Aux armes, citoyens!
We in Europe are on Our Own Now
As Americans reel from the liquidation of the United States government at home, the collapse of institutions of higher education and scientific research, the sniggering flouting of the rule of law and a Constitution the Trump regime views as a hindrance to be swatted away like a pesky fly, not to mention the terrorizing spectacle of the arbitrary arrest, detention, exile and disappearance of a first batch of designated undesirables to offshored penal colonies, we in Europe are scrambling to defend ourselves against obliteration. It has become startlingly clear that Europe is being pincered between a diabolical duo of oligarchic dictators, Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump. They are intent on carving up the world, cleaving it into spheres with which each will agree to allow the other to do as he will.
Neither cares a squat about Europe. Or, rather, both view Europe’s continued respect — however imperfect that respect is, and it is imperfect, and I will take on some of its imperfections in future posts — for the rule of law, for human rights, and for democracy as an inconvenient remnant of the world they gleefully intend to finish off. Witness J.D. Vance’s loathesome speech in Munich last month or Elon Musk’s unabashed meddling in European elections. After over two years of valiantly fighting off Russian attacks, Ukraine, a European country about whose fate Europeans are not even being consulted, will be the first casualty in the deal the American conman will make with his longtime Russian enabler. The rest of Europe is next on the block, and we know it.
There is a new tang of anxiety in the air here. People are afraid. This month, the French news has been reporting every day on readying the nation for war, asking young people how they’d feel about a return to mandatory military service, asking their fathers and grandfathers what it was like when they served, talking about which social programs will have to be cut in a country where many are barely making ends meet and have watched the national health and education systems slowly collapse due to insufficient funding.
This is head-spinning stuff for the French. Europe has blithely existed for the past eighty years under an invisible shield of American military might, aimed over Europeans’ heads at the Soviet Union, then Russia. It is astounding to me that, while I was growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s in mortal terror of nuclear annihilation by the Soviets, performing nuclear attack drills along with fire drills and earthquake drills at school, my French husband, who was growing up thousands of miles closer to the Soviet Union, says such a threat never crossed his mind nor did anyone in his family or community ever talk about such a thing as nuclear warheads or the threat of a new war in Europe. War was history. The second World War was a black-and-white world of hazy newsreels and grandparents’ talk of privation. There were monuments to the dead. There were plaques for martyrs shot on the street by the Nazis and for Jews rounded up and deported to concentration camps, but all of that was in the past. It was over.
The sudden American turnabout on European defense is betrayal on an unimaginable scale. It is simply unimaginable. It is surreal, and we struggle to shake ourselves awake from the unreality of what we must accept as our new reality. In this, we join millions of Americans watching in shock and awe as our world threatens to fall apart. For dual citizens such as myself, or American citizens who live in France or elsewhere in Europe, we live a double tragedy, a double collapse, a double betrayal.
“Faced with this dangerous world, it would be folly to remain spectators,” said Emmanuel Macron in a solemn address to the nation on March 5. Our president laid out the new stakes: “The United States of America, our ally, has changed its position” on the war in Ukraine… . “At the same time, these same United States intend to impose tariffs on products coming from Europe.” Aïe, there’s the rub. Since Macron’s speech, there has been a flurry of meetings between Europe’s leaders and top brass to coordinate a massive, collective, coordinated effort at European rearmament and defense, as well as a nonstop series of visits to the White House to try to soothsay the angry beast.
In this effort, France has a clear advantage. It not only possesses nuclear weapons, those weapons and the chain of command to potentially deliver them is 100 percent French. Our fighter jets, the Rafales, are French. This is not true of other European countries who depend on American F35s that can be grounded with one failure to upgrade what is, as all fighter jets are these days, basically a flying computer. (On the other hand, there are nuclear power plants all over France and, as one commentator on television pointed out, it would take one bomb hitting one of them near a population center to cripple the country.)
The question we ask now: Do we have enough time to mount a European-wide defense capacity that is not dependent on the United States and is capable of being a real deterrent to Russian aggression? Buying time is important. The national television news assures us with video as proof that the United States is still participating in NATO exercises, in Norway near the Russian border, for example, alongside Europeans as it has since NATO’s founding. But we are not terribly reassured. We know the question is not if but when Donald Trump will, perhaps with one of his black marker-signed decrees, or perhaps with a comment on Truth Social full of capital letters and exclamation points, or perhaps via his attack-dog minion, J.D. Vance, or his lapdog minion, Marco Rubio, or perhaps by a post on X by his tech-fascist-oligarch-in-chief, Elon Musk, announce the end of U.S. support for NATO, or — it would amount to the same thing — the annexation by force of NATO member via Denmark, Greenland, or NATO member Canada.
Nationalism is a dangerous sentiment, I know. I am, at heart and by upbringing and national origins, an internationalist cosmopolitan. But I can’t stop tears swelling in my eyes again when I remember Axelle Saint-Cirel singing La Marseillaise during the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games last summer in Paris. What a halcyon time that was; a time of calm and national unity between two episodes of national political upheaval; the last calm, we now know, before the great storm Donald Trump, the president-avenger, is beginning to unleash upon the world.
Watching Axelle Saint-Cirel sing La Marseillaise in Paris again on video makes me think of the unforgettable scene in the 1942 movie Casablanca when Victor Laszlo, a Czechoslovak resistance leader married to Inge Lund, aka Ingrid Bergman, tells the orchestra at Rick’s Café Américain, to play La Marseillaise to drown out a group of partying German soldiers. The club’s American owner, Rick Blaine, aka Humphrey Bogart, is in love with Inge, and we see flashbacks of the glorious time they shared as lovers in Paris (of course!) before the war, yet, he finds his moral backbone through the bitter fog of his jealousy and affected apolitical cynicism (‘cause since she left him, he just doesn’t care about anything anymore), and nods his assent. The orchestra strikes up the French national anthem and the entire room, minus the drowned out Nazi soldiers, erupts in an emotional rendition of the Marseillaise.
The camera closes in on actress Madeleine Lebeau’s face, which vibrates with the fervor of the French longing to be free as she sings. It pans to Ingrid Bergman, her flawless features a study in the film actor’s craft as wave after subtle wave of emotion illuminate her face with pride in her husband and dedication to the importance of the battle he is waging against the Nazi aggressor. Rick can’t resist. He knows he has to do the right thing for a cause greater than himself, and help the man who stole the woman he love’s heart.
In Casablanca, La Marseillaise, a song whose words are nothing less than a call to arms, was the anthem of a common fight for Europe’s freedom, a fight, in 1942, where free France and the United States were on the same side. In 2025, tragically, unbelievably, that is no longer the case.
Aux armes, citoyens!
Refrain of La Marseillaise:
Aux armes, citoyens !
Formez vos bataillons !
Marchons ! Marchons !
Qu'un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons !
Take up your weapons, citizens!
Form your battalions!
Let’s march! Let’s march!
May impure blood
Fill the rows in our fields!
Further viewing and reading:
Replay of national television special broadcast by France 2 on March 13, 2025: L’évènement: La France face aux menaces https://www.francetvinfo.fr/replay-magazine/france-2/l-evenement/l-evenement-la-france-face-a-la-guerre_7122078.html
Text of President Emmanuel Macron’s address to the nation, March5, 2025: https://www.elysee.fr/front/pdf/elysee-module-24161-fr.pdf
What a time. You summed it up perfectly.