Tag Archives: Paris

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 59 – You pays your money, you gets your vaccine

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It ain’t over yet! Keep washing your hands! (And social distancing, which they’re not doing in this old ad for laundry soap)

First it was our masks, now it’s our medicines! The US will be served first if Sanofi develops a vaccine against Covid-19 because the Americans have put more money into the research, the French-based drug company’s boss said yesterday.

Last month US diplomats in China bought shipments of masks ordered by France, Germany and other countries as they stood on the airport runway.

Now Paul Hudson, a peripatetic British marketing expert who was appointed last year, has said Washington will be able to place the biggest advance orders of any vaccine that is developed because the Barda research and development body has “shared in the risk” in trying to develop it.

If Europeans want to move higher up the pecking order, the EU must match American investment, he said.

The French opposition Socialist Party shot out a communiqué dubbing the announcement scandalous.

Pointing out that France has contributed a fair bit to Sanofi’s worldwide success, the party says that our health should not be subject to the whims of the market, adding “no French company should gamble with our own health security without facing the threat of nationalisation”.

“It’s obvious that our health must be excluded from the rules of the market,” Socialist former minister and presidential candidate, Ségolène Royal, told France Inter radio.

All of which begs the question of why they left pharmaceutical companies in private hands while they were in power.

Junior government minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher joined in the condemnation, although she kept it in the conditional.

“For us it would be inacceptable if any country had privileged access on a pretext that would be a monetary pretext,” she told Sud-radio.

In the evening Sanofi said that the US would have priority for vaccine produced on its territory and the rest of its production would go to “Europe, France and the rest of the world”. They didn’t say where they plan to produce how much of the product, which, for the moment, remains strictly hypothetical anyway.

There will be a second wave in France unless strict control of people’s behaviour is maintained, a study led by the Institut Pasteur warns.

The boffins who estimated that 5.7% of France’s population had been infected, thus making herd immunity an idle fantasy for months to come, now believe that was an overestimate. They have revised the figure to 4.4%, ie 2.8 million people.

In Ile de France, the hardest-hit region, 9.9% of the population has been infected, they believe.

Lockdown has been effective, the study concludes, but that means that very few people have assembled the necessary antibodies.

They find that 3.6% of infected people are hospitalised and 0.7% die, ranging from 0.0001% of under-20s to 10.1% of over-80s.  

“Effective measures of control designed to limit the risk of transmission must be maintained after 11 May [when lockdown ended] to avoid a resurgence of the epidemic,” they warn.

Meanwhile, people are rushing to the shops to buy clothes and get haircuts.

They can also go to the beach in some areas, although they mustn’t sunbathe or picnic, just take exercise.

So what has the government got against parks?

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo wants them to be reopened to the public for the sake of their health.

“You can take the métro but you can’t go into a park,” she points out.

But the capital is in a red zone, so letting the populace gambol in those green spaces would be “inopportune, given the vivacity of the virus’s circulation in Ile de France,” government spokesperson Sibeth Ndiaye says.

As a compromise, Hidalgo suggests limiting the number of people who can enter at any one time.

Cédric Herrou, the farmer who helped migrants cross the border from Italy, has been acquitted by an appeal court in Lyon.

NGOs say the decision means that solidarity is not a crime.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 27,074, 83 in the past 24 hours, which is a return to the lower figures reported at the end of last week. 21,071 people are in hospital, down 524, and 2,428 are in intensive care, down 114. 58,673 patients have been discharged from hospital, 888 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 58 – Lockdown could return if we don’t behave

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RATP staff outside Champigny station yesterday Photo: Tony Cross

Health Minister Olivier Véran has given us all a good talking to. There could be a new lockdown if the virus starts to spread again, he warns.

“We haven’t finished with the virus,” Véran said today. “If we don’t collectively observe social distancing and protective measures, the virus will take off again.”

Mr Déconfinement, Jean Castex, has a plan ready.

If the number of cases reported daily returns to twice the rate when lockdown ended on Monday, we could be confined to our homes again, although the measure might be restricted to affected areas rather than national.

He is suspending judgement on whether we’re out of the epidemical woods until 2 June, he says.

The country’s top court, the Conseil constitutionnel, has blocked two measures in the renewed state of emergency.

Social workers will not have access to information gathered to trace possible Covid-19 cases, it ruled, but it accepted that tracing itself “pursues the constitutional value of protection of health”.

It also decided that people arriving in France can only be forced into quarantine on the orders of a judge. Dodgy one, that.  

I have mixed feelings about the Conseil constitutionnel.

