THE BATTLE FOR FRANCE

President Emmanuel Macron has plunged the country into chaos.

- LAUREN COLLINS

On December 4th, the country's Assemblée Nationale voted to topple the government for the first time since 1962.

At the end of July, Lucie Castets was planning to go to Italy with a group of friends. Every year, they rented a house and followed the same ritual: pool, spritzes, a viewing of "Gladiator." For the past year, Castets had worked as the finance director for the City of Paris. On July 22nd, shortly after noon, she was in the bike garage of her office building, in the Thirteenth Arrondissement, when her phone started buzzing. The caller was Olivier Faure, the head of the French Socialist Party. Just before picking up, Castets texted her wife, then took the call.

"What does he want?" her wife wrote back.

"I don't know," Castets replied.

"Maybe he's gonna ask you to be Prime Minister or something."

"Haha."

After Castets hung up, the text conversation continued.

"Actually, he is," she wrote.

"No shit?" her wife replied.

Soon, Castets would burst onto the political scene in what the French press took to calling her "Warholian summer" of instant notoriety. For the moment, however, practically no one knew who she was. After the phone conversation, Faure ran Castets's name by his fellow party heads in the left-wing alliance known as the Nouveau Front Populaire, or N.F.P."Who?" one of them replied. But Castets made an appealing candidate: a thirty-seven-year-old woman from civil society, fresh-faced and sincere, yet not without a streak of swagger; impeccably credentialled and indisputably of the left, but obscure enough to have neither a record that would raise hackles nor political enemies of consequence.