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The Gendarmes demand 'attestation' forms from people who dare leave the house. Credit: MARTIN BUREAU/AFP via Getty Images
As soon as Macron appeared on TV to declare the new Covid-19 measures, I knew we were in trouble. Manu suffers from what poker players call a “tell”: an unconscious physical gesture that betrays the working of the mind. With President Macron it is the hands: he makes an Eiffel Tower of his fingers when stressed. When the tower of digits tumbled I said, “Full lockdown.”
Full lockdown it was. The works. An hour max outside per day for physical exercise, no more than 1km from your residence. All non-essential businesses closed (although schools, this time round, remain open, as do factories and some public services), until 1 December, at least. And back to carrying an attestation — a signed, date, timed form declaring the reason for leaving the house. The accepted reasons, as with the first confinement in Spring, are limited to buying essential goods, attending medical appointments, aiding the needy, going to work.
This was the evening of Wednesday, 28 October; confinement was to begin on the stroke of midnight, the next day. So Parisians were granted a whole 30 hours to flee the arrondissements for the country. Flee they did. Traffic jams around Paris stretched for a cumulative 730km.
Some Parisians from the exodus have ended up in our remote Charente village of La Roche (population 185), renting the gîtes the community owns to aid the coffers. The Parisians are easy to spot: they blink like moles in the daylight, and go jogging and walking in sportswear from North Face or Ruckfield. Locals going for a walk in the woods dress in gear from the Decathlon megastore in Niort.
Anyway, the Parisians have fled their diseased city for a place with not a single case. And they have dumped their dogs.
The French hold the European record for abandoning dogs (about 100,000 canines a year), the peak times being holidays, because no one wants to pay for kennels. Or vets. So I was not entirely surprised when I opened the front gate on the Friday morning that began confinement to find a bedraggled, aged, arthritic golden Labrador sitting there. With more hope than expectation, I looked up and down the stony track for its owner. Nobody.
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SubscribeThe French love rules, and they love paperwork to outline the rules, but the one thing they love even more is exceptions to the rules.
I live in a very rural hamlet in Creuse (central France), where the Chasse (hunt) is a big deal. This has continued unabated since lockdown started, as one of the many exceptions to the lockdown is the essential hunting of vermin. Suddenly every chasseur is engaged in this essential activity … but only on Saturdays.
Vive La France!
You are so right about loving exceptions to the rules. The verbal precursor to the exception is “en principe” and “normalement”. Vive le système D !
Nice one, Howard! We have lived here for 30 years and learned early that an artisan, when asked when his quote will be sent, replies”Normalement la semaine prochaine” which means possibly this month. Once tbe devis is accepted he will tell you that work will begin “En principe, vers la fin du mois” meaning possibly this year.
No one screws with the local Chasse. Ever.
Thanks for the article, if this is the spirit of the French people, than I love them. In comparison, (most of) the Dutch in my country are cowards.
Van Beek and also a dutchie?….hmmmmm…:)
CL@ trust me, when it comes to cowardice, the French are in the top of the pile.
According to a survey, 70 % of them want a tighter lockdown. My neighbours clean the door handle, the one living on my floor, comes out of his apartment to see if I am wearing a mask ( of course I don’t ) and how it is I am constantly going outside ( because I would go nuts if I didn’t).
Frankly it baffles me that you foreigners would want to live in a country that is basically …..on the brink.
I fled this lockdown and went to Austria……who a couple of days after I’d arrived, also went into full lockdown…….No limit to how far I can go away from my place, we are even encouraged to go out into the fresh air to….and I quote….look after our physical and mental health. And I bloody do…..hiking and dirt biking the mountain…….sleeping my 9 hours and feeling content……all the while, my fellow countrymen pop psycho pills like m & m ‘S because they are simply losing it.
Still……they want more of this lockdown………
This country is just a padded cell and its government made of cynical twits who seem to enjoy the way they treat their people.
Suicides have gone up the roof, domestic violence, divorces ……Los of jobs……and the author mentions, businesses closed for ever.
I spent the first lockdown in Sweden and now in Austria ……….France is just a dump.
A very entertaining article.
And gives a true flavour of the French, I think.
The first rule of rules is that they must make sense. Lockdowns are predicated on purely arbitrary measures than can have their own degree of harm, and since they don’t make sense, people will ignore them. I suspect the US is headed toward a round of civil disobedience, too, to pushback against the sometimes-draconian measures pushed by governors who then do the opposite of what they preach.
