A former freight depot and now a residential “start-up campus,” Paris’s Station F is exactly the kind of project with which Emmanuel Macron wants to associate his presidency. Hip, modern, and housed in a building where “old-fashioned” workers used to labor, it gels with his vision of France as “une start-up nation.” His remarks on “France 2.0” are peppered with terms inspired by Silicon Valley, spoken in English for added effect.

For his supporters, Macron is a hero in standing up for “open Europe,” a dynamic political innovator who has pushed aside the old parties of both Left and Right, and he gave full voice to his “modernizing” agenda when opening Station F. Celebrating a new “entrepreneurial ecosystem,” Macron called for his compatriots “not to be ashamed to make money” and credited the assembled start-uppers with “writing a new page for the planet.” It was fitting, he said, that these tech pioneers should be housed in a station, “a place where you come across people who succeed, and other people who are nothing.”

It might seem odd for a democratic leader to refer to “people who are nothing,” but from the beginning of his presidency Macron has embraced this arrogant posture. His muscular liberalism adopts a tough “pull yourselves up by your bootstraps” line. In similar recent provocations he has called public-sector workers “slackers” and told students missing their studies for protests that they could not expect easy “chocolate-coated exams.”