Name: France brings back limited military service with 3,000 volunteers | BBC News
Uploaded: 2025-11-27T16:52:01.000Z
Duration: 7 min 8 s
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But we begin in France, where President Macron is announcing that France will restore military service on a voluntary basis almost three decades after conscription was phased out.

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The scheme is a response to the renewed threat of confrontation with Russia and will initially involve thousands of young men and women every year.

As you can see, Emmanuel Macron is speaking right now, but

we can talk to our Paris correspondent, Hugh Schofield.

Hugh, I'm aware that President Macron is speaking as we speak, but

what have you managed to glean from his speech so far?

what he's done already is confirm what has been leaked over the last few days.

That is to say that there is going to be a new military service starting from next summer.

And he hasn't yet spelled out the parameters, but

if what we've been told already is borne out by what he says, then we know that it'll be initially, just maybe just a couple of thousand in the first year, but

rising eventually, he hopes, to 50,000 a year by 2035.

These are 18, 19 year olds who will be involved, and they will be volunteers.

No question of returning to the old conscription.

But there is what he says now, a need not for conscription, but for mobilization.

So he spent the beginning of the speech reminding everyone of what had been there before Jacques Chirac abolished national service in 1996.

That is to say every year, every, all young men, in theory, went and did 10 months training.

We're not going back to that because he says that's not what the army needs.

The army wouldn't be able to cope with that.

What is needed is a pool of men and women now able to be mobilized to perform backup roles to the professional army, to form a kind of more of a hybrid force that will consist of professionals, of reservists and of these volunteers.

So the detail he's spelling out, as I understand it, it'll be rising, as I say, up till to 50,000, and

they'll be volunteers and they'll be paid.

And all of this, of course, is very different from the mandatory conscription, which was the old system.

And this is designed to counter possible threats coming from Russia.

Yes, I mean, that's obviously that's the case.

I mean, this is a rising sentiment across Europe.

The rhetoric out of Paris, from Macron, from the chief of staff, only last week warning that France doesn't have the martial spirit anymore, and

saying to the mayors of France, this is General Mondo, the newly appointed chief of Staff, he said to the mayors of France at a gathering of mayors of France, you know, the 35,000 mayors who run the communes of towns.

He said, you've got to go and tell people that, you know, this is serious, that there's a risk of human sacrifice, you may lose your children.

This is what he told mayors to spread out across the land.

So there is this growing sense that something could happen, you know, General Mondon said that his military planning is based on the presumption that there could be a confrontation of some kind with Russia in the next three or four years.

So this is seeping into the national consciousness and as it is across Europe.

And what France is doing is no different from what many other countries are doing.

The Netherlands, Belgium have introduced a voluntary system.

Germany's talking of introducing a voluntary system.

There are countries like Finland, Greece, which have never given up military service.

Other countries, Sweden just joined NATO, which is introducing a mandatory service, but

not for everyone, for kind of people selected on merit.

So across the continent, there are various moves afoot under different configurations to reintroduce some kind of military service.

So we can see President Macron speaking in Grenoble to an audience that includes lots of young people.

How has this been received, specifically by young people in France?

Well, I mean, the good news as far as Macro is concerned, as far as President Macron is concerned, is that it's gone down pretty well so far.

We know from polling that the idea of a voluntary military service is very popular.

Even if it's voluntary, that figure goes down if you.

They are asked about an obligatory compulsory military service.

It's still about 50% are in favor of that.

The nuance is that younger people, in other words, people who will be involved in this, are less willing than their elders.

But even among that age group, there's still a positive majority, 60% in favor of a voluntary military service among young people, as opposed to 40% against it.

Older people, many of them nostalgic, of course, for their own memories of the good old military service and their camaraderie and all that.

So the country as a whole is not opposed to this at all.

But we'll have to see how it pans out, because there are other considerations.

And then there's this other thing which needs to be factored in, which is that this is not Macron's first bid to sort of tap into the spirit of engagement which he likes to evoke among young people.

For the last few years, there's been something running called the national, or the Universal National Service, which has been a complete flop.

It was supposed to be a kind of voluntary thing where hundreds of thousands of people would turn out and get two weeks of civic responsibility training and then practical work on tractors and lorries and things like that.

So everyone, you know, there will be a certain degree of skepticism until this is up and running.

But I think it's different now because this does have the support of the Army.

The army does not want to be involved in basically, you know, social work, providing, you know, a kind of background of social cohesion to make, you know, to help the different classes mix together and get people into jobs.

The army says this much more limited, voluntary, military, purely military service.

It's military training is something that's much more up their street and which they say will be useful because it will provide this pool of extra men and women who can come in and help in an emergency.

That's our Paris correspondent, Hugh Schofield.

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France brings back limited military service with 3,000 volunteers | BBC News

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