Alex, see my post above for a fuller explanation, but the daily case rate has gone from climbing through 50,000 and topping at 86,000… to a low 4,800 and average now around 9000. It does work. It does make sense. Are they arbitrary regarding their particularities place to place and country to country. Yes. But here, people are not ignoring it. Like everywhere, they stretch the rules. So what. The goal has been achieved, very quickly, and virtually painlessly.
The daily case rate has gone up because the case rate for respiratory viruses always goes up when the weather turns colder. This increase was wholly predictable, not shocking.
The goal has been achieved, very quickly, and virtually painlessly.
The millions forced into unemployment, those concerned about rents and mortgages, the business owners struggling to make do with capacity restrictions, etc etc, may disagree with you. All of which ignores that the whole point of lockdowns is to spread infections over a longer time, not to prevent them.
Ok… so to your first point, why does the case rate go up when the weather turns colder? Could it be because when people are indoors the rate of reinfection goes up? Gee… who knew. However, in spite of that, while it’s definitely getting colder here in France, THE CASE RATE HAS FALLEN 95%. You think that’s luck, as Bruno, above, appears to believe? It’s the lockdown.
Re your second point, in a civilized society where the vast majority of people follow the rules and they have decent leadership, it’s very easy to organize a lockdown that includes financial supports for affected businesses. That’s what’s happening here, instead of the US model, where there is no leadership, great division leading massive non-compliance… and the financial support that was used unfortunately has now expired because of the above; poor leadership and non-compliance. Just throwing good money away.
Lastly, as shown in China and New Zealand and Australia, the point of the lockdown is to ELIMINATE the virus. You only hope for slow-down when compliance is partial… and we have the US as a prime example.
eh ben, non. https://capx.co/competent-g…
You might eliminate it in NZ because it’s more isolated than Spitzbergen. And Oz is just going into Summer, their respiratory bug season is done. I suspect Argentina thought they were well on the way to elimination back in April… They were admiring articles in the Guardian about it, their mortality rate has now exceeded that of Brazil. As Anders Tegnel said back in March “You can’t stop this”.
“virtually painlessly”. Words of similar effect spoken by those whose lives have not been affected financially by these draconian measures.
France is not the only country fed up with restrictions!
I never thought I’d say this, but France is saying what we’re all thinking!
Brilliant, this article is good news, let Macron and the lunatics that surround him go f* themselves
I live part of my time in the Charente too, close to the Vichy line. The French are very poor in this dept, apparently young people are leaving as soon as they are able as there is so little work or prospect of work,
They are a tough lot, many like voting NF, but they do seem obsessed with masks, I saw one local driving his tractor wearing one. I fear the message about protecting others has not got through.
Most bars had gone bust long before Covid came along, it’s certainly not helping the few still left.
It’s grim,
First post making sense in this load of dribble.
What else would you expect from a people who light up under every no smoking sign they can find as a big F you to the authorities who put them up..
Nice brochette of anglo-saxon expat clichés here sir
The Italians are the same. They find some clever and inventive ways around the stumbling blocks… necessity is the mother of invention. The British do it too – while maintaining the outward appearance of conformity. They don’t quite celebrate it in the way the French & Italians do with a smile and a wink… In France and Italy, the neighbours are much less of a danger.
Let’s all just appreciate the hashtag #artisanapoil
Not nearly as entertaining as the article above, however there is some speaking out in the U.S. as evidenced in this Newsweek article: “Over 6,000 Scientists Sign ‘Anti-Lockdown’ Petition Saying It’s Causing ‘Irreparable Damage” By Matthew Impelli On 10/7/20
https://preview.tinyurl.com… (goes to Newsweek)
Dry reading, though points are clearly made.
In the United States, laws are collected from each state and organized in U.S. Code. However muddy, we love rules too! While link hopping between sections of U.S. Code, I found a thought provoking read from the United Nations regarding Human Capital.
https://unstats.un.org/unsd…
Still reading, though a big picture is appearing in which those of us who are unable, or do not care, to maintain good health are less than worthy commodities in the realm of Human Capital as discussed in the pdf document linked above. That is not a direct statement, rather the impression left. Sharing this here because I am wondering what others think, specific to COVID19 lockdowns.
Allez l’équipe? (courtesy of Google Translate)
Hmmm… yes, a nice anecdote, but what M. Lewis-Stempel forgets in the midst of his tale is that at the time Macron announced the lockdown, the number of daily covid cases in France was climbing nearly vertically, topping out 10 days later at an astronomical 88,790 cases in one day. To put that number in perspective, that per capita rate would equal approximately 440,000 cases per day in the US, nearly 21/2 times higher than anything yet seen in the ‘out of control’ US. Since that date, Nov. 7, and obviously due to the ‘lockdown’, there has been a very steep fall in cases, now averaging about 10,000 cases per day and falling.
