The sheer hatred against Macron is something new, even for protest-friendly France

“Louis XVI was guillotined; Macron, we can start again” echoed the chants on Thursday at the angriest protests to date against the French president’s pension reform.

There has already been one casualty: King Charles III’s first state visit has been postponed due to fears of violence. And now, after Thursday’s incandescent protests that saw more than 900 fires lit, airports blocked and paving stones hurled around the country, the French “revolutionary itch” - as one Elysée aide put it - is back with a vengeance.

“Jupiterian” Macron was the first to theorise that the French expect a touch of majesty from their head of state and have never really got over losing their monarchy, pining for a king like a lost limb. The paradox, he added, was that the French are a nation of “regicidal monarchists”. And sure enough, just nine months after he was elected for a second term, many French are now screaming: “Off with his head.”

Yet viewed from across the Channel - and almost anywhere else in Europe, indeed the world - the call to arms for a new 1789 is based on a laughably anodyne change: raising France’s legal state retirement age from 62 to 64.

For many foreign observers, the reform is a no-brainer. In an ageing country with a high life expectancy, the worker-to-retiree ratio has shrunk to 1.7 to one, from three to one in 1970. Germans retire at 67 and for Britons it will soon be 68.

Surely the French can’t be the only Western welfare state democracy to have its cake and eat it regarding pensions?

That is the message Mr Macron has been pushing. Given their allergy to pension funds, the French must work more and longer for the country’s generous pay-as-you-go system to remain afloat. If nothing changes, deficits will run to €10 billion by 2030 and rapidly rise from then on.

Yet the foreign observer should not underestimate the widespread sense of injustice over this reform.

“Contrary to what you might think, it’s not innocuous, it runs deep. It’s perceived as existential by two thirds of the French people,” said political scientist Dominique Moisi.

“We French give precedence to life over work. It’s a very emotional sociological issue. It may sound irrational, even absurd, but people look at retirement as a kind of paradise that precedes the end. The apple tart with your grandchildren on a Wednesday is the epitome of that paradise. President Macron has lost completely that dimension,” he said.

Thomas Piketty, the Left-leaning star economist, said the French were convinced that raising the legal retirement age - rather than the number of years of pension contributions meaning those who start early retire early - is “the most unfair measure”.

“It affects most not those who have done studies, white-collar workers, but those who started earliest. These are people who often have tough jobs like being a supermarket cashier. If you need to find €10 billion is it really via these people?,” he asked.

Naturally, France’s strike and protest culture is nothing new. Yet times have changed. The seminal student and workers’ May 1968 movement was seen as a largely joyful uprising in a bored country with virtually no social or economic woes. The 1995 strikes over raising the retirement age from 60 to 62 were huge but president Jacques Chirac was not personally singled out for vilification. It helped that he shelved the reform.

There was exactly the same number of French in the street - around 1.2 million - in 2010 after the last major pension reform was passed under Nicolas Sarkozy.

But this time it’s personal.

“There is something different. The level of rage, if not hatred, against Macron has never existed before,” said Mr Moisi.

“In all honesty, I have no idea where we are going. How can you reach a compromise when society is so polarised and when the issue is no longer the pension age but the presence of Macron in power?”

Part of the problem is France’s presidential regime, which hands the head-of-state huge powers when he has a parliamentary majority. It was designed for Charles de Gaulle but nobody has been able to fill his shoes ever since.

Brilliant and energetic, Mr Macron could pull off that trick, or so the French thought. “But there is an immaturity in Macron that destroys the sheer brilliance of the man,” said Mr Moisi.

He has not been helped by the fact that while the French chose to entrust him with presidential powers once again by re-electing him, they also opted to deny him a parliamentary majority. In order to pass his reform, he had to bypass a parliamentary vote via a special constitutional article, fuelling claims he is acting like an authoritarian monarch. He has failed to meaningfully advance the cause of a more horizontal, participatory democracy.

Yet to blame Mr Macron for the mess would be short-sighted.

The level of ire against this pension reform, just as the fury against a green fuel tax that sparked the yellow vest revolt in his first term, points to a deeper disquiet. As the conservative newspaper Le Figaro put it, it reveals the “malaise of a country haunted by its economic decline, its cultural fragmentation, its ageing population”.

French democracy has become a largely “negative” process about keeping the far-Right out of power, it wrote. The French, it lamented, have sacrificed “national pride” and concerns about rising debt for “the sofa and the vegetable garden”.

“Tired of its power”, the country appears to want to “simply retire”.

But some French have a far more prosaic take. As this correspondent’s barber put it, “The French don’t like change and want it with jam on top. Some get to retire early. Meanwhile, the rest of us just get on with it.”