No one had been warned. When President Emmanuel Macron's convoy pulled up at around 3:30 pm on February 6 in front of the virtually empty bar in Roulans, in eastern France, the crowd was stunned. Accompanied by a dozen security officers, the president, who had been having lunch two hours earlier at the Elysée Palace with Prime Minister Gabriel Attal, stopped for a coffee in the small village. "It's the surprise of the day, of the year and even of the century!" said the bar's manager to the local press afterward.

Neither the prefect, nor the mayor, nor even the district's Renaissance (Macron's party) MP, Eric Alauzet, were notified. When the first photos of the president leaning against the bar were posted on Facebook, alerting the L'Est Républicain correspondent, Macron had already left the establishment. In this cat-and-mouse game with journalists, the president is well ahead of the other players.

The Elysée would only reveal the reason for this intriguing trip after the fact. Invited a few days earlier by the president of the Jeunes Agriculteurs ("Young Farmers") union, Arnaud Gaillot, to come to his farm to talk with union representatives, Macron simply wanted to accept the invitation. In a press release issued on February 7, the Presidential Press Association took offense at the "secret" visit, "on a hot topic that concerns all citizens." Journalists accredited to the Elysée, whose job it is to report on the actions of the president, questioned him: "If there had been the slightest incident, the slightest unforeseen event involving the most senior figure in the government, would the public have known about it? Moreover, how did this trip go? It's impossible to know."

In the midst of the agricultural crisis, Macron did not see fit to allow the media to follow the trip, because, as an adviser to the Elysée said, "sometimes exchanges freeze and sincerity diminishes in the presence of cameras and microphones." While seated at a table with a cheese platter and a glass of wine, "people can speak without a filter." "A bond is established."

After six and a half years of traveling the length and breadth of France, meeting the French public under the watchful eye of journalists, the president, in search of "authenticity" and "spontaneity," "wants something different," said the same adviser. And he intends to increase the number of trips without press presence, outside of the official schedule. In fact, Le Monde informed Georges Mothron, mayor of Argenteuil (Les Républicains, right), that on February 8, the president visited the palliative care unit at his local hospital in the northwestern suburbs of Paris.

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