One of the striking features of the debate between Emmanuel Macron and Marine Le Pen, televised on 3 May 2017 in the run-up to the second round of the French presidential elections, was Macron’s recourse to the language of civil war. Leaning on a reference to comments by political scientist Gilles Kepel, Macron claimed that the social division exacerbated and exploited by Le Pen’s Front National played perfectly into the hands of France’s ‘terrorist’ enemies, and he used the notion of civil war to capture this division: ‘Ce qu’ils attendent, le piège qu’ils nous tendent, c’est celui que vous portez, c’est la guerre civile.’ / ‘What they want, the trap they are setting us, is the very one you are helping to make, that is civil war.’ Warming to his theme, he repeated the charge of laying the groundwork for civil war twice within the following forty seconds. Nor was this his only public use of this language: addressing the European Parliament on 17 April 2018, he described the opposition between newly successful authoritarian nationalists and upholders of the ideal of transnational European democracy in terms of the return of civil war to Europe.