Monthly Archives: May 2020

Coronavirus diary day 74 – France relaxes anti-Covid fight despite the spitters and litterbugs

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It will be back to nearly normal for most of France next Tuesday but Parisians will have to drink their coffees en terrasse and wait a while before they can go to the gym, the theatre or Disneyland. Meanwhile, the government suspects us of having squirreled away too much money during lockdown and wants us to spend it for the sake of the economy.

You wouldn’t think posters asking people not to throw masks, gloves and paper hankies on the ground during an epidemic would be necessary, would you?

“We protect you not the pavement”, poster in Champigny Photo: Tony Cross

But apparently some people can’t even make it to a rubbish bin just one step away.

Street scene, Saint Maur des Fossés Photo: Tony Cross

Then again, some people around here spit in the street. Not best practice.

Despite the health and safety delinquents’ best efforts, we seem to be making progress fighting the virus. The Ile-de-France region around Paris is out of the red and into the orange and the rest of the country is green for go, Prime Minister Edouard Philippe told us yesterday as he announced phase 2 of déconfinement.

Here are some of the measures he outlined:

  • Numbers in schools will be limited throughout the country, above all in the Paris region. Parents who have had enough of their kids during lockdown will be able to enjoy a certain liberty in the summer – colonies de vacances (holiday camps) can reopen.
  • Happy couples can trip to the mairie for civil marriages, although probably with a restricted number of guests. The number of people attending a funeral remains limited to 20.
  • Museums and art galleries will reopen throughout the country but visitors will have wear masks. There are some quite pretty patterns out on the street, mind, so perhaps it will add to the aesthetic experience.
  • Beaches and watersports centres will reopen. While theatres, amusement parks, gyms and swimming pools will be in business again in the green zone, they will remain closed until 22 June in the Paris region.
  • Restaurants and bars will reopen in the green zone but we will only be able to drink or dine out front in the Paris region.
  • Discos and casinos are “discouraged” until 21 June, which, given the news of new clusters among clubbers in South Korea, seems like a good idea.
  • Cinemas will remain closed until 22 June, the operators having insisted that they should all reopen at the same time.
  • Travel will be possible all over France,the 100km limit on journeys being abolished even for potentially toxic Parisians.
  • The controversial Stop-Covid tracking device will be open to voluntary subscription from 2 June. Some opposition parties believe it is a foot in the door for the surveillance state. The right-wing Républicains couldn’t agree among themselves and voted for in the lower house and against in the Senate. Macronist orators appealed to parliamentarians’ patriotism, boasting that they weren’t using apps made by Californian big-tech, like the Germans, but had commissioned a French version, like the Brits, the only other Europeans to have their own nukes, as one minister pointed out.

Spend! Spend! Spend! is today’s message from the government.

Consumer spending is down by a third and the authorities don’t approve.

Despite unemployment soaring to 20%, they believe there are 60 billion euros we would have spent, had we not been confined to our homes, stuffed under our collective mattress.

The call will be a disappointment to the celebs and scientists who signed an appeal to dial back on consumerism in the aftermath of the epidemic. Some of the signatories raised eyebrows, given that they do ads for companies like Lancôme (Juliette Binoche, Penelope Cruz), Dior (Marion Cotillard, Isabelle Adjani), Chanel (Vanessa Paradis), Armani (Cate Blanchett), Versace, H&M, Dolce & Gabbana (Madonna) or Kia and American Express (Robert de Niro).

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,662, 66 yesterday. 15,208 people are in hospital, down 472 in 24 hours, with 1,429 in intensive care, down 72. 67,191 patients have been discharged from hospital, 607 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 72 – War of the masks: Covid-19 weaponised in council election campaigns

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The River Marne from the Pont du Petit Parc between Joinville-le-Pont and Saint-Maur-des-Fossés Photo: Tony Cross

Afternoons on the river Marne are pretty busy these days – teenagers canoeing or sitting on the banks smoking dope, a young woman playing her mandolin while being filmed (I think that should be available on social media by now), fishermen, boules players, sunbathers and walkers, not all respecting social distances and not all wearing masks.

The market has been at the centre of a war of the masks this week.

It pitches the Communist Party (PCF) against the mainstream right’s candidate for mayor, Laurent Jeanne He hopes to dislodge the left in the second round of council elections, currently in a state of suffragium interruptum (I think I got the Latin right) due to the epidemic.

