Category Archives: Coronavirus

Fascists on the rampage – then and now

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Thousands of far-right fanatics, many of them armed, gather in front of the seat of government, whipped-up by fake news and racist propaganda, convinced that the political elite is mired in corruption. They battle with the police, who open fire. At least 15 demonstrators and one police officer are killed and about 2,000 people are injured. One important far-right leader marches his troops away from the battle and the rest are forced to retreat.

You may notice that this is not what happened in Washington on Wednesday.

It is a very brief summary of events in Paris on 6 February 1934 when far-right groups collectively known as les ligues (let’s leave aside the debate of how fascist they were) demonstrated against a government that had been hit by a series of corruption scandals and had decided to transfer the right-wing prefect of police, Jean Chiappe, to Morocco.

Corruption, anti-Semitism, xenophobia

Over the preceding weeks, there had been a series of right-wing demonstrations against corruption, fuelled by anti-Semitism and other forms of xenophobia, as well as another French right-wing hobby-horse, anti-freemasonry.  

Veterans’ groups aligned with the Communist Party, at the time still tied to the third period line that dubbed social-democrats “social-fascists”, had also organised their own simultaneous protests.

Far-right demonstrators face police on Paris’s Place de la Concorde

This all culminated in the 6 February demonstrations, during which thousands of far-right street-fighters assembled in various parts of Paris, a large number of them in front of the National Assembly. Many were carrying projectiles, fireworks or fire-arms, as well as ball-bearings to throw under the hooves police horses or poles with razor blades attached to cut their tendons.

Unlike the US authorities, the French government pulled out the police in force. Then as now, nobody would accuse French cops of being woolly-minded liberals but, having already suffered the attentions of the right-wing militias on previous protests, they opened fire in response to explosions that may or may not have been shots, with the results noted above.

The contrast with the failure to mobilise adequate defence for the Capitol and the lack of the police’s customary brio when it comes to crowd control is obvious. Then again, the sitting French president had not incited the mob to demonstrate.

The riot inspired an immediate debate as to whether there had been at attempted putsch. In both cases, the insurgents don’t seem to have had a coherent plan and didn’t know what to do once they had put thousands on the streets, or in the American case, in the seat of government.

Left unites against fascism

So what happened after the 1934 riot?

Its immediate result was a shift to the right in government, which led to the first appearance of Marshall Philippe Pétain in a ministerial position. (According to General Bornet, he revoked the honour awarded to garde mobile who was killed during the riot and the medal was removed from the officer’s coffin in front of his family as they attended his funeral.)

But, coup attempt or not, the presence of thousands of armed far-right activists on the streets shocked the left into action.

The French Communist Party joined the Socialist Party (SFIO) in demonstrations and strikes against fascism and was instrumental in persuading the Communist International to ditch the third period’s sectarianism.

That in turn led to the 1936 election of the popular front government, led by the SFIO with the bourgeois Radical Socialists holding ministerial posts and the Communists supporting from outside.

The popular front government is still remembered for important reforms – the introduction of the first paid holidays and unemployment pay, the reduction of the working week from 48 hours to 40, and the nationalisation of the rail network and other important industries, although it was a massive strike movement that forced this radical turn.

The bad news is that it failed in its initial primary aim, that of preventing fascism.

A significant number of members of the 200 families who notoriously controlled the French economy at the time – the Michelins, Renaults, Cotys, Taittingers (you’ll notice that these names are still around) – continued to finance the far right, sponsoring anti-Semitism, coup plots and reactionary conspiracy theories as an ideological bulwark against the expropriation of their wealth.

They chose Pétain and collaboration with the Nazis when it came to the national humiliation of 1940. And, while a few of the far right took their patriotism seriously and joined the resistance, many of the ligues’ members ended up in the Vichy government’s militias, in the editorial chairs of collaborationist papers or in important political positions.

