The “national service”, which started on a voluntary basis in 2019, will affect all boys and last a few weeks. Waiting for the announcement. The President: “Promoting Social Cohesion”
From our correspondent
PARIS — Launched in 2019 by President Emmanuel Macron, the “national service” is becoming truly “universal,” as its name Snu (Service national universel) suggests: after hosting 32,000 young volunteers in 2022 (less than the expected 50,000), Macron would have decided to make it compulsory for all boys between the ages of 15 and 17. If the rumors are confirmed, 800,000 young French people will have to spend a few weeks in hostels, training centers or Defense Ministry facilities to take courses in civics, first aid or environmental protection.
The idea is to reduce the fractures and divisions in French society, bringing together young people from different social and geographical backgrounds to resume the function that military service performed until 1997. In his year-end speech on December 31, Macron evoked the possibility of conscription: “Since confidence in the vitality of our democratic life has also fallen, we know that we will have a lot to do in the coming months. In the coming weeks I will lay the foundations for a Universal National Service.”
There were two options: to make the service compulsory or to encourage young people to participate by offering the free driving license (which costs an average of 1800 euros in France) in exchange. The first option seems to have prevailed, there is no official announcement that could arrive on January 20 on the occasion of Macron’s visit to the Mont-de-Marsan airbase on the south-west coast of France. So far, a budget of 140 million euros has been earmarked to welcome young people who want to participate in 2023: if we move to compulsory participation for everyone between 15 and 17 years old, the scale will change and there will be an allocation of one to three billion euros.
Macron is now being asked to better clarify the nature and content of a service that was created to “promote national cohesion”, it is agreed, but which so far has seemed to vacillate between some elements of military inspiration and a more classic civilian service. The young people taking part in the SNU are already wearing uniforms, watching the flag raising and singing the national anthem, aspects that have drawn much criticism and suspicion that the government is trying to regulate and discipline the youth. According to sociologist Florence Ihaddadene, interviewed by Mediapart, it is “more of a civic rather than a military education on paper”, but not without criticism. “Young people are not trained to defend the country or to fight against an external enemy, but to be ‘good citizens’ who vote, are compliant and respect secularism as conceived by the Macronist government – says Ihaddadene – . The children are taught to respect the rules, which are more useful to the patrons of the companies than to the country”.
Instead, the SNU’s Secretary of State for Youth, Sarah El Haïry, rates them as a fundamental tool to learn “the sense of connectedness with the community” and defines them as “neither summer camp, nor army, nor school, but the best of the three.’ Previously, the volunteers had to go through a “cohesion stay” in a department other than their home department, consisting of sports, meetings and debates, cultural visits; and then an 84-hour “service of general interest” at a club, administrative body, or other institution. To promote the SNU at the time of its creation, when it was still on a voluntary and non-compulsory basis, the government had resorted to the YouTuber TiboInShape, who made a video in Guyana (the French region of South America between Suriname and Brazil) with the participation of Gabriel Attal, then youth secretary. Today, government spokesman Attal defends the project and its transition to duty: “Young people from all over France, from all walks of life, gather around the values of the Republic, watched over by soldiers, police officers, gendarmes, firefighters . It is a great plan that will affect 800,000 young people and benefit them and the country.”
. https://youtu.be/sbB7Ko1-uT8 https://youtu.be/tq7zYW-pEbs
Jan 13, 2023 (change Jan 13, 2023 | 2:16 p.m.)
© REPRODUCTION RESERVED