Last Friday, Jeanne, who is a regional councillor, was joined by a team of his supporters in handing out masks provided by the regional authority at the entrance to the market.

The PCF claims he told punters that he has taken the initiative because “the town council is doing nothing”. It has in fact distributed 70,000 masks – two per household – in our letterboxes, set up an improvised medical centre in a gym and distributed over 3,000 food parcels.

Jeanne denies uttering any such slander and claims that the mayor, Christian Fautré, ignored an invitation to join him on Friday’s distribution, preferring to hand out leaflets at another market.

The local opposition parties have accused Fautré and friends of hogging the anti-virus spotlight, rather than observing a local-level union sacré against the epidemic. That appears to be true and to have caused some dissent in the current majority’s ranks.

The left-wing list led by the PCF, which is fighting to keep hold of the mayor’s position, won 34.92% of the vote in the first round of local elections, while the right-wingers came out in front with 39.76%.

Which might explain why the battle for credit in the anti-Covid fight is so intense.

Renault is planning to lose 5,000 jobs by natural wastage, according to Le Figaro.

This is despite the government’s announcement of an aid package, which pushed up the company’s value on the Paris Bourse by 17% this morning.

An announcement that the carmaker, which was privatised in 1990 and is now 15% state-owned, aims to save two billion euros and close some plants in France prompted the Macron government to promise aid on condition that production is transferred to electric and hybrid cars and there is more production in Europe.

No mention of public transport.

Having suffered badly during lockdown, clothes shops have announced that more than 14,000 jobs could go.

French “growth” in the first quarter of 2020, Source: Insee

France’s economic activity is estimated to have slumped 21% during the Covid crisis, according to national statistics institute Insee. That’s actually an improvement on the 33% estimate on 7 May and Insee reports some recovery in companies’ morale, which hit rock bottom last month, but not in consumer confidence.

There has been some confusion over the national Covid-19 statistics, almost certainly because of the correction of inaccurate figures on deaths given by care homes.

But the general trend is good – fewer cases reported, less pressure on the hospitals and numbers in intensive care down.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,530, 73 in the past 24 hours. 16,264 people are in hospital, down 534, with 1,555 in intensive care, down 54. 65,879 patients have been discharged from hospital, 680 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 70 – Macron’s health reform consultation – don’t get your hopes up

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The government is to start a consultation on salvaging the health service this afternoon. It will be by videoconference, Coronavirus oblige. The choice of chair does not bode well for anyone hoping for revolutionary action.

“Healthworkers for a new health service”, a poster from May 1968

Ministers have dubbed the event the “Ségur de la santé”, puzzling at least one reader of Le Monde, who asked its journalists “What is a Ségur?”.

“Factories occupied”, a poster from May 68

The nickname is a reference to French political folklore. In 1968 De Gaulle’s ministers negotiated with union leaders to end the general strike that brought the country to a halt (sound familiar?). The meeting took place at the Labour Ministry in the rue de Grenelle, so were referred to by that name.

Since then governments who have wanted to give the impression they were launching some momentous initiative in consultation with the little people – the Sarkozy government’s emission of hot air on the  environment in 2007, for example – have referred to them as “Grenelles”, regardless of whether they took place in said street or not.

This time round some bright spark has got with the times and named the meeting after the address of the Health Ministry, avenue de Ségur, even though most of the participants will not actually be going there but e-intervening.

The meeting is to be chaired Nicole Notat, not a good sign that anything very radical will come out of it. Notat was leader of the CFDT union confederation from 1992 to 2002 and an enthusiastic practitioner of the strategy of ingratiating itself with employers and governments by undermining more militant action by other unions.

On the other hand, the mood in the hospitals appears to be potentially insurrectional, as Le Monde’s tweet of healthworkers carrying a banner calling for a “general dream” (it’s a play on words with the French word grève for strike) indicates:

Here a doctor accuses the government of torpedoing the negotiations by choosing Notat, failing to invite unions and trying to scrap the 35-hour week in exchange for pay rises:

The consultation starts at 3.30pm today and will last into July.

