Gentle sunshine caressed the impeccably manicured lawn of Matignon, the official residence of the prime minister of France. Like every day, a robot mower blindly and silently criss-crossed it, in a hypnotic pattern of movement – to the right, to the left, one way, then the other. On the day France voted in the European Union elections, Sunday, June 9, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal and his close advisers retreated to the music pavilion at the bottom of the garden, where the prime minister set up his quarters when he arrived at Matignon on January 9. His "pack" – his chief of staff, Emmanuel Moulin, and other top advisers – sipped soft drinks or chilled wine as they awaited the results, which were expected to be poor.

In the late afternoon, Emmanuel Macron's chief of staff, Alexis Kohler, called his friend Moulin to inform him of the decision taken by the president to dissolve the Assemblée Nationale. Moulin, a former head of the Treasury, immediately informed the prime minister. Both men were stunned. Throughout the day, Macron was encouraged by his entourage to inform his prime minister without delay, but he took his time. When he finally called at 7:15 pm, shortly before the political meeting he had convened at the Elysée Palace, Attal told him: "I'll give you my resignation, use me as a fall guy." To no avail.

Like others, the prime minister had been expecting a dissolution in the autumn. But not now, not at the worst possible time, when the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), poised for a historic victory, has "the wind in its sails," as he put it, and when the eyes of the world will already be on Paris at the end of July for the Olympic Games. The call was short. Attal returned to his advisers, pale. Two of them started crying. The "beautiful adventure" was ending. They know there is a real risk that the RN's president, Jordan Bardella, will move into Matignon, a place about which he had shown such curiosity when the prime minister invited him and the other party leaders in early January.

'I don't want to die a slow death'

Later that night, members of the government arrived at the Elysée Palace for a special Council of Ministers meeting at 10 pm. In a salon on the ground floor, they gathered in a mournful atmosphere. The president's official photographer, Soazig de la Moissonnière, flitted around the table to immortalize the somber faces, in black and white. "At that moment, everyone was in the process of moving into tomorrow's world," said one minister.

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