Ready for battle

After all, the Revolution of 1789 coined a universal slogan – liberty, equality and fraternity – that no subsequent political movement has managed to improve upon. On the contrary, a totalitarian extreme left in many parts of the world has prostituted the motto that sheltered the aspirations of so many generations and for which millions of young people gave their lives. 

This year, the traditional 14 July parade on the Champs-Élysées in Paris was organised ‘like a real military operation’, according to the capital's military governor, Loïc Mizon, who accompanied President Emmanuel Macron in the command vehicle. Unlike in previous years, on this occasion France has given the event an epic tone, flexing its military muscle so that the French people would not only admire the ‘spectacle’ but also feel protected by armed forces displaying discipline, effort and readiness for combat. 

Virtually all the television channels broadcasting the event showed an audience that fully identified with its army and accepted the arguments Macron used to justify both the deployment and the significant increase in military spending over the coming years. 

Macron himself had urged the Chief of the Defence Staff, General Thierry Burkhard, to precede him a few days earlier and make a statement as forceful as ‘Russia has designated France as its main target in Europe’. The rarity of such an appearance by the nation's top military commander was accompanied by a warning to the French people themselves: ‘It is not my intention to frighten the French, but to make them aware of the lasting, close and significant threat posed by Russia,’ General Burkhard said. 

The speech paved the way for the big announcement by President Macron: to increase the military budget by €6.5 billion over the next two years, with the aim of reaching 67.4 billion euros by 2030. This is an arduous task for Prime Minister François Bayrou, who has even turned to AI to see where he can find 43.8 billion euros in savings to reduce the budget deficit to the 4.5% agreed with the European Commission. It remains to be seen whether the French head of state's appeal to all political forces ‘not to oppose the increase in military spending’ in the vote on the next national budget, scheduled for September, will be successful. 

In any case, taking advantage of the holiday, Macron presented the National Strategic Review (RSN), drawn up by the General Secretariat for Defence and National Security (SGDSN), which calls for ‘France and Europe to be able to defend themselves better and deter any new aggression against the continent’. Macron sets this hypothetical aggression around the year 2030 and already points to the culprit: ‘Vladimir Putin's Russia, whose hostile and subversive actions in Europe - cyberattacks against hospitals and energy facilities, assassination of opponents in exile, manipulation of certain elections and attempts to influence public opinion - seek to destabilise our societies’. 

Macron also sets himself up as the leader of the new revolution, ‘the European strategic revolution’, while implicitly calling on other European NATO countries to ‘defend our freedom by defending the armies that in turn defend our freedom’. Likewise, in a synchronised operation with much of the media, numerous military leaders have called on young people and emphasised the importance of their joining the fight for freedom. Many of these statements already hint at the establishment of a new voluntary national (military) service to acquire and train the necessary skills for the coming struggle. 

The epic tone of all the speeches and debates was accompanied by an air of national pride, of feeling like a citizen of a strong country, ready to defend its freedoms, renewing values that seemed to have disappeared, or at least faded from the concerns of the younger generations. This atmosphere was palpable at the classical music concert in the Champ de Mars, where more than 60,000 people sang Edith Piaf's ‘Hymn to Love’, accompanied by cellist Gautier Capuçon and pianist Jerôme Ducros, evoking Céline Dion's performance from the Eiffel Tower during the last Olympic Games. There was also admiration and pride in technological precision, with the dance of more than a thousand drones launched from 120 positions on the Eiffel Tower itself, while traditional fireworks exploded in all their magnificence over the French capital. 

This atmosphere of national epic overshadowed the hundreds of altercations reported on the night before the national holiday. Nearly two hundred people were arrested. Not all of them reject French and European national sentiment, but most are the usual provocateurs who take advantage of any event to set fire to and destroy public and private property. More often than not, they do so with borrowed slogans, unable to argue rationally on behalf of what and whom they are causing the damage.