So, while it’s certainly true that this lockdown isn’t nearly as severe as the spring lockdown was… it’s working as well or better. In spite of the authors story of the sport of defiance due to the unbreakable and unbending will of the French people and their resistance to change, my own view, also as a resident of France, that they are, stretching the rules or not, honoring the spirit if not the precise letter of the lockdown. Yes, they go farther than allowed. Yes, they move generally at will through their towns and regions. However… and again… IT’S WORKING!
The data is in, and it is compelling to not say overwhelming. The lockdown works, and it works because while we do go generally where we like when we like, we don’t go to the social mixing businesses, the bars, the night clubs, the coffee shops and the restaurants… because they’re closed. We all wear masks when out of our homes… and those two things make all the difference. Schools open, nearly all businesses open.
Due respect to the author, but I’m sure that M. Macron knows the French better than most… and designed the system to succeed precisely by taking into account the human condition of French culture. Say what you will, but there is no French equivalent of the Trumpist conspiratorial anti-vax anti-mask stolen-election sub-culture found in the US. They may, like all peoples, demonstrate their petty resistance to authorities… but the results of the lockdown say that the great swath of France is rational and understands and honors the spirit of the laws as they come down.
Lockdown works ? What a laugh. The Marseilles Marins Pompiers as the fire fighters are called there, analysed the sewage waters. The amount of virus was already heading south just at the start of the lockdown.
An epidemic runs a course of its own and lockdown or not doesn’t change that. Good scientists are honest enough to tell that even they do not understand why it is so…..but it is.
SARS was a good example….it came…..and just went …
I witnessed the Swedish lockdown in the spring. I was there 3 months……the beauty of it is they have done all along what the stupid French government seems to discover today after having made people totally crazy and sent the economy into a deadly spin.
Well, it’s always good to know the recent results are just the result of a lucky guess by Macron, hey? They do say it’s better to be lucky than smart. Or, Bruno, as another idiot once said, “One day it’ll just disappear.” … but that was 250,000 US covid deaths ago.
Meanwhile, this about your Marseilles pompiers: “The (national) testing network, named Obepine, should be operational through France and able to provide national data by mid-December. For now, it has confirmed it’s records show an improvement in the health situation since confinement”… in other words, exactly what one would have expected to find, and not at all what you allege. But then, you probably don’t even believe that 267,000 have died of Covid in the US, right? It’s all a vast conspiracy….and the proof is that there’s no proof. That’s how good they are!!
As to why it disappears? Actually, what good scientists will tell you that it ONLY disappears when it can no longer reinfect, either due to herd immunity or isolation, as in the case of SARS. Any organism that doesn’t reproduce, dies. That’s they way they stop it all over the world. That’s how China shuts it down… but you, despite the facts, prefer to think lockdowns don’t work. You, Bruno, are the problem.
Thank you Sidney for your calm rebuttal of the le penseur Bruno who thinks France is a dump. Perhaps, when his triumphant 2020 European Tour is over he will return to France and enjoy the less than perfect but essentially egalitarian country and see that, like all countries, the economy has suffered but that people have not gone ‘totally crazy’. .
It’s far too early to say conclusively that the lockdown is working, and to say that it’s passed virtually painlessly as you do in your above comment is incorrect.
(par exemple : https://www.lemonde.fr/plan…
or : https://www.rtve.es/noticia… )
There certainly is an equivalent to the sub-culture you have mentioned, just not American in style.
Has been noted since last June (2019) that the French are perhaps the most anti-vaxx in the world. And has been noted again more recently that the french are the most anti-vax in europe, a trend particularly pronounced amongst the youth.
( here: https://www.latribune.fr/ec…
and here: https://www.lequotidiendume… )
This would certainly fit in with an anti-multinational, pro-organically sourced culture surrounding agriculture and cosmetics – the existence of which can’t be denied. With the Yellow Vests and les intégristes to boot. Whether they are THE most, I wouldn’t hold to that but this is far from the ‘rational’ France you portray.
Fact is no one strategy has clearly worked: countries with severe lockdown’s have suffered equally as badly as those without. Question seems to be more of competent governance. For the most part Western Europe has fared terribly.
Other readings :
https://www.nejm.org/doi/fu…
https://capx.co/competent-g…