A slight reversal of the downward curve in hospital admissions took place yesterday. Seven more patients were admitted nationwide. The number in intensive care continues to decline and most experts seem to think a second wave unlikely. This week should be a decisive test of whether that is so.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,367, up 35 in 24 hours. 17,185 people are in hospital, up seven, with 1,655 in intensive care, down 10. 64,617 patients have been discharged, 70 yesterday.

This is day 70 of this diary, which you can celebrate as you wish. I am going to stop posting every day but will keep writing regularly, so watch this space (and tell your friends to do so too).

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Coronavirus diary day 69 – France tightens hydroxychloroquine rules after Lancet article

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France’s rules on using hydroxychloroquine are to change following the Lancet’s publication of two studies indicating that it can be dangerous when used to fight Covid-19.

Health Minister Olivier Véran has ordered national health officials to review the conditions for prescribing the drug, along with others mentioned in the studies.

The French rules were already quite restrictive, limiting its use to serious cases in hospitals and requiring the agreement of several doctors.

The move is a blow to the flamboyant Professor Didier Raoult but is unlikely to undermine his popularity in certain circles. In fact, it may even enhance it among the conspiracy-theory inclined.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump tweets on.

Local councillors in the 30,000 towns and villages where a party or coalition won a clear majority in the first round of elections were finally able to take their seats yesterday, two months after the poll.

A further 5,000, including Champigny, await the second round, now set for 28 June (virus permitting) to decide on a winner.

The handover usually takes five days but has been prolonged due to lockdown and other epidemic-induced complications. Apparently, there has been tension in some areas between outgoing administrations and those who will replace them.

Among the new mayors is Gérald Darmanin, who you might think has his hands with being the country’s finance minister.

He has been elected mayor of the northern French town of Tourcoing, a post he held between 2014 and 2017.

The 37-year-old minister-mayor appears to be something of a workaholic, or at least a positionaholic.

When he took up his post in Macron’s government, he was also a deputy mayor, a regional councillor and vice-president of the metropolitan area around Lille, which includes Tourcoing. He also represented the local authorities on 28 public and private-sector bodies.

After this omnipresence was revealed by l’Obs magazine, he resigned from the 28 jobs but held onto his municipal, regional and metropolitan seats, resigning from the latter in November 2018 after further press coverage.

There has been some controversy over the various incomes he received in the past. Today Darmanin, who came to Macronism from the mainstream right UMP/Républicains, says he will donate his mayoral salary to the Society for the Protection of Animals.

Accumulation of mandates is a habit French politicians have found difficult to kick. While aspiring to the padded seats of ministerial office, they want to keep a buttock in their local bases, which are indispensable to their careers and a useful fallback if they fall victim to the whims of presidents or voters.

Clearly it is not easy to fulfil all these functions with extreme conscientiousness – Darmanin was found to be to have attended 20% of the sessions of the regional council, while being paid 100% of his allowances.

Every time there’s an election in France, there’s a lot of tut-tutting about this situation and promises to phase out the practice. Last year Prime Minister Edouard Philippe said that his ministers would have to choose between a ministry or a mairie.

Darmanin said today that he has the government’s permission to do both jobs.

Philippe himself heads a list that faces a second-round showdown in Le Havre, the town he was mayor of before becoming prime minister. He has indicated that he will not be both mayor and prime minister. Culture Minister Franck Riester, who heads a list at Coulommiers, has made a similar commitment.

France’s Covid-19 death toll total will not be available until tomorrow because of the difficulty in obtaining figures from care homes during the holiday weekend. The rest of the figures show no sign of a second wave so far, with 17,178 people in hospital, down 205 in 24 hours, with 1,665 in intensive care, down 36. 64,547 patients have been discharged from hospital, 338 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 68 – Catholics, evangelicals, Trump and the virus

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Don’t put your faith in miracles – Rembrandt’s The Raising of Lazarus

Today is a long weekend in France, thanks to Thursday being the Feast of the Ascension, a public holiday in a secular country that still observes Christian festivals. After victory in a spat with the government, traditionalist Catholics will be able to celebrate in Church tomorrow. Muslims have been advised to celebrate Eid at home.

Five days ago, France’s Conseil d’Etat ordered the lifting of a ban on religious services within a week. The government has gone one better and scrapped it now, in time for Sunday mass, while reminding the faithful that they should still observe social distancing and other precautions against the spread of Covid-19.

