These are very amazing confidences, and which strangely had not caused a lot of ink to flow when they were published on July 15. Questioned by the writer Emmanuel Carrère, who accompanied him during his official visits to Greenland and Canada, Emmanuel Macron dropped this sentence: “I have never been a teenager. I don’t like adolescents. I don’t understand them. My wife understands them. »»
We would have liked to know how in the interview The Head of State resulted in this observation – “I don’t like adolescents” – but the writer admits in this long story published on the Guardian that he does not know “how we got there”, that is to say to this sentence.
Recoils on the ecology and guilty of young people
Nevertheless, these statements by Emmanuel Macron first leave speechless. It is indeed at best surprising and at most faulty that the head of state is disinterested in those who are the future of France, and the adults of tomorrow.
But when you look more closely, these words then appear rather consistent with the policy that governments have carried out during these last two five years, especially in recent years. While the environment is a major concern of young people – global warming is even often quoted as the first concern of 18-35 year olds – Emmanuel Macron is accused of having acted in recent years many declines on the front of ecology. More than 43 declines have been deplored since the beginning of 2025, according to a statement of associations.
The governments that have followed one another in recent years, from Attal to Bayrou, have at the same time multiplied the security declarations, to seduce an older electorate, often taking as a scapegoat … young people. We remember the declaration of the current Secretary General of Renaissance, who was then Prime Minister, at the place of the youngest, at the end of 2024: “You break, you are repairing, you salt, you clean, you challenge authority, you are learned to respect it. The same tried to tighten the justice of the minors, before his text was partially found by the Constitutional Council.
Childhood is not a priority
When it comes to helping children and minors, not guilty or straightening them, the cause has never been erected as a priority. Since 2017, there has never been a ministry dedicated to childhood, barely a state secretariat from 2019 to 2022. The ministers who were in charge of this function have been worth more than the others, not allowing real stability. And this, while child protection, for example, has known the most serious crisis since its creation. In the very opinion of the rapporteur of a commission of inquiry on the subject, the situation is “dramatic”. The number of children on the street also broke records under Macron and the mental health of adolescents has particularly deteriorated, faced with a cruel lack of child psychiatrists. We could also cite the spectacular dropout of the French school in international rankings, or the choice of a Prime Minister who publicly slapped a teenager and chose not to react when he was alerted to serious violence on children.
Not so amazing that Emmanuel Macron admits “not to love” adolescents and teenagers. His political choices reflect this resentment.
