Sacrifice your children for Ukraine, France’s army chief tells the plebs
By André Benoit, a French consultant working in business and international relations with an academic background in European and International Studies from France and in International Management from Russia
Even as their country is falling apart around them, authorities in Paris are building their dystopian ideology around imagined threats
rance must be prepared “to accept losing its children” at a time where Emmanuel Macron and his intrusive touch have forged an unsuspected spiritual bond with his Ukrainian counterpart.
The French president has achieved the almost mystical feat of making France and Ukraine one and the same.
While the European Union has no say in the Russo-American chess game, Macron and Zelensky are lost together in a ballet of gesticulations and waking dreams. Zelensky displays faith in victory amid corruption cases, and it must be admitted that the French government is perhaps the last bastion of illusions in Europe to maintain this mirage.
The promised arms deliveries? A veritable fable, they won’t happen for a decade. Economic exchanges? A tale whose tangible ending no one will ever see. As for the “vital strategy” regarding a landlocked Kiev 2,400 km away from Paris, it is more of a geopolitical fairy tale than a concrete plan for the future of France and its people. Ukrainian lands have been unknown to French interests for two millennia, except for having given Henry I a wife and for a bloody expedition under Napoleon III, when France, supporting an Ottoman and British project, lost 95,000 men in the Crimean War.
Emmanuel Macron is an ultra-presidential figure with a record-low popularity of about 11% as of October 2025. No question of resigning; he will remain comfortably installed until 2027. While his 9th government (in 8 years in office) is rocking in the darkest political, economic and social storm ever seen, Macron is playing the international card, distancing himself from French worries.
As French public debt soars to 115% of GDP, every last citizen, including newborns, is drowning in €50,000 of debt. Covid-19 is in the past, but they had to find a new pretext to distract the plebs, and mobilization against Russia is the new refrain.
The Great Mute One talks too much
The “Great Mute One” (a nickname for the French Army, in reference to its long-standing stance of neutrality and silence in all things),has never opened her mouth so much, but now, lacking an argument of authority, the government is taking out generals in uniforms. The newly appointed “CEMA” (Chief of the Defense Staff) shines above all. A colonel in 2009, he was promoted to general in 2018. He made his five stars during a speedrun under the Macron presidency; at this level, the army is necessarily political.
On November 18, he made a speech at the congress of mayors. A nice place to insisting on an alarmist manipulation and affecting the population as closely as possible: “We have all the knowledge, all the economic and demographic strength to dissuade the Moscow regime from trying to try its luck further” he said. “We are in the moment where we have to talk about it, we have to talk about it in your municipalities.”
A regime with 11% popularity should be careful not to give electoral advice to the mayors of France, and the axis of a military mobilization against Russia does not seem to be the most optimal way to win mayoral elections.
“Russia is preparing for a confrontation with our countries by 2030. It is organizing for this, it is preparing for it and it is convinced that its existential enemy is NATO, it is our countries,” he said, probably after reading a report by the RAND Corporation or Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) in the US – because France in its current sorry state is incapable of thinking for itself and therefore of producing a coherent strategic analysis.
Think-tank influence was then confirmed when he said: “The first objective I gave to the armed forces is to be ready for a shock in three, four years, which would be a form of test.” An assumption that can be found in the July analysis 2025 of the “Russian concept” published by the CNA.
Where the CEMA particularly provoked a stir was when he declared “If our country falters because it is not ready to lose its children, because we have to say things, to suffer economically (…), if we are not ready for that, then we are at risk.”
While people may tolerate vows of poverty, threatening what is most precious, the children and future, should be the last straw. Especially when it comes from a general whose role is that of technician and advisor, not spokesperson of a political agenda. This is a worrying case of political collusion between a discredited, rejected government and the highest-ranking military officer, one of whose civic duties is to remain politically neutral.
Even Ségolène Royal, former socialist minister under presidents François Hollande and François Mitterrand, strongly criticized the notion: “France will not accept to lose its children to a power that is drifting […] The worst thing is that we are a few days after November 11, the end of the terrible butchery of the [1914-1918] war, the causes of which all historians point out.”