The case was taken to the State Council by right-wing traditionalist Catholic organisations, whose adepts have accused France’s bishops of insufficient zeal in their attempts to overturn the decision.

Muslims, however, will not be going to mosque for prayers to mark Eid. The French Muslim Council, which yesterday announced that the end of Ramadan would be marked on Sunday, said it would abide by the government’s anti-epidemic advice not to organise events that would bring groups of people together.

Perhaps chastened by the role played by a megachurch in spreading the virus in eastern France, evangelicals have warned believers that their services are “at-risk events” and advised them not to hold baptisms and communal meals.

Religion is grist to the political-exploitation mill for Donald Trump, of course.

He has declared that he will order state governors to lift bans on religious assembly, a power that appears not to be vested in him by any worldly authority.

“In America we need more prayer, not less,” he said, ignoring as ever the lack of clinical evidence for his preferred methods for fending off plagues. It would be interesting to know how often Trump prays to any god other than Mammon, although such speculation does not seem to trouble his evangelical voters, at whom this latest sally seems to be aimed.

Questioned about it, White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany attempted to outdo her employer in spiteful fatuity by telling a press conference “ … boy, it’s interesting to be in a room that desperately wants to seem to see these churches and houses of worship stay closed”, the kind of remark that sorely tests one’s commitment to religious tolerance.

More on hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine: A study published in the Lancet concludes “Although generally safe when used for approved indications such as autoimmune disease or malaria, the safety and benefit of these treatment regimens are poorly evaluated in COVID-19.”

Since a Marseille-based sociologist whom I have enjoyed interviewing in the past declared that coverage of two recent studies that I cited shows that “French journalists don’t know either how to read or how to interpret a medical study”, I’ll just leave the link here.

France’s Covid-19 death toll has not been officially declared today, apparently because reliable figures are not available for care homes during the holiday weekend. 17,383 people are in hospital, down 393 yesterday, with 1,701 in intensive care, down 44. 64,209 patients have been discharged from hospital, 351 yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 67 – Back to market, with masks, gel and lots of plastic

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Some stalls missing but the charcuterie is there Photo: Tony Cross

Champigny market has reopened, with a restricted number of stalls, still tightly packed in some places. As a new Covid-19 cluster is noted in our region, the government has set a date for the  local council elections’ deciding round, which was postponed because of the epidemic, and domestic violence has risen but not feminicide, apparently.

Today I returned to shopping in the local market. It was closed during lockdown and has now reopened in a downsized form.

Hand gel dispensed at one end of the market Photo: Tony Cross

Entrance is limited by temporary barriers and at one end a council worker offers hand cleanser to shoppers as they enter. Strangely, this is not the case at the other entrances, although we are offered leaflets by trade unionists and masks by representatives of the regional council.

Epidemic-fighting rules mean a reduced number of traders, with no take-away cooked food – there’s usually a choice of Turkish, Vietnamese, Moroccan and Tunisian – and no clothes and hardware.

The alleys are still quite packed Photo: Tony Cross

That leaves meat, fish, fruit and vegetables, all surrounded by plastic, the stallholders wearing either masks or visors, which give them a slightly military aspect.

Despite the thinned ranks of traders, they keep to their usual spots, meaning that distancing is not easily observed in the narrow aisles. And some people seem to think that wearing a mask makes it unnecessary. Others appear to believe that a mask is some sort of talisman providing magical protection no matter where you put it, around your neck or just over your mouth, for example.

Queues not really spaced out Photo: Tony Cross

Lockdown must have been hard for the traders, even if they received some government bailout funds. One chap, of Algerian origin, I think, started an organic fruit and veg stall last December. The government’s grants are based on their contributions to the tradespeople’s social security system, so I believe he won’t have been eligible.

Nevertheless, they seemed to be in good form, the fishmongers yelling through the protective cloth, the cheesemonger boasting about the quality of his Cantal and the women on the offal stall asking how Mum is as she meticulously pruned the veal kidneys I bought.

A new cluster has been identified in our region, the Val-de-Marne, although not in a town near us.

Eight cases have been identified on a building site in Villeneuve-le-Roi, near Orly airport.

The second round of local elections will be held on 28 June, the government has announced, so long as the virus respects the democratic process.

