The melee followed months of demonstrations in the streets by workers who have blocked oil refineries, nuclear plants, factories and the country’s rail network. A government economic overhaul has set off the unrest — an attempt, bold at first, to loosen France’s ultratight labor laws, making hiring and firing easier and throttling back the union grip.
As much as anyone’s, it is Mr. Macron’s ideas the demonstrators are protesting. In addition, his banking background, elite education, button-down persona, and technocratic aura — “the best way to afford a suit is to get a job,” he angrily told a T-shirted demonstrator several weeks ago — have made him the focus of much of the rage.
France appears both terrified and absorbed by Mr. Macron’s ideas — of making it easier to get and to lose a job, to move to a new job, and to shake off the lifetime security of unbreakable contracts in search of something better.
“There’s a desire for change, but a fear of change, too. That’s France,” said Philippe Aghion, a Harvard economist who worked with Mr. Macron on an influential reform commission in 2008 and who has influenced the young man.
The ideas generated by that commission weigh in the minister’s thinking, Mr. Aghion said.
The T-shirt incident was captured on video and quickly went viral, earning Mr. Macron a mocking hashtag, #UnTshirtpourMacron, and much derision in the news media.
At the same time Mr. Macron polls far higher than his boss, Mr. Hollande, whose re-election prospects next year look increasingly shaky. Mr. Macron is the darling of the businessmen’s confederation, the favorite of right-leaning pro-capitalism media in France, and he earned applause and rage in equal measures when he said in an interview last year, “We need young Frenchmen who want to become billionaires.”
In a recent visit to the northern industrial town of Valenciennes, Mr. Macron appeared to be in full campaign mode.
The police blocked off the city center, fearing protests. At a training center, apprentice welders and home-health aid workers waited to take selfies with him. He quizzed them attentively, like a candidate, about their hopes and aspirations.
“What’s at stake for me is to inspire confidence again,” Mr. Macron told a worker grumbling about the labor reform law at a mattress factory, striking a broad theme for France’s future. Nearby, other workers waited patiently for pictures.
To the Socialist establishment, Mr. Macron is too ready to lecture much older politicians, and is the man who wants to “reintroduce mobility in the labor market,” as he wrote in an article last year, but also end “our culture of paying managers more.”
In his characteristic rapid-fire delivery he told a parliamentary committee last month: “We’ve created rigidities at the entrance-point in artisanal occupations,” like hairdressers and nail salons. “We’ve put up barriers.” France needs to “help in the creation of jobs for which qualifications are limited,” he said. He was one of the youngest men in the room.
An older Communist representative would have none of it.
“There is always with you this, I won’t say, obsession, to liberate activity,” André Chassaigne, a factory worker’s son, scolded Mr. Macron. “As a society, we would lose our bearings.”
The French news media can’t get enough of Mr. Macron. Intrigued by his combination of brains (he once served as assistant to one of France’s leading 20th-century philosophers, Paul Ricoeur) and heterodoxy, they have put him on the cover of newsmagazines more in six months than any other political figure, despite his thin record of accomplishment so far.
“The Macron Rocket — His Secret Plan for 2017,” was one recent cover; “Macron: Why not him? How he wants to break the system,” was another. Even glossy gossip magazines like Paris Match follow him, intrigued by his unusual domestic arrangements: He is married to his high school teacher from the town of Amiens, who is 20 years his senior.
In the central city of Orléans last month, he was invited — by an opposition party mayor — to preside over ceremonies honoring Joan of Arc, who made her decisive stand against the English there in 1429.
“Jeanne was a shepherdess, but she beat a path to the king,” Mr. Macron told hundreds spread out in the plaza in front of the towering 17th-century cathedral in the city where she led the French troops in battle.
“Jeanne was a nobody. But she carried on her shoulders the will to progress and justice of an entire people. She was a crazy dream. But she wound up imposing herself as something obvious,” he said. “Believe in individual initiatives, in courage, in risk.”
The applause for Mr. Macron was polite — his highfalutin style, nurtured at France’s best schools like the Ecole National d’Administration, is peppered with references to the country’s literary and political heroes.
But the audience was attentive, even if his arrival was greeted with boos from union members.
“Maybe it’s a crazy dream, impossible,” he told a crowd in Lyon last week, “but this great change, necessary to our country, I’m persuaded we can accomplish it together.”
The City Hall in Lyon was packed, and the mayor there greeted him like a hero.
“He’s a free atom. One doesn’t really know where he is going,” said Mr. Aghion, the Harvard economist.
“The problem is,” Mr. Aghion added, “he doesn’t really have any allies.”
Much of the challenge Mr. Macron will face, if he enters the lists in next year’s race, was summed up in an encounter with reporters in Valenciennes. Defending himself over the harsh T-shirt encounter, he said, “One doesn’t tutoie a minister” — referring to the familiar form of the second-person pronoun.
True, the “tu” form is generally used only with children and friends, and not with ministers. But a politician with national ambitions in France might be better off not pointing that out to a gaggle of journalists.
“He’s got to separate himself from his image as a technocrat,” Mr. Aghion said.