Tag Archives: Emmanuel Macron

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 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 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 54 – Why is France’s lockdown ending now?

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“Save lives, stay at home,” the government pleads. But will we?

Why is France ending lockdown on Monday? Even if hospital admissions and cases in intensive care are going down, the virus is still very much out there. People in power are antsy about the economy but the government is also clearly worried that confinement cannot be enforced much longer.

“They said we were an undisciplined people,” Emmanuel Macron said in his televised address in mid-April, without specifying who “they” were – probably the Anglo-Saxons. He went on to congratulate the nation for respecting rules that are “among the strictest ever imposed on our people in a time of peace”.

But that was over nearly a month ago and public patience has worn thin since.

Approval of Macron’s handling of the crisis slumped in April, from 51% to 43%. Meanwhile, the approval ratings of Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe, are now higher than the president’s, down just two points to 46%.

That’s apparently led to tensions in what the media calls the “executive couple”, with reports that a reshuffle may be in the offing. There are rumours that Philippe has been putting out feelers about taking back his old job of mayor of Le Havre.

By Monday the French will have managed 55 days of lockdown, not as long as Italy and Spain, which were harder hit by the virus, but a long time, all the same.

I can see the signs of impatience in my neighbours – Marianne says she desperately wants to go to Paris, speculates that as many people may die from the effects of lockdown as from the virus, says it’s the government’s fault for not having enough masks and tests; Philippe stops anyone he can to chat, especially if they’re female, and clears the leaves in front of other neighbours’ doors; the rate of, technically lockdown-breaking, visits by families and friends has gone up.

You can’t enforce these measures without public consent and that is seeping away, as the intelligence services are probably telling a government whose authority has been undermined by its lies and U-turns over key aspects of the fight against the epidemic.

No nuance here: the deconfinement map

Poor old Hauts de France, the region in the north-east of the country that was classed orange, ie getting better, on the Coronavirus map earlier this week. But that nuance has disappeared when it comes to deconfinement.

So far as the post-lockdown regime is concerned, there will only be red and green and on 11 May Hauts de France will be red, in the naughty corner with ultra-infected Ile de France, Grand Est and Bourgogne-France Comté.

Testing and tracing are the new watchwords, and not before time.

The government promises to carry out 700,000 tests a week, aiming to identify 75% of cases, including asymptomatic ones.

Infected people and their families will be told to isolate, either at home or in hotels requisitioned for the purpose.

Doctors and other medical professionals will be responsible for finding out who they have been in contact with – there was talk of a bonus for doing that but MPs scrapped that idea. Specially established brigades will phone contacts, tell them to self-isolate and sometimes test them.

The definition of close contact will probably be someone who has been within a metre of an infected person without wearing a mask, according to reports.

The minister responsible for IT, Cédric O hopes the controversial StopCovid app will be ready in June.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 26,230, with 243 dying in the last 24 hours. 22,724 people are in hospital, down 484, and 2,868 are in intensive care, down 93. 55,782 people have been discharged from hospital, 755 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 44 – France’s colour-coded deconfinement plan seems a little vague

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So how lockdown ends will vary across the country after all. First Macron said it would be “decentralised”, then media reports said it would be the same everywhere, as befits France’s Jacobin tradition. But when Prime Minister Edouard Philippe took the stand to unveil the déconfinement plan yesterday, he said it would be prudent, staggered and differ according to how badly hit your area has been.

There are to be red (badly hit) and green (little affected) départements. Which is which will be decided on 7 May, four days before lockdown is lifted.

There can be no doubt that the Paris region, Ile de France, will be red, since it has been worst hit by the virus, followed by the Grande Est, which includes Alsace and Lorraine. Since Ile de France produces 30% of national wealth, that’s bad news for hopes of economic recovery.

Raphaël, the local council employee who phones to check on Mum’s health, said that he and his colleagues spent yesterday drawing up plans for lockdown end, only to find that their efforts may have been wasted because of the regional variation.

On what this actually means, Philippe was a little short on specifics. Secondary schools will be slower to reopen in red areas, it seems, and parks and gardens will remain closed. Face masks will probably be obligatory on public transport and using the network during rush hour will probably limited to passengers going to work, who will probably have to be able to prove that is what they are doing to inspectors.