The first round took place just before lockdown, leading to some criticism about the risk to public health, in particular to polling officials. A report has since claimed that it didn’t result in extra infections. Even if that’s true, it was a risky choice, made by Macron partly because of pressure from the largest opposition parties, apparently.

A local councillor told me a couple of week ago that he expected the whole process to be started all over again. “Some of the candidates are dead,” he pointed out.

The number of women murdered in France appears to have gone down during lockdown, according to Gender Equality Minister Marlène Schiappa. But the number of cases of domestic violence registered with the police has soared.

The number of feminicides reported went down to one every 4.2-4.4 days, compared one every 2.5-3.0 days, she said, while warning that the figure could be a result of underreporting.

But fears that confinement would lead to more violence in the home seem to have been justified. The number of legal complaints has risen 36%.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,215, with 83 in the past 24 hours. 17,583 people are in hospital, down 358, with 1,745 in intensive care, down 49. 63,858 patients have been discharged from hospital, 504 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 66 – Che’s special offer and what will the epidemic change?

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Che Guevara. You’ve bought the T-shirt, hung the poster on your wall (when you were a student, of course), collected the stamp, maybe even slept under the Che duvet cover, now you can see that saintly face displayed in Champigny town centre, sporting a protective mask and a pair of colourful glasses.

At first sight it looks like an inventive public health announcement. But wait, the slogan “Conseil, Hygiène, Emotion” (Advice, Hygiene, Emotion) – it’s cunningly designed for the purposes of the acronym but seems to have no more bearing on the fight against Covid-19 than on a call to insurrectionary action.

In fact, Che is offering us 30% off frames for our glasses in the opticians that looks onto Place Lénine (at least that’s appropriate). Hasta la vitoria siempre!

It remains to be seen whether this will prove as controversial as Champigny’s Pizzagate, when a picture of Lenin as a pizza chef was posted on a fast-food stand during a festival of street art last year.

That achieved media coverage after a far-right councillor demanded it be taken down, accusing the Communist-led council of brainwashing the schoolkids who had reproduced the image of “this grim character” (Lenin being the wrong kind of grim character for the Rassemblement National).  

Photo: Tony Cross

He didn’t complain about the pictures of Karl Marx and Rosa Luxemburg. Perhaps he judged them less grim. Or perhaps he didn’t recognise them.

Will revolution, or at least radical change, follow this crisis? After all, it has been compared to a war and war is the midwife of revolutions.

For the moment austerity has been ditched and there will presumably be some sort of pump-priming to reboot the economy.

Cities are taking some measures to ensure that pollution does not return to pre-lockdown measures and everybody’s talking about an eco-friendly future.

The epidemic has been a lesson in the need for a decent health service, state intervention and solidarity.

The French government is to hold a consultation on the future of health care and promised to end the “pauperisation” of healthworkers, a situation that could surely have come to their attention without a virus threatening to bring the system and its employees to their knees.

But plans are afoot to save the big polluters and, as for paying for the current epidemo-Keynesianism, it’s beginning to look as if it will be back to business as usual, if it is left to those in power to decide. French Finance Minister Bruno Le Maire has dismissed the proposal to bring back France’s wealth tax as “pure demagogy” and that seems to be the ruling-class consensus.

Previous wars, plagues and other crises have either sparked revolutions, strengthened the hand of labour, and/or given birth to the welfare state.

But it looks as if, in the gruesome logic of capitalism, not enough people will die this time and most of the deceased will be old, so no post-Black Death-style labour shortages or other reversals of power relations.

What conclusions the majority of people will draw and what they will be prepared to do about them remains to be seen.

If you scroll down to previous posts, you’ll see that France’s official death toll went down yesterday. Sadly, this is not thanks to 217 resurrections but because a group of care-homes adjusted the figures for Covid-19-related deaths downwards.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,132, 110 in the past 24 hours. 17,941 people are in hospital, down 527, with 1,794 in intensive care, down 100. 63,354 patients have been discharged from hospital, 791 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 65 – Now they order a billion masks!

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The French government is to order one billion masks from local manufacturers. To which the only possible reaction is, what took you so long?

Having told the general public that we didn’t need masks when the epidemic first hit, the government now declares itself worried that France is dependent on international suppliers.

There are four medium-sized companies producing 10 million masks a week locally at the moment but they are working at near full capacity.

