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.

“By 2029, 2030 we won’t have caught up, but [our goal] is to make a generational technological leap so we’re at the cutting edge and will be able to conquer a number of markets,” Lecornu said earlier this year when he was still armed forces minister.

Crucial to his plan is leaning on France’s homegrown technological capabilities, industrial capacity, and highly educated technical workforce.

Even companies not traditionally known for involvement in weapons production are being drafted into this effort. Over the summer, Lecornu ordered an accounting of France’s entire stock of 3D printers, ready to be requisitioned at a moment’s notice if needed for national defense.

After Lecornu’s announcement in June that a French company would be building drones in Ukraine, Franceinfo reported that Renault was the firm concerned.

Following these first stories, BFMTV talked with officials from the Confédération Genérale du Travail (CGT) and Force Ouvrière (FO) unions who were opposed to the idea.

“Many of our employees have challenged us about this. They signed up to make cars, not weapons,” one FO official said. “Some already want to know if they can refuse an assignment like this,” a CGT rep said.

BFMTV also fearmongered about the presence of immigrant workers from Russia on some production lines, suggesting that it could create “tensions” if they were manufacturing drones to be sent to the heart of the conflict. One unnamed union official reportedly said that one idea put forward was to build the French factory in Slovakia, to be staffed by supposedly more ethnically loyal workers.

Details about what the timeline for production is or whether any part of drone production will take place in France still aren’t available, but some workers are already worried that they might find themselves involved in arms production.

Kept in the Dark

Workers at one large Renault complex in Lardy, a forty-minute drive south of Paris, told Jacobin that they’ve mainly learned about the plans from the press.

“That’s a recurring problem in this company,” Florian David, forty-three, a crash-test engineer, said.

At Renault’s shareholder meeting in April, the subject of reorienting production toward military goals was first raised. But it wasn’t until press articles about the proposal started appearing over the summer that workers at David’s factory heard anything from management.

“When the topic gained traction in the media and it started to be widely discussed, that’s when we got an official statement from the company saying that they were actually considering it,” David said.

Renault told workers in a statement that they were considering the plan — but they still haven’t been given any confirmation that they will move toward producing drones at the site, despite some workers seeing it as a site well-matched for military production.

“These are large industrial areas with large industrial buildings, so they are very long, very large, very well suited,” David explained. The Lardy complex is on the site of a former castle, which sold its holdings to Renault when it was short on cash — an expansive 135 hectares with around forty buildings.

The site is also in the woods, David said, so could be attractive because the forest lowers its visibility to the outside. “It’s totally feasible” for Renault to use the facilities for military production, David concluded. And the decline in the auto industry, which has hit Renault workers hard, makes him open to the idea of the company doing business outside of its traditional domains.

“If my company has work, that means I get my salary,” David concluded.

Economic Sovereignty

In recent years, Renault has cut half of its workforce in Lardy — from 2,400 to 1,200 since 2018, Florent Grimaldi told Jacobin. He’s a CGT union rep who works as an engineer at the research site of the complex, converting combustion engines to electric motors.

In 2022, Renault announced that it would no longer be producing combustion engines. That follows a trend in France toward electric car production, with combustion and hybrid-engine vehicles shunted off to lower-wage Romania and Spain. Ninety percent of Renault’s €80 million investment in France from 2022 to 2026 went to the site at Lardy as part of the electric adaptation plan.

Grimaldi explained that for the moment, there are hardly any details about where drone production might be focused. Instead, it seems like Renault is trying to figure out the best way to sell the idea to its workers. The news made a stir in July, provoking conversations in Grimaldi’s office, at the canteen, over the coffee machine, and at union meetings. But the company went silent until September, when it put out another statement in a more nationalist tenor, talking about the importance of developing sovereign drone production for France’s defense.

“The first communication really was about drones in Ukraine, but then they tried to convince us that it was just for France,” Grimaldi explained.

That nationalist narrative appeals to some workers, Grimaldi said, especially those worried about hanging onto their jobs. But he says it puts engineers like himself, as well as other workers, in a tricky position. He chose to work on electric motors as a way of making things better for society, he said, and many engineers in his line of work have held off on taking better-paid jobs in fields like aeronautics and the weapons industry to do work that doesn’t trouble their conscience so much.

“There are still many of us who are very opposed to the idea,” Grimaldi said. “We wrote a leaflet saying that we’re against this military orientation, but for the moment it’s nothing concrete, so we don’t know yet how to react collectively.”

Workers in his industry have no conscience clause. In France, some professions like journalism do give workers this right. This means they can quit a job because they’re unsettled by new management, or the direction that the company is headed, and still receive full unemployment benefits. But workers like Grimaldi, morally opposed to working on weapons of war that kill people, don’t have that right.

Human Progress vs. Weapons of War

Another engineer, who didn’t want to be named because of worries about problems with management, said that many Renault workers have already left for the weapons industry, taking jobs at companies like MBDA, Thales, or Safran.

“We know that Renault [workers have] skills that are attractive to the arms industry because they’ve hired people who work here after previous layoffs,” he said.

Why hasn’t he gone too?

“On a technical level, it’s something I can do,” the engineer said, “but it goes against my personal convictions.”

For him, the idea of getting into the weapons industry flies in the face of Renault’s recent efforts at greater responsibility.

“We’ve done a lot of development to reduce the amount of pollution our vehicles produce, we’ve done a lot of development to avoid crashes, to anticipate crashes, to reduce deaths after all,” the engineer added.

He said that for some company execs who had military experience, the idea of arms production came naturally to them. But for him and many Renault colleagues, this isn’t what the company is about.

“I wanted to become an engineer to make progress for humanity, not to destroy it.”

War Profits

Moral objections to war aside, France’s rearmament push is part of a quest for profits. And with military budgets rapidly expanding across Europe, French defense companies Thales, Safran, and Dassault Aviation have soared over the past twelve months, even while the rest of the economy has remained cool. For investors looking for returns, armaments are the place to be.

According to Grimaldi, this is the driving force behind Renault’s moves, much like its recent jobs-destroying outsourcing measures.

“If we had continued to work on hybrid and thermal vehicles, there would have been no job losses,” Grimaldi said. But with steeply rising car prices since the pandemic and falling sales, auto manufacturers have looked for profits in a familiar place.

“It’s a deliberate policy by the manufacturers, which has been to prioritize profit margin over volume,” Grimaldi said. “[Rising prices and job cuts aren’t] due to the switch to electric vehicles . . . [but] because there’s a policy among manufacturers to sell fewer vehicles at a higher price.”

Renault factories have long been crucibles for France’s workers’ movement. From the Popular Front in 1936 to the bitter strikes of 1947 to striking workers in May ’68, they have been iconic sites of worker struggle. And at the height of the Communist Party’s power, muscular, well-organized cells of workers had particularly strong contingents at Renault plants.

Today we’re far from those historic peaks of organized labor. Yet some workers still think it’s important to stand up against the powers that be — and to do so at work.

“We need to find a way to take action and to express ourselves collectively, because individually it’ll be difficult,” Grimaldi explained. “They’ll say you have your work contract, you have to do what your employer tells you to do, and it’ll be tough to say ‘no, I’m not going to work on that.’ It’s not individual, but collective means that we’ll need to find so that we’ll be numerous enough and we’ll be determined enough to say that we don’t agree.”