Macron wasn’t happy. First, at a speech at the French Defense Ministry, he said: “It is not dignified to hold certain debates in the public arena.” Then, in an interview with Journal du dimanche, he elaborated: “I am the boss,” adding if there was a difference of opinion between the president and his top general, “it is the chief of the defense staff who will change his position,” not the president.

Announcing his resignation Wednesday, de Villiers, who was appointed chief of defense staff in 2014, said it was his duty to share his “reservations.” Hours after his resignation, the government named General François Lecointre the new head of the military. The career officer served in the Balkans in the 1990s and more recently headed the EU’s military training mission in Mali.

Although Macron still enjoys high approval ratings after two months in office, the actions that led to de Villiers’s resignation are being widely criticized.

“The way he did it will leave marks,” Henri Bentégeat, a former head of the country’s armed forces, told Le Monde. “You can't publicly question a military leader like that in front of his subordinates.”

Part of the problem was the manner in which Macron, who had campaigned on, among other things, a massive increase in the defense budget, directed his criticism at de Villiers. The general’s remarks to the French parliamentary committee were off the record, but leaked to the media. Macron’s subsequent criticism of him, however, was public.

Macron was elected on a pledge to be a tough president who would make the necessary difficult choices to remake modern France, but it has become quickly clear that his style has chafed even his supporters. He has said his thoughts are “too complex” for the media to understand, appeared to insult African states for their birth rates, and made a joke about the types of boats used by migrants. But it’s his dispute with the military that may hurt him in the long term.

“It’s clear today that the executive cannot bear a situation where its top public servants have a view of things that is different from the political view put together by the Elysee,” General Vincent Desportes, a former head of the country’s premier military school, told Reuters, referring to the presidential palace. “It’s not Erdoganism [a reference to the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan], but it’s not far off.”