The government wants production to rise to 50 million a week by the end of the year and says that will mean the country will be able to supply health professionals and patients who have Covid-19, although not the general public despite the fact that we are now urged to wear them to avoid the spread of the disease.

So the Finance Ministry has finally got round to requisitioning companies that have the capacity to produce this vital product – four of them. One, Brocéliande, which is owned by supermarket chain Intermarché, actually manufactured masks in the past but presumably stopped doing so when previous governments ran down the programmes launched during the bird flu epidemic.

Macron yesterday told BFMTV that the country never ran out of masks and people only thought that was the case because of “an error of communication”.

There were shortages, he admitted, but “Let’s collectively be honest enough to admit that in March, and even more so in February or January, nobody was talking about masks and we would never have thought we would have been forced to restrict their distribution to healthworkers.”

Which isn’t the way everybody remembers it.

In a victory for trade unions, Amazon has given up fighting court orders to tighten up anti-virus measures in consultation with workers’ representatives and reopened its warehouses in France.

With Europe’s car industry hard-hit by anti-virus lockdowns, Renault has announced a plan to save two billion euros, which will involve closing three small factories and “restructuring” or closing Flins, which employs 2,600 workers, according to Le Canard Enchaîné.

There’s a lot of talk about not returning to pre-virus levels of pollution, which would mean keeping the demand for new cars down, not to mention reducing air travel and other super-polluters.

To avoid an anti-green backlash, it’s vital to guarantee income to laid-off workers and plan centrally to provide jobs in ecologically friendly industry.

France now has nine different political groups in parliament. A two-party system it ain’t.

The new group has been formed by 17 MPs who have left Macron’s LREM, having apparently just realised that the millionaire former banker and budget-balancing economy minister lacks a certain commitment when it comes to social and ecological matters.

Macron’s 2017 presidential bid put an end to the dominance of the centrist Socialists and mainstream right in its successive incarnations. But even before that the country had a proliferation of small parties, largely because of the electoral system.

Most members of the smaller parties would have found a home in larger bodies in the UK or the US but leading a small party can be a politically profitable affair. You can usually bag a ministry or two when a government of your general political persuasion is formed (not to mention the considerable wealth the Le Pen family has accrued by establishing dominance in the hate market).

The latest mini-split deprives LREM of its absolute majority in parliament but Macron will be able to rely on the support of François Bayrou’s Modem and other liberal flotsam and jetsam. On top of which, the new group is not actually declaring itself to be part of the opposition but rather “independent”, so no big problems for the president there.

Encouraging signs in the statistics since lockdown ended, with the death toll, admissions to hospitals and numbers in intensive care all down. But experts say it is too early to judge whether the trend will continue.

Green = Hospital discharges, Yellow = In hospital, Red = deaths, Orange = In intensive care
Source: Mapthenews

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,022, 217 in the last 24 hours. 18,486 patients are in hospital, down 547, with 1,894 in intensive care, down 104. 62,563 people have been discharged from hospital, 835 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 64 – Forest bathing and religious assembly in an epidemic

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I went walking in the woods. For the first time since lockdown started.

Frogs croaked in the ponds, the sun dappled the ground and I couldn’t believe how loud the birdsong was.

The Japanese have a phrase – shinrin-yoku (forest bathing) – for going to nature recharge your batteries (to use a very unnatural metaphor). It works.

I was not alone. There was a group of pensioner-ramblers, some teenagers doing exercises by their car (the pensioners applauded them), families, groups of friends and cyclists – more people than usual on a weekday, perhaps because people want to stretch their legs and breathe the air of the woods after two months’ lockdown. And perhaps because many workers are still laid off or have lost their jobs, allowing them the small compensation of time to enjoy the natural world.

The forest, the Forêt de Notre Dame, is easy to get to from the towns that sprawl along the main road out of Paris to the east.

On sunny weekends, lockdown permitting, families come from the housing estates and residential streets to picnic on the grass in front of the Château des Marmousets. Smoke from barbecues grilling meat and veg for meals in French, Portuguese, Antillais and north African styles floats over a pond and a paddock for horses.

 Adventurous visitors can visit an 18th-century ice-house sunk into the earth behind the château.

The very urban shopping centre I visited on my way back was also busier than usual. Queues in front of a games store and more shoppers than usual in the organic supermarket I went to. No photo of this. I had my hands full of fruit and veg.