Post-Trump Republicans and the modern militias

The US today is clearly not the same as France in the 30s.

Trump is on his way out of office and the violent attempts to prevent his departure have fizzled out.

But, despite all the talk of “moderate” Republicans being forced to distance themselves from him, he has pushed his party even further to the right. Despite all the racism, vulgarity, narcissism and contempt for democratic institutions, the mainstream Republican voter cast his or her ballot for Trump. To really build a worthwhile momentum, the ambitious careerist has to fire up the crazies with just those attributes that shock the rest of us so that is the path many Republicans seem likely to follow over the next few years.

Although the spectre of Bolshevism may not be obviously haunting the West, the US and Europe have entered an era of economic, social, demographic and ideological turmoil. Capitalism is being called into question, especially by young people, in a way it has not been since long before the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Meanwhile, capital is increasingly addicted to short-term gains, emptying businesses’ coffers to pay out dividends and enormous salaries to top bosses. Many of the wealthy are deeply committed to defending their right to amass ever vaster fortunes, especially in the US where a kind of neo-Calvinism preaches that the rich are rich because they deserve to be so.

This is now the Republicans’ creed. Combined with white suprematism and a load of other ideological junk, it is the dogma of the Proud Boys and other modern-day ligues and the lumpen bourgeoisie will continue to sponsor them.

Nobody but an idiot would expect the Biden presidency to come up with any reforms as significant as those of the French Popular Front. That means it will be an even less reliable bulwark against the right, once they have caught their breath and launched new political offensives.

Polarisation, turmoil, confusion lie ahead of us. The looming climate catastrophe means that the long-term stakes are even higher than in the 1930s, while those who oppose the solutions remain as ruthless as ever. Let’s hope we have the courage and the means to face them down.

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Police brutality in France – it’s not that new

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The French police are the subject of much controversy these days. They have always faced a certain amount of opposition, sometimes of an extremely radical nature. Here’s an example from 110 years ago.

Jean-Jacques Liabeuf fights with the police, as reported in a contemporary newspaper

In 1910 a cobbler called Jean-Jacques Liabeuf went on a bar-crawl near Les Halles, then the site of the markets that kept Paris supplied with food. At his last port of call, just before 8.00am, Liabeuf brandished a knife with a 20-centimetre-long blade and announced that he was going to “rub out” at least two cops that day.

The police were duly called and two officers grabbed him as he left the establishment.

But they screamed with pain and let go of their target, who had wrapped leather sleeves packed with nails around his arms, concealing them beneath the cape he was wearing.

The weapons Liabeuf was carrying Source: Wikipedia

He than ran off to a neighbouring building, pursued by the police officers. There he stabbed one of them, Célestin Deray, eight times, drew a pistol and shot him in the chest and the stomach.  He stabbed the other, Constable Fournès, in the throat, also injuring three other cops who arrived before being himself stabbed with a sabre and taken to hospital. A crowd of onlookers had formed and tried to lynch him.

Deray died from his wounds.

Framed as a pimp

I came across this story on a fascinating Facebook page devoted to recounting aspects of the history of Paris through images.

A police photo of Jean-Jacques Liabeuf

Predictably, given the debate currently raging about law and order, the post inspired a number of comments along the lines of “People were already attacking law enforcement then”.

But another reader gave us an idea why Liabeuf was not too enamoured of the constabulary.

Born in Saint Etienne, he had come to the capital after serving several short prison sentences and being sent to fight in France’s colonial adventures in Africa.

In Paris he met and fell in love with Alexandrine Pigeon, a prostitute whose pimp, Gaston, was a police informer.

He was arrested, along with Alexandrine, by two members of the anti-prostitution police and after a trial which his lawyer did not bother to attend – he sent a message to the court that he was busy eating his lunch – jailed for three months for living off immoral earnings.

At the end of his sentence, Liabeuf breached an order not to return to Paris, was arrested and served another month in jail.

