French Car Workers Don’t Want to Make Military Drones
Leading French automaker Renault is reportedly converting some production sites to make military drones. It’s stirred discontent among car workers in France, who say they didn’t sign up for Europe’s rearmament push.
As France’s war mobilization ramps up, more companies and their workers are being drawn into arms production. (Christophe Morin / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
As Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky visited Paris last Monday, France’s prime minister, Sébastien Lecornu, promised deeper military integration between the two countries — including an agreement by Kyiv to buy one hundred combat planes from flagship French defense company Dassault Aviation.
France is the world’s second-largest weapons exporter. In March, its then–economy minister Éric Lombard called for a war economy. He wasn’t the only one. “If our country isn’t ready to accept to lose its children” in a war against Russia, it “will falter,” France’s chief of defense staff Fabien Mandon said in a speech last Thursday. As France’s war mobilization ramps up, more companies and their workers are being drawn into arms production — like it or not.
Lecornu Wants a War Economy
Lecornu, who as Emmanuel Macron’s armed forces minister from 2022 to 2025 helped shepherd a stock-market boom for French weapons companies, used the meeting with Zelensky to show off France’s capacity for drone production. The visit was an opportunity to send a clear signal that France aims to ramp up its offensive-drone capabilities.
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