The Conseil d’état has overruled the government’s ban on services in places of worship during the state of emergency, judging it “disproportionate” and a “serious and manifestly illegal” violation of religious freedom.

The case was brought to the council by a number of Catholic groups, including far-right organisations that were active in the campaign against gay marriage. They run a permanent campaign to prove that it is they, not Muslims, who are victims of discrimination due to secular and Islamic “Cathopobia”.

Some Catholics took particular offence at Interior Minister Christophe Castaner’s remark that one can pray on one’s own. The Conseil d’état agreed with them, declaring collective worship an essential part of religious freedom.

Protestants, Jews, Muslims and other religious persuasions have gone along with the government’s guidelines during the crisis.

So Catholics will be able to celebrate Pentecost in groups, although not in such large assemblies as the evangelical service that was party responsible for Covid-19’s virulence in the east of the country. The ban on assemblies of more than 10 people rests in place and was mentioned in the council’s ruling.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 28,239, 131 yesterday. 19,025 people are in hospital, down 346 in the past 24 hours, with 1,998 in intensive care, down 89. 61,728 patients have been discharged from hospital, 515 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 63 – Schools, slaughterhouses and worrying about America

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As more French pupils go back to school this Monday, 70 new cases of Covid-19 have been identified in infant schools, which partially reopened last week. Several schools, in various parts of the country, have had to close again.

Education Minister Jean-Michel Blanquer says the kids probably caught the virus before returning to school on 11 May and insists that the closures show that “we are strict”.

Collèges, whose pupils are aged between 11 and 15, partially reopen today in green zones of low infection rates.

Of the 25 clusters found last week, some in green zones, two large ones are in slaughterhouses, reinforcing international concern that abattoirs are particularly prone to infection.

More than 100 workers have tested positive – 63 in a slaughterhouse in Brittany, 34 in another near Orléans.

More cases may be found in the latter, since the 400 employees are to be tested today and tomorrow. Officials say that the required precautions – hand gel, temperature taken on entry – seem to have been observed.

There have been a number of cases in meat-packing plants in the US and Germany, leading to concerns that they are particularly vulnerable to the virus.

The authorities in the two French regions have launched investigations.

In general the signs a week after lockdown are relatively good.

Although the number of deaths went over 28,000 on Sunday, there have been no more than 700 new cases recorded on any given day, way below the 3,000 that Prime Minister Edouard Phlippe said would lead to him confining us to our homes again.

The number of people infected by a carrier is 0.6, below the one per carrier that indicates epidemic, and testing has become more widespread over the last week with only 2% proving positive.

But the virus’s incubation period is seven to 14 days, so the experts say we have to wait a week before breathing a sigh of relief (through our face-masks, of course).

Is anybody else worried about a Trump coup after the US presidential election?

Here’s the scenario: Assuming the election isn’t called off because of a second wave of Covid-19 and assuming Biden wins, despite being a terrible candidate and despite the possibility that the economy will pick up if the virus subsides, will Trump accept the result?

Isn’t he likely to declare there was fraud and that he actually won? Neither he nor his hard-core supporters are constrained by the requirement of proof for an assertion they want to believe, so hundreds of thousands of hard-right fanatics could be mobilised to support his claim.

As we have seen in the anti-lockdown demos, those die-hards come largely from the enraged petite bourgeoisie, the classic base of fascist movements, with the all-American ideology of an SUV-driving Calvinist elect, entitled to unlimited consumption, but convinced of their own victimhood.

Some of them are armed and able to march into seats of government unhindered.

What would the Democrats do if they did so across the country in the aftermath of the election results?

What would the police and the army do? Would generals and police chiefs order the dispersal of these militias, using arms if necessary?

Would the ranks obey those orders if they came? Would they split more or less on racial lines?

So what would happen? Civil war? A coup, followed by pogroms and purges?                                                                                                                                       

The US is showing the symptoms of an empire in decline. But none of its leaders show any sign of accepting the loss of world hegemony, Trump least of all. How would he face up to China’s rise if he returned to power?

Back to France. The official Covid-19 death toll now stands at 28,108, 483 in the past 24 hours. 19,361 people are in hospital, 71 down yesterday, and 2,087 in intensive care, down 45. 61,213 people have been discharged from hospital, 147 yesterday.

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