President Macron is facing widespread opposition to his dream of fostering national unity by forcing French teenagers into four weeks of civic service.
The scheme began on a voluntary basis in 2019 but attracted only 32,000 youths last year. Macron is determined to breathe new life into a project that he hopes will recreate the patriotic spirit that many observers believe was lost when France ended conscription in 2001.
He wants to make the General National Service compulsory for ages 15 to 17 but unions representing teachers and students, as well as left-wing opposition parties, commentators and even some of his own MPs, say the project will be prohibitively expensive and of dubious value.
The idea was a key component of Macron’s manifesto when he first ran for the presidency in 2017, when it was touted as a way to draw a fragmented youth together around common values.
It was inaugurated two years later and comprises two stages. The first involves sending the teenagers to “cohesion camps” where they are given uniforms and spend a fortnight taking part in sporting and cultural activities while learning about French republican “rituals” such as raising the tricolour flag every morning.
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The second involves a 12-day public interest mission, for instance with a charity or in a care home or army base. Sarah El Haïry, the minister for youth, described the scheme as “neither a summer camp, nor the army, nor school, but the best part of all three”.
Macron, who has no children, is said to be dismayed that French teenagers have shown little enthusiasm for his project. A close adviser told Le Figaro that “he talks about it all the time” in private and that he was convinced that his civic service would “structure the generation”. He is also said to believe that it will go down in history as one of his great achievements.
The French president had been planning to announce that the service would be made mandatory for all of France’s 800,000 adolescents in a speech this month but is having second thoughts after some of his advisers warned that he could be on the verge of a cataclysmic error, with the cost estimated at €1.5 billion to €3 billion a year.
They also note that whereas the voluntary scheme runs during school holidays, the compulsory version would have to operate during term time; no one imagines that Macron would dare to force adolescents to give up their holidays. Teachers say lessons would be lost as a result.
Guillaume Roquette, editor of Le Figaro’s weekly magazine, said the whole idea was pointless. “It is difficult to recreate a patriotic sentiment in an individualistic society where few people would accept the constraints that went with conscription. The danger, therefore, is to give birth to a dubious project that does not have much use, costs an arm and a leg, and whose main purpose is to enable the president to pronounce fine speeches.”
