There’s an entire industry of consultants working on what national leaders look and sound like – but the question of how they smell is less frequently pondered. Not many voters get close enough for it to matter.

At least one current national leader does reportedly care about scent a great deal, however. According to a recent book, The Tragedy of the Élysée by journalist Olivier Beaumont, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, slathers himself in sufficient Dior Sauvage for his staff to detect his approach from an Élysée palace corridor away. In so doing, Macron observes a national tradition. Napoleon Bonaparte had a standing order with his preferred perfumer, Chardin, for 50 bottles of eau de cologne per month. Louis XIV, who was reputedly frightened of bathing, commissioned his perfumer to design a different scent for every day of the week and had his shirts rinsed in a potion of rose-water, jasmine, musk, nutmeg and much else.

Conventional wisdom suggests that smell is the most powerful sense in evoking primal emotions. The historical record certainly suggests a long-established and pretty much universal belief that scent is a potent communicator of power: palaces and temples have dazzled and dominated visitors and worshippers with the deployment of odour since antiquity. Egyptian pharaohs pleased their gods – and demonstrated a connection to them – with offerings of incense. Chinese emperors were so preoccupied with perfume that Mao Zedong seized on it during the Cultural Revolution as symptomatic of the decadence that he wished to extirpate. (Mao’s personal hygiene was legendarily dreadful – his doctor, Zhisui Li, recalled him never bathing, as well as brushing his teeth with tea – though it remains unclear whether this was some cunning olfactory intimidatory tactic.)

Personalised scents of state have now largely faded, with a few exceptions. The late Sultan Qaboos of Oman collected and commissioned perfumes and presented them to his guests. He also founded a fragrance brand, Amouage.

Less majestically, Donald Trump includes perfumes among his hefty range of self-branded merchandise. The Victory 45-47, which comes in a bottle adorned with a little gold statue of him, retails at $249 (€213) – or $398 (€340) for two bottles and $597 (€510) for three. Perhaps the importance of scent in the mass-media age hasn’t dissipated entirely.