENA, the National Administration

School where they train the leadership. But he comes from us a Red Brook working-class city, Amyan in the north,

and Sophie introduces us in 1977 with the birth of young Emmanuel Jean-Michel

Frederick McCrone to the fact that Amiens had had a communist mayor for 20

years. What is it in Amiens that the French would know immediately that coming from

there means your one kind of thing? What do we understand about the town, Sophie?

Working town, a lot of industry in the past, industry that's closed, so a sort of

sense of decline on the one hand.

It's also part of the sum, it's in the battlefields, so I think that's also part of its identity I think it's seen as

part of an area of France that has been in decline and that has struggled. It's not, this is not sort of smart,

chic, you know, suburbs of Paris or

Left Bank intellectual milieu. It's really much more a sort of an

average kind of town. Mom and dad are both physicians and dad remains a

physician you say as a the publication of this book.

His grandparents are even more compelling.

I believe one of his grandparents, his paternal grandfather,

was an Englishman who married a French woman following the

first wars. Do I remember that correctly, Sophie?

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