At a national level, working from home will be encouraged, older people leaving home will be discouraged and the authorisation slip allowing you to leave home will no longer be needed, unless you are over 100km away from your address, which is only allowed for urgent family or business reasons to stop the virus spreading.

There is supposed to be careful tracking of cases and those they have been in contact with, with a promise of 700,000 tests a week after 11 May – at last!

But the government chickened out of proposing its tracking app, which has proved controversial even among Macronists. That will be debated on a separate occasion.

Liberals in the US are hailing a journalist’s observation that the epidemic has now killed more Americans than died in the Vietnam War as a masterful put-down of Donald Trump.

The war was indeed traumatic for their country and the number of young men killed tragic, especially since many were either conscripted or forced into the military by economic circumstances. There were 58,220 of them, according to the US National Archives.

But aren’t we forgetting something here?  Estimates of Vietnamese deaths range from one million to over three million, not counting those killed in Cambodia and Laos. They seem to have been largely wiped from the US national memory.

This time round, Vietnam is generally held to have handled the virus well, with only 270 confirmed cases and no deaths, despite its proximity to China.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 23,660, 367 yesterday. 27,484 people are in hospital, a fall of 571 in 24 hours, with 4,387 in intensive care, down 221. 46,886 patients have been discharged from hospital, 1,373 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 41 – Tension at the top as France prepares to end lockdown

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Prime Minister Edouard Philippe will tell us on Tuesday how we are to be deconfined. We already have a fair idea, since the proposals of the government’s scientific advisers have been made public and, of course, we all now listen to the experts – as long as we’re not Donald Trump.

Except apparently the government didn’t accept their advice on reopening schools. The committee at first proposed keeping them closed until September but in a second opinion accepted the “political decision of a prudent and gradual reopening”, while suggesting that it should be voluntary and that learning at distance should be maintained where necessary.

It is not clear whether the government is most concerned about children’s education returning to normality or their parents being able to return to their workplaces. Maybe both, eh?

So far as those workplaces are concerned, the scientists want working from home to continue wherever it is feasible – that’s going to become more common anyway, now we’ve discovered how practical it can be, isn’t it? – and office hours to be staggered to reduce crowding on public transport, where we will all probably have to wear masks, social distancing being judged unviable by the Paris transport network.

The word “discrimination” having been uttered, there will be no compulsory extension of lockdown for the over-65s but, given the extra risk for older people, the experts advise them to observe a “strict and voluntary” stay-at-home policy.

Most shops and businesses will reopen on 11 May but not bars and restaurants or museums and other places where large numbers of people may gather, a category that seems to include parks and gardens.

Preparing the end of lockdown seems to have been a fractious business, so far as the government is concerned.

Macron having announced that all would be ready on 11 May, he did not take kindly to some of his ministers prevaricating, according to the Journal du Dimanche.

There has even been tension between Macron and Philippe, which is “unprecedented” according to the paper.

The president himself seems to have dropped the idea of regional variations and the country’s mayors, who are important local powerbrokers, have told him that it is up to the government to draw up the rules, which they promise to implement.

A sad note on a Champigny Facebook page: A woman whose father recently died reports that the family home has been burgled. A bag containing his harmonicas, “the only thing I had to remember him by”, was stolen.

Given that they do not have much monetary value, she hopes that the burglars may have dumped them and that someone might find them and return them to her.

“The thieves, if you see this message and you still have a bit of humanity, please put them back in the letter box so that I can do my grieving,” she concludes.

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 22,614, 369 in the past 24 hours. 28,222 people are in hospital, a fall of 436 in 24 hours, with 4,725 in intensive care, down 145. 44,594 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,101 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 38 – Lockdown tensions rise as government prepares to end it

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How do we get out of lockdown? The president has set a date, 11 May, but the plan is a bit short on details at the moment.

There are signs of tension, reports of vandalism and some clashes with police in parts of the banlieue, where some large families live in cramped conditions and many young people have strained relations with the forces of law and order.

