Emmanuel Macron Is Inaugurated as France’s President

France’s new president, Emmanuel Macron, center, on the Champs-Élysées in Paris after his inauguration on Sunday. CreditPool photo by Michel Euler

PARIS — Against the regal backdrop of a grand reception room in France’s presidential palace, Emmanuel Macron, 39, was officially installed on Sunday as the youngest president in modern French history.

In his short speech to mark the occasion, he encouraged the French to embrace the future, to hold him to a high standard and to join him in the hard work ahead.

“I reassure you that not for a single second did I think that everything changed as if by magic on May 7,” Mr. Macron said of the day he was elected.

“This will be slow work, demanding, but indispensable. It will be up to me to convince the French that our country, which seems threatened by the sometimes contrary winds of the world, carries in its heart all the resources to be a nation of the first rank.”

The new president is wasting no time. On Sunday afternoon, Mr. Macron, as the new commander in chief, visited wounded soldiers at a military hospital outside Paris. On Monday, he is expected to travel to Berlin to meet with Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany, France’s most important ally in Europe, and will also announce his pick for prime minister. By midweek, the rest of his government is expected to be named.

Before week’s end, he is scheduled to visit French soldiers serving in places such as Mali and the Central African Republic.

Mr. Macron said his presidency would be guided by two concerns: finding ways to help the French “have confidence in themselves again” and making France prosperous and strong.

The country faces persistent high unemployment, especially among its youth — unemployment tops 40 percent in some places — and a need for more flexibility in the workplace to encourage employers to create more jobs. There are also concerns about terrorism and immigration, which have led to deep divisions between France’s Muslim minority and non-Muslims.

The European Union, of which France and Germany are economically the most powerful countries, faces the most severe criticism since its founding, including by France, with calls for deep reforms. Those resentments run so deep as populism rises across the continent that leaders throughout the European Union are considering far-reaching changes.

Britain voted last June to leave the bloc, and Mr. Macron will be deeply involved with Ms. Merkel in negotiating its exit.

According to protocol, Mr. Macron was greeted on his arrival on Sunday at the Élysée Palace by his departing predecessor, François Hollande, to whom he owes his first experience in politics. Mr. Macron was a counselor to Mr. Hollande when the departing president was re-elected in 2012, and later became his economy minister.

The departing president, François Hollande, right, with Emmanuel Macron after the handover ceremony at the Élysée Palace in Paris on Sunday. CreditPool photo by Patrick Kovarik

Mr. Hollande, however, proved ultimately unpopular in large part because he could not ameliorate France’s relatively high levels of unemployment. Sensing the political winds, Mr. Macron left the government in April 2016 to form his own movement, En Marche!, or Onward!

At the time, few thought he could become president, but a combination of happenstance, hard work and voters’ impatience with the old political choices contributed to his victory. He was helped both by Mr. Hollande’s decision not to stand for a second term and by a corruption scandal that engulfed Mr. Macron’s most formidable opponent, François Fillon, a former prime minister, whose hiring of his wife and children to work for him led to an embezzlement investigation.

After greeting Mr. Macron on the steps of the palace on Sunday, Mr. Hollande met with him in private so that the departing French leader could give the incoming one “secrets of state,” identified as a handover of the codes for France’s nuclear weapons.

It was also, in many ways, a meeting of a political era that appears to be fading in France with one that is on the horizon. Mr. Hollande is a Socialist party member who has been in politics his entire adult life. Mr. Macron, in addition to being 20 years younger, is a former investment banker who created a movement that he describes as neither “left nor right,” essentially an effort to fuse elements of both.

Mr. Macron has something of the image of a wunderkind who has leapfrogged his way to the top, while Mr. Hollande comes across as a political character who proceeded step by step and who had the misfortune to come to power at a difficult time and without the mandate for change that Mr. Macron hopes to profit from.

That said, Mr. Macron’s aspirations to loosen labor rules, overhaul aspects of the pension system and simplify unemployment benefits are a tall order in a country whose citizens regularly take to the street whenever any change is perceived as potentially weakening the social safety net.

Laurent Fabius, the president of the constitutional council, who proclaimed Mr. Macron’s election official on Sunday during the formal ceremony, referred obliquely to his efforts to forge a new politics for France, citing François-René de Chateaubriand, one of the country’s great intellectuals and conservatives of the end of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th.

“Chateaubriand wrote a formula that fully makes sense: ‘To be a man of his country, one must be a man of his times,’” Mr. Fabius said. He added that Mr. Macron was both, but then urged him to reach out to everyone — an important exhortation for the new president, who was the choice of only 24 percent of voters in the first round of the election.

Mr. Macron won handily in the second round, but many voted not so much for Mr. Macron, but against his far-right opponent, Marine Le Pen, who was seen as representing a radical and even fascist departure from France’s traditions.

“Calm the anger, repair the wounds, alleviate the doubts, show the road forward and embody the hopes” of France, Mr. Fabius urged.

Mr. Macron and his wife, Brigitte, will take up residence on Sunday in the presidential palace, although they have a home in Paris’s Seventh arrondissement. It has generally been deemed too difficult to guarantee the president’s security if he lives outside the Élysée Palace.

Mr. Macron waved at crowds as he was driven up the Champs-Élysées in a military jeep to the Arc de Triomphe, where he attended a ceremony honoring France’s fallen servicemen at a Tomb for the Unknown Soldier. He then greeted bystanders and shook hands with those who had come to cheer him, before returning to the palace.

By ALISSA J. RUBINMAY 14, 2017