It was after that sentence that he came to Paris again, convinced that he had been fitted up and determined to avenge himself on the cops who had sent him down. He did not find them and Deray and Fournès paid the price of protecting their colleagues.

Riot in the shadow of the guillotine

Unsurprisingly, Liabeuf was condemned to death. But, at a time when police were used against striking furniture-makers and railworkers, his case became a cause célèbre for the French left, with radical papers pointing to the injustice of his previous conviction and the apparent corruption of the officers who arrested him.

The funeral of anarchist Henri Cler, killed during a clash with police during a furniture-makers’ strike in 1910

President Armand Fallières having rejected a petition calling for Liabeuf’s pardon, a crowd of about 10,000 – including Lenin, Picasso and French socialist leader Jean Jaurès – turned out on the morning he was due to be guillotined.

A number of demonstrators were arrested or injured in clashes with the police and, after an anarchist shot a cop while trying to free Liabeuf to the cheers of the crowd, the prefect sent in the cavalry, with sabres drawn. The wounded police officer, part of a brigade specially devoted to tracking anarchists, later died.

So the police were not particularly popular with those sections of the population most likely to be on the receiving end of their attentions, often perceived as using arbitrary violence in defence of an unjust social order.

Police station attacked

That’s also true today.

The only police station in Champigny-sur-Marne, where I live, has been attacked three times, twice this year and nationwide the number of attacks on police rose 14% in the first nine months of this year.

https://twitter.com/LeCapricieux94/status/1315050472810708994?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1315050472810708994%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.francetvinfo.fr%2Ffaits-divers%2Fpolice%2Fchampigny-sur-marne-un-commissariat-attaque-dans-la-nuit-par-une-quarantaine-de-personnes_4137345.html

Some 96 officers are reported to have been injured at a demonstration against the government’s proposed security law last Saturday.

But, then again, so were a number of demonstrators and journalists at that protest and at a violent police raid on an improvised migrants’ camp last Tuesday. They have not received a phone call from Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin, who says he has spoken to most of the injured cops.

And so was Michel Zecler, a black music producer, beaten and racially insulted by police who followed him into his studio in Paris last week, apparently with the intention of fining him for failing to wear an anti-Covid mask.

Michel Zecler after his encounter with police in Paris

And so were about 30 people who lost either an eye or a hand during the Gilets jaunes demonstrations in 2018, nor the demonstrators clubbed or teargassed on protests against changes to labour law in 2016, not to mention an ever-growing number of banlieue residents, usually belonging to racial minorities, who have been insulted, chased or beaten by the forces of the law.

Many of these assaults came to light because they were filmed, a procedure the government, under pressure from right-wing police unions, means to make more difficult with the controversial article 24 of its security bill.

Here’s an illustration of why that is a bad idea.

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Coronavirus diary day 87 – France’s history of racist policing, toppling statues and doves in Afghanistan

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Worldwide protests over the murder of George Floyd have given a new boost to campaigns against police brutality and racism in France. Ministers have promised action, while insisting that “France is not the United States”. But official France is still in denial over the nature and extent of the phenomenon.

In 1986 I came to France to take part in the massive marches that followed the death of Malik Oussekine, a student of Algerian origin who was killed by police during demonstrations against a right-wing government’s proposed education reform.

It was December and I remember the cold, the crowds and sleeping in a small flat in Belleville along with a crowd of other agitators from various European countries, there, like me, to convert the French to our view of how to fight racism and change the world. Our efforts were not rewarded with great success.

One night a group of us were arrested by cops on motorbikes, one of whom sported a very striking moustachewith waxed points and was particularly indignant about our attempt to flypost the walls of a bank.

We spent most of the night at the commissariat, pretending not to understand French, which wasn’t that far from the truth, and thus avoiding answering questions. The moustachioed cop was furious when his boss decided not to charge us and kicked us out onto the street, to find our way back to base as daylight broke on the boulevards.