A still from video of the attack in Bois l’Abbé

Last night shots from home-made mortars were fired at the police station in Champigny, which is situated on a housing estate in the Bois l’Abbé neighbourhood. There were two incidents, one just before 1.00am, the other at 3.30am, according to reports.

A CRS riot police officer was slightly injured and a police vehicle damaged.

The attackers fled the scene and have not been caught.

Videos have been posted online, including one apparently filmed by the attackers.

Raphaël, the council employee who phones to check on Mum every day, says that isolation is taking its psychological toll on some of the elderly people he talks to. One old lady was desperately sad not to have been able to hold her great grand-daughter, who has been born while lockdown has been in place.

The latest news is that lockdown exit is likely to be applied differently in different parts of the country – so there should be relatively tough restrictions in the Paris region for some time yet.

The president is considering a déconfinement that varies according to how local authorities judge the situation in their area, sources have told Le Monde, which comments that “Emmanuel Macron is not as Jacobin as people think”, according to his supporters.

In hypercentralised France it really is quite daring to leave such initiatives to the regions. But it makes sense, given the disparate effect of the epidemic.

Along the Atlantic coast the rate of hospitalisation it between 0.9 and 1.9 per 1,000, with rural areas less affected than those where the cities of Rennes and Bordeaux are situated.

Val-de-Marne, where I live, seems to have the highest rate in the country, at 14.9 per 1,000, although Paris has a higher per capita death rate – 6.0 per 1,000, compared to 5.8 per 1,000 here.

Although the proportion of their population in hospital is lower, the death toll in Haut Rhin and Territoire de Belfort, in the east, is even grimmer, 8.5 and 10.0 respectively.

Paris has the highest total of deaths – 1,288, compared to 817 in Val-de-Marne, 646 in Haut Rhin and 140 in Territoire de Belfort.

Whichever way you look at it, the Paris region, with its tightly packed population and high infection rate, is going to have to enforce more precautions than the rest of the country.

Those will probably include enforcing wearing masks on public transport. The worldwide controversy over their value continues, however, with the WHO repeating its assertion that they are not useful to people who are not infected while the French Académie de Médécine has called for them to be made obligatory in all public spaces as from now.

In any case, it will be back to business as almost usual on 11 May. Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire wants all shops to reopen, but not bars and restaurants. On the other hand, there might be regional disparities, he says.

National health boss Jérôme Salomon says that social distancing and other precautions will be with us “for a long time”.

Some 61,700 lives have been saved by France’s lockdown, according to a study published yesterday. The health service, especially in Ile de France and the Grand Est, would have been swamped, with 100,000 intensive care beds needed, it estimates.

The report in Le Monde prompted one grumpy early-riser to denounce the publication as “propaganda and disinformation”. Not being under lockdown is “not a synonym for an orgy or a Covid party”, the commenter said, pointing out that the death toll was not nearly that high in countries that have not instituted lockdown.

But there are other variables, notably the extent of testing in Asian countries that were better prepared than Europe. And, as Le Monde points out, the recent rise in the death toll in New York, which was slow to enforce lockdown, and in Sweden, where it has not been implemented, show that the measure “has saved numerous lives”.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 21,344, 544 in the past 24 hours. 29,741 people are in hospital, down 365, 5,218 in intensive care, down 215. 40,657 people have been discharged from hospital.

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Coronavirus diary day 36 – Will the virus change politics forever?

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An opinion poll shows growing dissatisfaction with the French government’s handling of the Coronavirus epidemic and divisions have opened up in Macron’s party. Will the crisis shatter preconceived ideas or reinforce them?

San Gennaro frees Naples from the plague, Lucao Giordano

Shortly before the virus hit us, I visited the Luca Giordano exhibition at Paris’s Petit Palais museum.

By eerie coincidence, some of the works on show were inspired by the plague outbreak in Naples in 1656.

One, by Micco Spadaro, is a gruesome portrayal of the devastation it caused. Sufferers are confined to a square, where they drop dead on the ground. Workers – one account says they were “Turks or galley slaves” – remove the bodies.

