In May, the students of Sciences Po Lille are invited to visit the headquarters of the 1st Army Corps (France) located within the confines of the Lille citadel. Far from being a trivial outing, this “exceptional visit” illustrates the strengthening of ties between the school and the military in recent years.
Indeed, Sciences Po Lille has maintained a privileged relationship with the military institution since signing a partnership agreement in 2020 between the school and the Rapid Reaction Corps-France (CRR-Fr), now renamed the First Army Corps (1st CA), a “multinational high-level operational staff” as presented on the Sciences Po Lille website. This partnership, established “with a view to mutually beneficial exchanges” between the military corps and Sciences Po aims to “raise awareness of Defense and Security issues and the importance of Lille’s military presence by developing the link ‘Army-Nation’.” In other words, instilling in students in this “elite” program the interests of French imperialism and its needs in times of militarization.
A partnership to strengthen the “Army-Nation” link
The First Army Corps is a multinational staff of the French Army based in the Vauban Citadel of Lille, carrying out missions for the French state, the European Union, and NATO and is a member of the NATO Force Structure, capable of commanding a national or international land force of up to 120,000 soldiers. The objectives advocated by the Army and its staff are clear: to “highlight the evolution of the Army towards high-intensity action” and to be “absolutely ready for combat from tonight”. In this context, General Benoît Demesmeulles explains his desire to “support a new mindset with a spirit of openness”, aiming to organize moments of militaristic propaganda aimed at higher education institutions to develop this “Army-Nation” link.
This concept underlying the strengthening of ties between Sciences Po Lille and the military is indeed central to the French bourgeoisie. Present in the National Defense Review as “one of the silent pillars of French strategy” and a “strategic necessity”, it aims to develop “moral forces” to support the army in a period of resurgence of wars and conflicts. This was evidenced by the outbreak of the war in Ukraine in 2022, which served as justification for the government to strengthen its military apparatus. In this project, the army must serve to strengthen nationalism and contribute to the “cohesion and resilience of the Nation”, in a logic of “promoting the defense of the Nation by the Nation”. Schools and universities are therefore privileged spaces for the army to deploy this propaganda.
Making Sciences Po Lille a training center for military leaders
Thus, the agreement signed between Sciences Po Lille and the CRR-Fr provides for the development of partnerships, conferences, and more broadly to influence the teachings and all practices of the institution. This choice is consistent with the profile of the current president of the board of directors of Sciences Po Lille, Muriel Domenach, who was the permanent representative of France to NATO from 2019 to 2024. While she is on the Board of Sciences Po as a master counselor at the Court of Auditors, she was a specialist in strategic issues in the Quai d’Orsay, and has served in the Ministry of the Armed Forces since 1999. She was already invited to the inaugural conference of Sciences Po in 2023 as the permanent representative of France to NATO. Thus, even though the President of the Board of Directors of Sciences Po has left the military career, she remains at the center of reflections on the ongoing militarization. She stated a few weeks ago that “Europe is no longer at peace”, pointing to Russia as an “existential threat” and terrorism as an “endogenous threat”.
This porosity with military institutions is found in the teachings offered to students, with the major SIGR (Strategy, Intelligence, Economic Intelligence, and Risk Management) in partnership with the army. In this major, students “acquire the necessary skills for analysis and decision-making in the public and private sectors in the field of international security”, directly preparing them for command positions. Students take courses on military strategy, studying for example “defense economics” or rather war economics, preparing them to implement an austerity and anti-worker economic policy, following the budget cuts by the Macron government on Social Security in favor of the military budget. These courses appear as indoctrination into the imperialist interests of France, with for example a course on “security issues in sub-Saharan Africa”, where they learn the “main responses to these issues and their current limitations”. In other words, how France can intervene to maintain its inherited interests from colonialism in the face of its loss of influence on the continent.
In conclusion, the main career opportunities offered by the leaders of the major are the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, or international agencies such as NATO but also “industrial and commercial companies in the defense, armaments sectors”. In this continuation of the partnership between Sciences Po Lille and the CRR-Fr, internships are offered to the army corps for students every year, as well as to the “permanent representation of France to NATO”. These are just two examples in a list of internships with the Ministry of Defense leadership, showing the strong relationship between the two institutions.
The major at Sciences Po Lille also collaborates with the arms company Thales, complicit in the genocide in Gaza. Indeed, last December 11th, a Thales speaker was invited as part of a presentation on “Defense Careers”, an invitation that sparked mobilizations completely ignored by the school’s management, which has a habit of repressing activists. Moreover, Thales offers internships to students in this major every year, showing a strong willingness to directly interfere in training to recruit its future leaders.
In the face of the digital evolution of armaments, Sciences Po Lille has adapted to the needs of the army through the Digital Society major, where students are trained in cybersecurity and the use of artificial intelligence for military purposes, a method referred to as the “Holy Grail” by the Israeli army, which uses it notably in the genocide in Gaza. This major also has a partnership with NATO leaders: last March 5th, Delphine Bonnardot, an AI expert for NATO, was invited for a conference where she presented the use of AI in “cognitive warfare”. The presence of the Lille CIRFA (Army recruitment organization) and the wearing of military uniforms by guests illustrate the militarization and propaganda led by the French army staff, to accustom youth to the presence of the army in public spaces.
As the schools Sciences Po have historically been designed by the bourgeoisie as a training ground for the ruling elite, in the time of Europe’s militarization, these institutions must now more directly train an elite capable of leading the army. The developed partnerships and the evolution of teachings indeed illustrate the French government’s policy of militarization and more generally NATO’s, which need new commanders to expand their armies in a context of international tensions. Students must therefore be trained in the capitalist interests of France, which is accompanied by a repressive policy to prevent mobilizations and silence any criticism of French imperialist policy.
A militarization that is spreading throughout higher education, with programs to indoctrinate youth funded by the Army and private companies, as in Rennes or Paris 8. While Macron announced a few months ago the transformation of the SNU into military service to “strengthen the army-nation pact”, and the chief of staff Fabien Landon declared last November that France must “accept to lose its children”, the state’s objective is to more directly put universities at the service of its geopolitical interests, promising youth indoctrination behind the flag and militaristic propaganda to make us believe that we should align ourselves with the army.
In this context, and as the wars waged by Israel and the United States in the Middle East will push countries like France to further arm themselves and prepare for war, it is urgent to make another voice heard from our universities, deeply anti-imperialist and anti-militarist. Faced with the rearmament of bodies and minds desired by Macron and the ever-increasing adaptation of universities to the needs of French imperialist interests, we must demand an end to partnerships with the military and arms companies as well as to all courses that go against the interests of youth, workers, and the working class. In this sense, the mobilizations of students at AgroParisTech against a training in service of ecocide set an example, as well as the mobilization in support of the two students from the Beaux-Arts repressed for their support for Palestine. Against the march towards war, we must defend a model of university at the service of the majority of the population, and not of the army.
