Macron’s naive plan to revive national service

Emmanuel Macron’s vow to press ahead with plans to bring back national service for France’s youth has taken many by surprise. The French president’s insistence that the scheme would be mandatory is also something of a shock, contradicting remarks made last week by Florence Parly, the minister of the armed forces, who appeared to suggest the service would be voluntary. Not so, according to a government spokesman, who said ‘it will be universal…and it will be obligatory’. So how has this announcement been greeted? In Britain, such news would inevitably be met with howls of outrage from certain quarters. In France, however, Macron’s plans have, for the most part, been greeted warmly.

Macron, the first president of the Fifth Republic with no military experience, has emphasised that the scheme would be different from the compulsory military training undertaken by generations of French teenagers that was phased out by president Jacques Chirac in the late 1990s. Rather, said Macron, the purpose will be to give the young ’causes to defend and battles to fight in the social, environmental and cultural domains’.