Emmanuel Macron is the first president of the Fifth Republic to have never served in the military, and it shows.

His bellicose declaration on Monday that the West might deploy ground troops to Ukraine has been roundly rejected by France’s allies. No chance, was the retort of Germany, Britain, Poland and others. Russia also warned that such a deployment would be very unwise.

Macron has never recovered the confidence of his armed forces

As a result, Macron has been left looking foolish and inexperienced, accused of war-mongering in order to boost his self-esteem after a bruising few weeks domestically. A dismissive editorial in today’s Le Figaro, the newspaper of choice for France’s military top brass, said of the president: ‘He draped himself in the cloak of a warlord confronting Putin, but he did so without troops or ammunition, in much the same way as he had, in a whim, summoned the anti-Daesh coalition to confront Hamas’.

It’s not the first time Macron has come over all martial. In July 2017, just a couple of months into his presidency, he donned a sailor’s overalls as he was  lowered from a helicopter onto a nuclear submarine. A couple of weeks later he appeared to be channelling his inner Tom Cruise as he arrived at an air base in a pilot’s uniform. The French found his Top Gun turn hilarious but also a little troubling.

Assessing Macron’s behaviour, Dominique and François Gaulme, authors of the book, The Clothes of Power: A political history of men’s clothing, wrote: ‘There’s a very childlike side to it, the childlike omnipotence of the little Macron who dresses as he pleases because he’s the boss.’

Macron’s fancy dress phase was not only childish, but it was also provocative to a French military that was still angry at the way their popular chief, General Pierre de Villiers, had been forced to resign days earlier. He had raised vociferous objections to the news that the new president intended to slash military spending by €850 million. The 39-year-old Macron reminded the 60-year-old de Villiers, who had commanded a mechanised infantry battalion in Kosovo in 1999, that ‘I am the boss’.

De Villers decided Macron wasn’t the sort of boss he wished to work for, stating in his resignation letter that because of the spending cuts he no longer felt able to lead a military ‘that I think is necessary to guarantee the protection of France and the French people.’

Macron has never recovered the confidence of his armed forces. In the space of a few weeks in 2021 his authority was twice challenged by open letters published in a conservative magazine. The first was signed by a number of retired senior officers, and the second was the work of anonymous serving soldiers. Both cautioned the president that his pusillanimity in tackling Islamic extremism was leading the country inexorably towards civil war. ‘We are not talking about extending your mandates or conquering others. We are talking about the survival of our country, the survival of your country,’ warned the letter.

In the years since the morale of the French military has weakened still further. There have been humiliating withdrawals from Africa – Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger – as Macron presided over a disastrous decline in French prestige on the continent. It has left many soldiers embittered. ‘I have seen the end of the old world’, an officer was quoted telling Le Monde last year when the newspaper reported about the ejection from Africa of France.

If Macron believes he can restore French prestige by rattling his sabre at Putin he is in for a nasty shock. The French military, like the British, is no longer capable of fighting a major war. This was painfully brought home to the French during a military exercise in 2022 against one of its allies. ‘When we started using our tanks, several of them went haywire,’ explained one of the French soldiers involved. ‘If the Russians had attacked us, I can tell you, we wouldn’t have been ready.’

At the same time General Vincent Desportes, the former Director of the Joint Services Defence College, said that France was ‘not at all in a military economy that allows us to conduct large-scale conflicts’.

This is because successive governments have run down the defence budget: from 3.07 per cent of GDP in 1980 to 1.4 per cent in 2017. Macron did persuade parliament to approve a significant increase in defence spending last year, one which will increase the budget from €295 billion to €413 billion for the period 2024 to 2030.

Nonetheless, in an interview last month, the defence journalist Jean-Dominique Merchet, the author of Are We Ready for War?, said that it would take many years for France to become a military economy after a long period of complacency. For example, it takes three years to produce one Rafale fighter aircraft because there is only one factory in France.

Merchet concluded that France had to face reality instead of believing it was a still a major player on the world stage. ‘We haven’t come to terms with that period, and we maintain our illusions by repeating to ourselves that France is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, a global power.’

This is particularly true of Emmanuel Macron who, unlike his predecessors in the Elysée Palace, never underwent compulsory military service. It was phased out between 1996 and 2001 because the then president, Jacques Chirac, wanted to make savings as France prepared to enter the Eurozone.

Chirac had done his military service in Algeria in the 1950s when France was engaged in a bloody war of independence. It was an experience that shaped his political life and was a factor in his refusal in 2003 to join George W Bush’s Coalition of the Willing against Saddam Hussein. His stance earned him the opprobrium of the Anglosphere, but Chirac turned out to have been right.

Emmanuel Macron should perhaps look more to Chirac for inspiration, rather than Tom Cruise.