French President Emmanuel Macron faces an obstacle to his ambitions to develop a flagship Franco-German next-generation fighter jet programme — a mid-sized French defence contractor that one would have assumed would do his bidding.
But family-controlled Dassault Aviation has long had an independent streak and outsized influence as the main provider of France’s homegrown combat jet fleet since the 1950s. It famously walked away from another cross-border defence project in the 1980s — the Eurofighter Typhoon later built by the UK, Italy, Germany and Spain — because it wanted design leadership and the bulk of manufacturing.
The situation this time is almost identical. Dassault and its hard-nosed chief executive Éric Trappier are intent on keeping control over the fighter part of the €100bn Future Combat Air System (FCAS), despite staunch opposition from partner Airbus. Macron has tried to drag the project back from the brink in repeated talks with German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
The mess has put renewed attention on the complicated relationship between Dassault and its main customer, the French government, reviving questions over who really calls the shots.
Marwan Lahoud, a former senior Airbus executive and industry veteran, predicted Dassault — with its century-long history, devoted family owners and engineer-led culture — would not budge.
“Everyone thinks the government makes all the decisions, the reality is more complex. There is a give and take,” Lahoud told the FT. “It just comes down to what France expects of a defence company — do they expect that they obey or that they produce the best weapons systems possible?”
Another industry executive put it more harshly: “Ministers come and go, presidents come and go — and Dassault remains.”
Like all defence contractors, the company cannot go too far in ignoring the state because the French military is the most important buyer of its Rafale fighters that bring in the bulk of its revenue. All exports must be authorised. French presidents are Dassault’s marketers-in-chief; Macron will try to close a contract with India to buy about 100 Rafales during a visit there in mid-February.
But if the stalemate with Germany cannot be broken, it will be a stain on Macron’s legacy, given his long-standing advocacy of European defence co-operation and reducing reliance on US weaponry.
Macron announced the FCAS project to great fanfare in 2017 with then German chancellor Angela Merkel. The programme was conceived as a fighter jet that would work seamlessly with drones, next-generation weapons and advanced communication systems, with Dassault leading on the jet while Airbus’s defence arm based in Germany led on the rest.
That plan gradually unravelled as the companies fought over the specifications of the jet, governance and supplier selection. Berlin accused Dassault of moving the goalposts and argued the original agreement should be honoured.
As with Eurofighter, French and German needs did not align: France wanted a lighter, more nimble jet that fits on its aircraft carrier.
By last September, Trappier was warning Dassault had the knowhow “from A to Z” to go it alone.
“We are quite willing to work with partners, including the Germans, but we don’t need to,” Trappier said at a factory inauguration.
Dassault’s pedigree in making aircraft is undisputed and it underpins its leverage with the French state, although the family, which owns 66 per cent of the publicly listed company, has other forms of influence. They own the conservative daily Le Figaro and wine estates in Bordeaux. Trappier recently hosted a grandiose anniversary party for the newspaper attended by French billionaires and politicians.
Founded by Marcel Bloch, the inventor of a high-performing plane propeller in 1916, the company today is one of a handful of global leaders making combat planes, rivalling the likes of the US’s Lockheed Martin.
Its Rafale all-purpose combat aircraft has been battle tested in the Sahel and Afghanistan, and is flown not only by the French air force but also by Egypt, India and Qatar. Rafale sales have boosted France’s export balance. Dassault also makes the Falcon private jet.
The heart of the company has always been its design unit, which Bloch retained even after the Front Populaire government nationalised Dassault in 1936. He later rebuilt the company to defend French skies during the second world war, refusing to share aircraft designs with Nazi occupiers and narrowly escaping death in a German concentration camp.
After liberation, he changed the family name to Dassault — from char d’assaut, or assault tank in French, and also the nom de guerre of his brother, a general in the French Resistance.
Pierre Lacombe, a retired Dassault engineer, said the company had produced legendary plane designers, fostering a fiercely proud and loyal internal culture, though no figure has remained as potent as Marcel Dassault. His funeral was a quasi-state affair, with a eulogy by then prime minister Jacques Chirac, while Mirage planes flew overhead.
Today, Dassault descendants still populate the board and, on top of their stake, the family derives its wealth from the tech spin-off Dassault Systèmes.
After a handover from Marcel to his son Serge, two corporate veterans have held the reins at the planemaker, Charles Edelstenne and then Trappier. An engineer by training, Trappier made his imprint with breakthrough export sales of Mirage jets, including to the United Arab Emirates.
All remain dedicated to preserving the aviation group’s independence, according to people close to them, despite repeated clashes with an interventionist state over the decades.
Marcel Dassault sidestepped a nationalisation attempt when Socialist president François Mitterrand came to power in 1981. He instead struck a deal to hand over only a 26 per cent stake, which had double voting rights attached to it, but which the state never exercised.
“He let go of value to keep control,” Lacombe said.
Dassault had another close escape when Chirac tried to use the state’s holding to merge the group with the early incarnation of Airbus in the late 1990s. It was saved at the eleventh hour by Chirac’s disastrous decision to call snap elections that he then lost.
“They hold grudges, since Mitterrand,” said Oddo analyst Yan Derocles. “The memory of what happened 50 years ago is alive and well at Dassault.”
Today, the French state only has a symbolic handful of shares in Dassault. Airbus owns 10.6 per cent.
One former defence minister pointed out the irony, noting Dassault’s influence should not be overestimated: “It’s a monopsony — there’s only one buyer here and it’s the state.”
The government has also kept Dassault’s technical department fed with constant funding and projects to maintain its expertise, a military procurement specialist said.
But Macron’s ability to finally corral Dassault into doing FCAS appears unlikely, people close to the talks said, especially given the president’s weakened position with 15 months left in office.
In November, with the Franco-German project on the brink, Macron insisted again that they had “an obligation to succeed . . . [because] it’s a test of the credibility of Europe”. At a press conference with Merz, he said the companies should try again to negotiate a compromise.
Subsequent talks collapsed again, as Dassault refused to change its position, one of the people close to the talks said.
“Dassault Aviation’s culture is not to accept what it considers unacceptable,” Trappier told the FT by email. “France’s interest is not to twist Dassault Aviation’s arm but, on the contrary, to take pride in the company’s success.”
The group was not trying to sink FCAS but believes its leadership was “precisely in the interest of the project”, Trappier added.
The German side had also been inflexible and bore responsibility, Dassault insiders and French officials said. Under French chief executive Guillaume Faury, Airbus has adopted a more aggressive stance, which Merz’s government has backed. Berlin has also said it could go it alone on a next-generation jet or find other partners.
If Macron cannot argue Dassault’s corner, few see how the project can be saved.
As one French defence executive who has worked with Dassault said: “When I hear some German counterparts say they don’t understand what’s happening on FCAS, or back in 2022 when they were saying ‘as soon as Macron is re-elected, he’ll be able to force the family to do it’, I want to laugh.”