The prime minister, Gabriel Attal, stared ahead with his arms folded while another minister covered his face with his hands. As the French president, Emmanuel Macron, gathered top government figures at the Élysée on 9 June to make the shock announcement that he would dissolve parliament and call a snap legislative election after a surge at the polls by Marine Le Pen’s party, the mood, the prime minister said, was “grave”.
One senior centrist figure said they had not slept properly since the announcement of