The outrage that met Malik Oussekine’s death led to the education minister resigning and his education bill being dropped.

Two of the three cops who beat Oussekine, members of a motorbike squad like the ones who arrested us, were tried and found guilty of involuntary homicide. But they only received suspended sentences and, although disciplinary action was taken against both of them, one continued to work in the police force.

“After this parody of a trial … I have come to realise that in the country where I was born I will always be a second-class citizen,” Malik’s sister, Sarah, commented.

Shortly after I came to live in France, in 1993, a report appeared in the newspapers of a woman who spent the night in the cells after accusing a police officer of racism while he checked a young man’s identity papers.

A little later young black man died in detention in the police station near where I lived in Montmartre. There was a small protest march past the scene of his death but no great scandal.

Since then the deaths of youths from racial minorities have led to many protests and, on some occasions, riots, most notably in 2005 when the banlieue exploded nationwide after two teenagers were electrocuted while fleeing a police patrol.

Recently cops were caught on video racially abusing and maltreating an Egyptian migrant who had jumped in the river to escape their attentions. And the media have uncovered two Facebook groups where several thousand “guardians of the peace” shared racist and sexist comments, several revealing a certain amount of sexual insecurity and one coining the interesting slogan “Make Normandie Viking again”.

According to one study, 54% of police officers voted for Rassemblement National (formerly Front National) candidate Marine Le Pen in the second round of the 2017 presidential election.

This journalist’s tweet shows cops sporting far-right symbols while on duty.

France’s government-appointed rights defender, Jacques Toubon, a former right-wing justice minister who has taken his job far more seriously than many people expected him to, has called for records to be kept of identity checks by the police.

In a 2016 study his commission found that 80% of the blacks and Arabs interviewed were 20 times more likely to be checked than white people.

Toubon has just opened an investigation into the case of Gabriel, a 14-year-old Roma who claims to have sustained serious injuries to the left eye when he was kicked in the head after being detained for stealing a scooter.

Last month he delivered a report that found institutional racism in police treatment of a group of 18 youths, “black or Arab or pereceived as being so”, in a Paris district.

As he approaches the end of his term, he may wish to turn his attention to the case of four families in the Val-de-Marne town of Vitry-sur-Seine who have just filed complaints over the arbitrary arrest and racial abuse suffered by their 14-15-year-old sons last month. One of the boys hopes to become a police officer.

All of which would seem to imply that when mainstream-right politician Damien Abad denies there is institutional racism in the police force, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner accuses actress and singer Camélia Jordana of “shameful lies” when she says she doesn’t feel safe when faced with a cop or Prime Minister Edouard Philippe declares that the overwhelming majority of officers of the law are not racist, they do not have tremendous respect for empirical evidence.

Castaner this week responded to the latest protests against police brutality with a ban on chokeholds, an order that police oficers suspected of racism be suspended while an inquiry takes place, and a promise to make internal investigations more independent.

Despite Castaner’s assurance that “France is not the United States” and “there are no racist institutions or targeted violence”, that sent police unions into a lather of indignation, which ministers greeted with a frenzy of appeasement.

Maybe not all French coppers are bastards, though. A young participant in one of the Facebook groups complained that none of the women at his police station would go out with him if he revealed his fascist sympathies.

Much kerfuffle about the toppling of the statue of a Tory slave-trader in Bristol last weekend.

I seem to remember certain moments when knocking down statues was widely hailed as a Good Thing, in Iraq in 2003, for example, or in eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A statue of Saddam Hussein is toppled in Iraq in 2003

Read my account of Iraq after Saddam’s fall here.

Members of the French government have assured us that the statue of Colbert, the minister under Louis XIV who drew up the Code noire, the legal framework for slavery in French colonies, will remain in place.

In world virus news, over 1,000 doves are reported to have died in Mazar-e-Sharif, the north Afghan city that is home to a beautiful mosque where they nest on the roof.