The Plague in Naples on the Piazza Mercatello, Domenico Gargiulo known as Micco Spadaro

Giordano’s painting is a thank you to the city’s patron saint, San Gennaro. You might think that the saint did not fufil his contractual obligations, given that he failed to prevent the deaths of 250,000 of the city’s 450,000 population and 50-60% of the inhabitants of what was then an independent kingdom.

But that’s not the way the church fathers viewed his performance. They told the faithful he was responsible for ending the epidemic, although Martinus Ludheim, a doctor from Bavaria who was visiting the city, seems to have had something to do with it. Giordano’s picture is entitled San Gennaro frees Naples from the plague.

We’ll never know if the loss of loved ones undermined any of the survivors’ faith in the saint or in an all-loving god. If you had made it through the epidemic, you didn’t want to end up being burnt at the stake for heresy. But ceremonies to thank the saint for deliverance seem to have been well attended and the Catholic religion has been pretty well-ensconced in the city in the intervening centuries.

Will the Coronavirus epidemic shake our certainties?

In a sense, it already has. Governments who worshipped at the altar of budgetary rigour have turned to epidemo-Keynesianism.

A new French opinion poll shows 85% of respondents want more to be spent on the health service, something the Macron government failed to do before the virus hit. It will be difficult to return to austerity in any form, whatever the pressure to pay for the present public largesse.

The Ipsos poll shows 58% dissatisfied with the way the crisis has been handled, up from 46% a month ago, while 45% say they are angry about the situation.

There is overwhelming support for the lockdown, at 77%. So the main bone of contention would not seem to be disciplined solidarity but the lack of masks and tests and the government’s U-turns on those questions.

Of course, opinion polls have to be taken with a pinch of salt, as several election and referendum results have shown, and the public mood will undoubtedly change when the epidemic finally ends.

Meanwhile, divisions have opened up in Macron’s party, La République en Marche. In the light of the crisis, some MPs who deserted the Socialist Party at the last election are calling for “social-Macronism”, which might involve more money for the health service, restraint of dividend payments and redistribution of profits to the low-paid.

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 20,265, up 547 in 24 hours. 30,584 people are in hospital, down 26, and 5,638 are in intensive care, down 61. 37,409 patients have been discharged, 831 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 29 – Macron does humble but misleads over virus testing

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Emmanuel Macron put on his humble hat in his third television address to the nation last night. For a man whose default mode is technocratic arrogance that must have been difficult.

In a sober speech described by one editorialist as “cuddle-therapy”, the president said that lockdown should be relaxed, though not completely wound up, on 11 May.

He paid tribute to key workers, many of whom are the sort of people he has previously dismissed as not having “succeeded” in life, called for humility all round, admitted “we” were not sufficiently prepared for the crisis, and pointed out that the virus is increasing inequality.

“We must be able to depart from the beaten path, from ideologies, reinvent ourselves,” he said, adding. “And me first of all.”

That would be very welcome. But it is pretty vague. Macron, like all other world leaders, has been obliged to renounce his worship of the free market during the crisis. Will he return to capitalist form once it shows signs of easing off?

Will society become more egalitarian?

Will those workers who have proved they are indispensable be paid what they’re worth or will they just have to be satisfied with applause at 8.00pm?

Macron raised the “possibility of planning carbon sobriety”. This crisis is an opportunity to avert even greater devastation by kicking the carbon habit. But will governments resist the temptation to go for growth by any means possible once workers are back at their posts?

The phased ending of the lockdown, which Interior Minister Christophe Castaner has already said is a target not a certainty, seems above all aimed at getting more people back to work, an understandable but risky strategy.

And there was one case of economy with the truth in the president’s address. Macron said that testing the whole population “would make no sense”.

Given that many infected people show no symptoms, that’s patently untrue. Widespread testing has been a key measure in those countries that have been most successful in containing the virus.

This is a repetition of the government’s disinformation about wearing masks. If there aren’t enough, just tell us. Don’t make out it wouldn’t be a good thing to test far more people than is currently planned.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now stands at 15,167, up 574 in the last 24 hours. 32,113 people are in hospital, 287 admitted yesterday. 6,281 patients are in intensive care, down 24. 27,718 have been discharged from hospital, 532 of them yesterday.

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