PARIS — Against the regal backdrop of a grand reception room in France’s presidential palace, Emmanuel Macron, 39, was officially installed on Sunday as the youngest president in modern French history.
In his short speech to mark the occasion, he encouraged the French to embrace the future, to hold him to a high standard and to join him in the hard work ahead.
“I reassure you that not for a single second did I think that everything changed as if by magic on May 7,” Mr. Macron said of the day he was elected. “This will be slow work, demanding, but indispensable. It will be up to me to convince the French that our country, which seems threatened by the sometimes contrary winds of the world, carries in its heart all the resources to be a nation of the first rank.”
The new president is wasting no time. On Sunday afternoon, Mr. Macron, as the new commander in chief, visited wounded soldiers at a military hospital outside Paris. On Monday, he is expected to travel to Berlin to meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, France’s most important ally in Europe, and will also announce his pick for prime minister. By midweek, the rest of his government is expected to be named.
Before week’s end, he is scheduled to visit French soldiers serving in places such as Mali and the Central African Republic.
Mr. Macron said his presidency would be guided by two concerns: finding ways to help the French “have confidence in themselves again” and making France prosperous and strong.
The country faces persistent high unemployment, especially among its youth — unemployment tops 40 percent in some places — and a need for more flexibility in the workplace to encourage employers to create more jobs. There are also concerns about terrorism and immigration, which have led to deep divisions between France’s Muslim minority and non-Muslims.
The European Union, of which France and Germany are economically the most powerful countries, faces the most severe criticism since its founding, including by France, with calls for deep reforms. Those resentments run so deep as populism rises across the Continent that leaders throughout the European Union are considering far-reaching changes.
Britain voted last June to leave the bloc, and Mr. Macron will be deeply involved with Ms. Merkel in negotiating its exit.
According to protocol, Mr. Macron was greeted on his arrival on Sunday at the Élysée Palace by his departing predecessor, François Hollande, to whom he owes his first experience in politics. Mr. Macron was a counselor to Mr. Hollande when the departing president was elected in 2012, and later became his economy minister.
Mr. Hollande, however, proved ultimately unpopular in large part because he could not ameliorate France’s relatively high levels of unemployment. Sensing the political winds, Mr. Macron left the government in August 2016 after forming his own movement in April named En Marche!, or Onward!
At the time, few thought he could become president, but a combination of happenstance, hard work and voters’ impatience with the old political choices contributed to his victory. He was helped both by Mr. Hollande’s decision not to stand for a second term and by a corruption scandal that engulfed Mr. Macron’s most formidable opponent, François Fillon, a former prime minister, whose hiring of his wife and children to work for him led to an embezzlement investigation.
After greeting Mr. Macron on the steps of the palace on Sunday, Mr. Hollande met with him in private so that the departing French leader could give the incoming one “secrets of state,” identified as a handover of the codes for France’s nuclear weapons.