Alongside the countless pieces of bad news that have been piling up for power in France since the President’s re-election in 2024, compounded by the calamitous dissolution of 2024, there may finally be one piece of good news today: the appointment of the Minister of the Armed Forces as Prime Minister. I’m not talking here about the intrinsic qualities of this politician, who is appreciated by many, nor about the finally sensible approach of seeking a government agreement before heading straight for the wall, but about the fact that he previously headed a ministry as the Ministry of National Defense.
In fact, this former position may well enable him to understand that nothing is more important today for the government as a whole than to prepare the country for war, in all its forms.
Because war threatens us. And it’s not just a matter of a few weak signals that are difficult to interpret.
First of all, there are direct military threats on our borders: in Ukraine, where our forces are already engaged at a distance and are preparing to be more precisely engaged on the ground, as peacekeepers. In Poland, where, just this week, the Russian armies organized air intrusions so intense that they were veritable provocations, prompting the Polish army to retaliate. In Africa, our last troops on the ground face formidable terrorist threats. Everywhere else, our interests and nationals are under threat.
Firstly, a terrorist threat, in the most diverse forms, and almost daily, on national territory, carried by increasingly young people of increasingly diverse origins, manipulated by foreign services or groups.
Then there are the constant economic attacks, in the form of industrial espionage, bogus students invited into our research laboratories, so-called industrial partnerships aimed at stealing our know-how, rumors spread on the markets, media campaigns aimed at damaging our image, our businesses and our tourism.
Then there are the repeated appeals from all quarters that our enemies are our friends, that we have nothing to fear from them, and that it would be better to disarm ourselves; or that, if we do arm ourselves, it would be better to do so with weapons from countries that retain the key to their use.
Then there are the threats posed by nature’s vengeance against the aggressions we inflict on her, from floods to global warming, from fires to the disappearance of wildlife.
Finally, there are other very real aggressions, which too many people find hard to perceive and link to a grand geopolitical scheme: digital viruses blocking our banks, hospitals and public services, to measure our capacity to protect ourselves; anonymous provocations targeting the Jewish community and then the Muslim community, to set French people against each other; so-called spontaneous calls to blockade the country, launched by strangers who may well be foreign agents, to assess our capacity to kill each other.
All these threats come from everywhere. From Russia, from China, from the United States; each of these countries makes no secret of the fact, and sometimes even trumpets the fact that the European Union is their enemy, and that they seek to paralyze it, to bring down its institutions and its currency; and in particular, to undermine from within the only member country of this Union with nuclear weapons and a seat on the United Nations Security Council: France.
In addition to all these threats, there is a final one, even more pernicious and deadly: that which comes from the heart of the nation, the nonchalance that leads to slacking off, scorning work, becoming hedonistic, getting into debt without limit, letting go of the ramp.
Faced with all this, there is no other response than an urgent awakening, a general mobilization.
By taking the example of the two countries best prepared today to meet these challenges, Finland and China: both regularly distribute information to their citizens on how to behave in the event of war; they draw up national mobilization plans, constantly look for loopholes, constantly track down the shortages that threaten them, refuse to believe the promises of their allies, and take the most important decisions in very restricted circles, where only those citizens with the highest level of defense secrecy clearance are admitted.
In France, this state of mind is essentially confined to a single corps, the army, whose job it is to protect. Even if, at times, one gets the feeling that the army is still planning to deploy weapons in 2040 that would have been needed in 1980, without seeing a completely different, much more global and diffuse battlefield coming, without being sufficiently wary of its own allies and without mobilizing the nation.
It was the entire Ukrainian nation that stopped the Russian advance. Not just its army. It is the French nation as a whole that will be able to halt its decline and resist its enemies. This will require much more effort in terms of national cohesion and social justice, and much more work, with just the right dose of paranoia.
We could then dream of a Prime Minister who comes from Defence and is in charge of national mobilization on economic, financial, social, military, democratic and ecological issues.
But we’d need a sense of tragedy at the highest levels of government, and an understanding that it’s only by mobilizing the whole nation and preparing for the worst that we stand a chance of escaping it.