Between fear and resilience, how each generation experiences the fear of a generalized conflict

These are the February holidays, a good part of the family is gathered at Frédéric and Hélène, happy grandparents of six little boys. Two of them, Joseph and Hector, 4 years old, make the living room their playroom. The carelessness of their occupations-Build a cushion hut-contrasts with the severity of the subjects discussed this afternoon at the adult table.

Frédéric launched his son -in -law on the news, they inevitably arrive at war. Ukraine, American disengagement in Europe, Vladimir Putin … “Stop, please,” cut Hélène in a soft and firm voice. Her grandmother’s heart is freezing that her grandchildren can participate in a war, a nightmare she believed to belong to the past.

A few days earlier, Emmanuel Macron said he wanted to “offer our youth a strong commitment”, to “give him the choice to serve”. The sixties immediately thought of military service and her grandchildren.

The freshly retired teacher considers herself happy to have experienced a period of carelessness. European construction, the fall of the Berlin Wall: everything seemed to draw a future “full of hopes”. “I now feel this chance as an injustice for them,” she says, thinking of the little boys who brighten up her house.

Admittedly, she remembers the conflict in Yugoslavia and the Gulf War, in the 1990s. But in her eyes, as for the majority of French people, these wars remained distant. The external operations of the army of trade were mainly followed by the families of soldiers.

“After the conflict in Algeria, there was a forgetting of the war,” explains François Cochet, specialist in military history (1). “The idea had settled in the West that we went to an eternal peace,” continues the historian Bénédicte Chéron (2). Despite the peaks of tension of the Cold War, an entire generation lived in this illusion.

For Bénédicte Chéron, the rocking took place at the turn of the 2010s with the media coverage of dead soldiers in Afghanistan. The 2015 terrorist attacks were then decisive, shaking up the idea that the national territory was inviolable. Then came the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, in 2022, a real shock for the population.

But the worst was Donald Trump’s return to the presidency of the United States, which, for many, ended the feeling of security. “My patients are more anxious by Trump than by Ukraine,” confirms Patrick Clervoy, psychiatrist in Toulon (Var).

Certitudes are shattering

Today, war is becoming a concrete danger. In a collective vertigo, 65 % of French people fear an armed conflict in the European Union. A year ago already, 72 % of them feared a military attack on our territory in the years to come.

During his speech on March 5, 2025, Emmanuel Macron insisted on “the Russian threat” and prepared the spirits for a “war economy”. “The homeland needs you,” he said.

In the United States, Donald Trump threatens to no longer support Ukraine militarily and financially, a strategic turning point that makes Europe tremble. The restoration of the military service is debated in Belgium, Germany and the United Kingdom. For its part, Poland will double the workforce of its army and prepare a large -scale military training for “each adult male”. The country is even thinking of withdrawing from the international convention against anti -personnel mines in order to place it at its borders with Ukraine and Belarus.

Danger signals accumulate, certainties are shattered. A world thought stable dislocates before our eyes.

Pascal and Élisabeth were born under Pompidou and Giscard. Agents of the Public Service, they met at the Créteil Faculty Student Mission (Val-de-Marne) in the 1990s. Young newlyweds, they then bought an apartment in the Paris region and decided to start a family. War never occupied their minds.

Four children and a house in the countryside later, carelessness has disappeared. “I’m afraid for my family,” said Elisabeth, by car on the roads of Sologne. Assailed by the news, the couple no longer knows what to think. “I try to understand what are the real risks of war,” says Pascal. In a society that has lost its military culture, this change of era is similar to a jump in the unknown.

Virginie works with children in school difficulties. She listens to the radio every day. The repetition of the word “war” all day long makes it anxious. “We are pushed to believe that we are going straight to the third world war,” annoys the mother of three young adults. When she can no longer, she cuts the news and takes refuge in her garden.

His mother, Marie-Laure, 80, lives things differently. From her chair, in her Val-de-Marne home, she never misses the 8 p.m. news. What she hears reminds her of her parents’ accounts on the atmosphere that precipitated the Second World War, but she refuses to talk about it with her grandchildren.

Youth on the front line

However, they already think about it. When you ask her granddaughter Emma, she first assures the opposite. Then recognize: “I am in denial, to avoid anxiety. Anyway, I’m not going to put on a trellis. At 27, she prefers to focus on the concrete actions that she can carry out on a daily basis, in the public service where she is employed.

Rise of perils, future retreat which they foresee reduced as a sorrow, devastated planet … In young people, everything merges in the same feeling of uncertainty. Their speech turns to fatalism or distrust. “They have less confidence in democratic values than those who were 20 years old in the 1990s,” said Bénédicte Chéron.

Would they be committed to defend them by arms? The hypothesis, unrealistic yesterday, is now studied in the circles of national defense, notably at the military school, with which François Cochet collaborates. “Judging in the past, so that young people are committed, they must think they do it for a just war,” observes the historian, himself a reservist.

So, is that the case? “We sometimes wonder with friends if we would go to the front,” says Julien, remembering the names of the 1940 resistance fighters. François-Xavier and Joseph, the twenty, also think about it. Die for Ukraine? No. Defend France? Maybe. Besides, like many, it is not necessarily the war that they are thinking. Joseph, he rather imagines a terrorist attack: “A guy with a knife or a kalashnikov … If they are two, it becomes complicated. These thoughts float somewhere, in the background, but do not prevent them from living.

This is surely what Marie-Laure would have advised them from her comfortable chair. “My parents got married in 1943, in the middle of a war, and they still had children,” she said maliciously. “There is always hope, and it’s the year to say!” At 80, she knows this well: history spares no one, but she continues to move forward.