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).
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.