Doves in front of the mosque in Mazar-e-Sharif Photo: Tony Cross

They have starved to death because lockdown has meant nobody is feeding them, as they were when I visited the city in 2009.

Lockdown has meant that some 30 doves die every day, according to the mosque’s imam Photo: Tony Cross

Legend has it that they flock there because the mosque was built at the site of the tomb of Ali, the prophet Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law. His body is said to have been put on a camel that walked to the city and then died there. Historians do not agree with this account.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 29,319, up 23 in 24 hours. 11,678 people are in hospital, down 283, with 933 patients in intensive care, down 22. 71,832 people have been discharged from hospital, 326 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 79 – Black lives matter in France, too

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Who’d have thought anything could push a global pandemic out of the lead story spot? Well, a nine-minute video of a US cop murdering a black man has and it’s sparked protests around the world. In Paris yesterday an estimated 20,000 people defied a ban on protests to link the killing to French police racism.

But stop! There’s none of that there here! Not according to Paris Préfet de Police Didier Lallement, who is concerned that such an accusation has hurt the feelings of his troops.

The Paris police force “is not violent, nor racist: it acts within the framework of the right to liberty for all”, he claimed in an email to the capital’s 27,500 cops.

The family of Adama Traoré beg to differ. They organised yesterday’s demo four years after his death in police custody.

Three official reports have cleared the three cops who pinned him to the ground. But a counter-inquiry commissioned by the family on Tuesday blamed their robust technique of detention.

Thanks to the family’s persistence, Traoré’s case has become a focus for “accusations of violence and racism, repeated endlessly by social networks and certain activist groups”, as Lallement puts it.

Regular deaths and injuries in the banlieue, along with videos of racial abuse and brutality, tend to bear those accusations out.

Some French people can get a little self-righteous about racism in the US. After all, wasn’t this the country where black GIs found welcome relief from the Jim Crow South at the end of World War II and where artists like Miles Davis and James Baldwin came to breathe freer creative air?

But they had the advantages of not being from former colonies or living on deprived estates in the banlieue.

“I realise that the Algerian is the nigger in Paris,” Baldwin commented after spending some time here.

Traoré’s family came to France from Mali, a former French colony in sub-Saharan Africa.

Back to the virus. Yesterday was the beginning of phase 2 of post-lockdown.

In Champigny the market had already opened, in a depleted form and the shoppers turned out, mostly wearing masks, and met up with friends

.

Some of the cafés had employed a flexible interpretation of the rules by offering drinks “to take away” under phase 1.

In Ile de France, which is the last orange for not-too-good area left in the country, they can now serve en terasse but not Inside.

Schoolkids and the un- or undereployed are sunning themselves on the banks of the Marne, or even on the river itself.

My afternoon walk took me to the former Pathé studios at Joinville-le-Pont, now a collection of workplaces, some apparently still linked to the film industry, and flats.

They were once frequented by Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Jean Renoir and other luminaries. They drank in the guingettes, the restaurants along the riverside, and added some glamour to this town on the outskirts of Paris.

Our late neighbour, Claude, was a house painter. He worked on the site once and told me they had conveyor belts going across it to transport the film and special double doors to prevent light entering the processing laboratories.

The 1946 film Les Portes de la Nuit was partly filmed there. This shot is a reconstruction of the overhead metro at La Chapelle in Paris, the set designed by Alexandre Trauner.

Trauner was a Hungarian who fled the far-right, anti-Semitic Horthy regime in 1929 and left a photographic record of the streets of Paris in the 1930s due to his research for his work. Here’s one of his preparatory sketches for another film, Le Jour se lève.


Asylum-seekers, eh?

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 28,940, 107 in 24 hours. 14,208 people are in hospital, down 260 yesterday, 1,253 patients are in intensive care, down 49, and 68,812 have been discharged, 372 in 24 hours.

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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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