Much of the significance of the initial “generals’ letter” or “tribune des militaires” depended on the relation, or lack of it, of retired officers’ sentiments to active servicemen’s intentions. But Valeurs actuelles have just this evening (9 May 2021) published a text that the editors describe, in their prefatory note, as coming from active servicemen. An English translation follows.
For some days a rumour has been circulating that a new tribune des militaires would be unveiled. Coming from active servicemen, it offered support to that previously published on the site of Valeurs actuelles. [English translation here.] This evening we have decided to publish this text, which has already circulated a good deal, and which was echoed in the media. And also to open it, below the article, to the signatures of French citizens who judge it to be up to the challenges that face us. All the while continuing, with a rigorous methodology, to put ourselves at the disposal of the professionals of the armed forces who desire to take part. Like its predecessor, the purpose of this article is not to damage our institutions, but to warn of the gravity of the situation.
Now the text proper, which addresses “Mr. President of the Republic, Ladies and Gentlemen, Ministers, Members of Parliament, Generals, en vos grades et qualités”:
We no longer sing the seventh couplet of the Marseillaise, called the “couplet des enfants” (“children’s couplet”). It is nonetheless rich in lessons. Let us allow the text itself to treat us:
Nous entrerons dans la carrière | Quand nos aînés n’y seront plus. | Nous y trouverons leur poussière, | Et la trace de leurs vertus. | Bien moins jaloux de leur survivre | Que de partager leur cercueil, | Nous aurons le sublime orgueil | De les venger ou de les suivre.
We shall embark upon a military career | When our elders are no more. | There we shall find their dust | And the trace of their virtues. | Far less eager to survive them | Than to share their coffin, | We have the sublime audacity | To avenge them or to follow them.
Our elders are combatants who have earned our respect. They are, for example, the old soldiers whose honour you have trampled these last weeks. They are those thousands of servants of France, signatories of an article of plain good sense, soldiers who have given their best years to defend our liberty, obeying your orders, to fight your wars or to implement your budget cuts, whom you have muddied while the people of France supported them.
You have called these people, who have struggled against all the enemies of France, seditious, while their only misdeed was to love their country and to mourn its evident decline.
Under these conditions, it falls to us, who have recently embarked upon this career, to enter the arena, simply in order to have the honour to tell the truth.
We belong to what the papers have called the “génération du feu” [generation of fire]. Men and women, active service personnel, of all the armed forces and of every rank, of every sensibility, we love our country. This is our sole claim on glory. And if we cannot, within the rules, express ourselves with our faces uncovered, it is just as impossible for us to keep silent.
In Afghanistan, Mali, Central Africa or elsewhere, some among us have seen enemy fire. Some have left comrades behind. They laid down their lives in order to destroy the very Islamism to which you make concessions upon our soil.
Almost all of us saw Opération Sentinelle [an ongoing domestic operation in response to 2015 terror attacks]. There we saw with our own eyes the banlieues abandoned, compromises made with delinquency. We underwent attempts at instrumentalization by many religious communities to whom France means nothing—nothing but an object of sarcasm, of contempt, even of hatred.
We marched on 14 July. And for months we were asked to be wary of that benign and diverse crowd which cheered us on, since we belong to it, banning us from going out in uniform, making us potential victims, upon a soil of which we are nonetheless capable of defending.
Yes, our elders were quite right in the essence of their text, in its totality. We see violence in our towns and villages. We see communitarianism establish itself in the public square, in public debate. We see hatred of France and of her history becoming the norm.
Perhaps that is not for soldiers to say, you argue. Quite the contrary: because we are apolitical in our assessment of the situation, it is a professional judgment that we offer. For we have seen this sort of decline in many countries in crisis. It precedes downfall. It heralds chaos and violence; and, contrary to what you assert here and there, this chaos and this violence will come not from a “military pronunciamento” but from civil insurrection.
For to quibble over the form of our elders’ article, rather than to recognize the clarity of their observations, one must be rather cowardly. For to invoke a misconceived duty of levelheadedness, with the aim of silencing French citizens, one must be rather deceitful. For to encourage senior officers to take a position and to expose themselves, before sanctioning them frantically as soon as they write anything other than dispatches, one must be rather perverse.
Cowardice, deception, perversion: this is not our idea of hierarchy.
The armed forces are, par excellence, the place to speak the truth, since one commits with one’s life. It is to this confidence in the military institution that we appeal.
Yes, if civil war were to break out, the armed forces would maintain order on its own soil, since this is required of us. This is even the definition of civil war. Nobody could wish for so terrible a situation, no more our elders than ourselves; but, yes, once again, civil war is brewing in France; and you know it very well.
Our elders’ cry of alarm recalls more distant echoes. Our elders are the resistance fighters of 1940, whom persons like you very often treated as seditious, and who kept up the combat while legalists, numb with fear, were already making concessions to evil in order to limit the damage; they are the valiant of 1914 who died for a few yards of earth, while you, without protest, abandoned whole quarters of our country to the rule of the strongest; they are all the dead, celebrated or nameless, buried at the front or after a lifetime of service.
All our elders, those who have made our country what she is, who have drawn her territory, defended her culture, given or received orders in her language: did they fight so that you might let France become a failed state, replacing a more and more patent sovereign impotence with a brutal tyranny against those of her servants who wish to avoid it?
Act, ladies and gentlemen. It is not a matter—this time—of emotion on demand, of ready-made formulae, or of media management. It is not a matter of extending your terms or of winning others. It is a matter of the survival of our country; of your country.
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