Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast of InCompass.

Go to InCompass-hypen Europe.com for free access to all our podcast today.

This is Paul Adamson. I'm in conversation with Sophie Pedder.

Sophie Petter is the head of the economist Paris Bureau.

Her most recent book is Revolution Francaise, Emmanuel Macron, and the quest to reinvent a nation.

Sophie, first of all, thank you for doing this, and you are widely seen as the foreign

journalist who knows Emmanuel Macron best.

So before we go into maybe some of the substantive issues in his own

entry, I'd like to ask you about what impression he gives you. You met him on several occasions.

You could link him to do with The Economist at the end of last year. How did he come across when

you're in his presence? Well, it's interesting, Paul. I think to answer that, I would go back to the very first time I met him, which was in 2012, when he was an advisor at the time to Francois Hollande, who was the socialist president of France. And at that time, he occupied the sort of second floor small office under the eaves at the Elyssetise Palace and he really wasn't known to the wider public.

But I was always struck by the sort of engaging nature of having conversations with him,

which I had reasonably regularly during his time in that job.

And I would say that if you meet him in a one-on-one situation today, it's exactly the same.

You have this impression of somebody who's engaged, who actually listens to questions,

who wants to answer the questions, quite unusual for a politician.

You know, I've interviewed many politicians in different countries,

and most of them try and avoid the question, he wants to engage in it.

So it is, I wouldn't say it's so much charming as a sense of interested in ideas,

wanting to engage, wanting to argue back, always pushing back, you know, no but, no but, you could say that but.

So trying to sort of have those exchanges with you on whatever subject, which is quite unusual. Now, obviously,

outside those one-on-one encounters, he has this image of being very arrogant. But what's always

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