Its nine members are picked by the president and the chairs of both chambers of parliament. You don’t get more establishment than that. Even worse, former presidents also have the right to sit on it. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, currently accused of groping a German journalist, is a member, while Nicolas Sarkozy renounced his seat in 2013 and François Hollande has never exercised the right.

I must be mellowing as my age advances because I am partly persuaded by the bourgeois democratic argument in favour of checks and balances. And the council has taken some decisions that have protected individual liberties.

But  in 2012 it achieved the astonishing feat of finding that the Socialist government’s wealth tax was contrary to the Republic’s principle of equality. There’s little doubt that it would take up the cudgels in favour of the rich and powerful in the event of a government taking on the power of capital.

Transport staff, sporting masks and visors, are posted outside Champigny station, checking that people abide by the rule that they must wear masks. Most of the entrances are closed and outside of rush hours there appear to be about half the usual number of trains.

Our neighbour Marianne and her partner, Christian, celebrated their second day of relative freedom with a day out in Paris – a short day since only people going to work or on some other vital business such as a court case can use the network between 6.30 and 9.30am and 4.00 and 7.00pm.

In rush hour you must have an employer’s certificate or a declaration of vital business to ride the rails

She took her mask and the bottle of alcoholic gel that she managed to find at a local pharmacy. It was great, she reports.

Having checked that I still have a car – it’s parked in a private carpark round the corner which I haven’t visited for two months – and that it still works, hasn’t been crushed by a tree in the storm or suffered any other dreadful fate, I shall not be risking public transport for a while yet.

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 26,991, up 348 yesterday. 21,595 people are in hospital, down 689 in 24 hours, with 2,542 in intensive care, down 170. 57,785 patients have been discharged from hospital, 1,061 yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 57 – France’s lockdown ends smoothly – apart from some Parisians behaving badly

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The banks of the River Marne yesterday Photo: Tony Cross

Officials say that the end of lockdown went smoothly. But some Parisians threw caution to the winds. And a young man appeared in court in western France after being caught flouting confinement rules 17 times.

France is a country of rules and regulations. But it’s also a country where the rules are habitually bent.

It’s the “normalement” factor.

“Do you have a room?” you may ask a hotel. “Normalement, non,” they may reply and then find you one, which shouldn’t really be let for some obscure reason or other but can be put at your disposition exceptionellement. (I remember this example from a book review I read many years ago. I think it was of Polly Platt’s brilliantly titled French or Foe, which I confess I have never got round to actually reading.)

There was a lot of rule-bending as the end of lockdown approached, as I noted yesterday.

Now it’s over but we’re still a red, high-risk, zone here and normalement the promenades along the side of the Marne are closed by decree. But, encouraged perhaps by the fact that it’s not exactly clear how they’re defined, many of us celebrated the first day of déconfinement with a riverside stroll.

There were even a couple of fishermen. Unlike the flock of Canada geese with their goslings, who are not constrained by anti-virus concerns, people were mostly observing social distancing.

Canada geese on the Marne yesterday Photo: Tony Cross

That wasn’t the case along the Canal Saint Martin in Paris. Crowds of young, immunity-confident people gathered there in great, tightly packed numbers.

That prompted the Paris préfecture to issue a new decree, banning the consumption of alcohol along the waterway.

Meanwhile, shoppers have been queueing at the required distance, masks are widely worn and many people continue to work from home.

An 18-year-old man appeared in court in Rennes, the Breton capital, yesterday, charged with his 17th breach of lockdown rules.

Police stopped his car on Saturday night. His passengers legged it but he was detained and found to be driving without a licence or insurance.

They also found that he had already been booked 16 times for being outdoors without the certificate required if you left home.

A sentence of 35 hours of community service after his 10th breach of the rules had apparently failed to make a great impression.

I can find no report of Monday’s judgement.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 26,643, 263 in the past 24 hours. That’s a worrying reversal of the decline in the daily death rate, which was down to 70 yesterday, but not as high as last Monday’s 306. It can probably be partly explained by underreporting at the weekend and, of course, reflects the infection rate of about a fortnight ago. 22,284 people are in hospital, down 285 yesterday, with 2,712 in intensive care, down 64. 56,724 patients have been discharged from hospital, 507 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 56 – Social divide on show as France’s lockdown ends

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Lockdown is over, sort of. It appears that many office workers have stayed at home. Manual workers don’t have that option, as reports from the Paris métro make clear.

“Avoid rush hour,” says this poster at Champigny station. Photo: Tony Cross

At 9.00am Paris’s main stations were not much busier than they were last week, press reports said today. People are conscious that the virus still stalks the land, it seems, and maybe working from home has caught on for good for some of the white-collar crowd.

But some of the trains from the outskirts have been packed and at 6.00-7.00am it was more or less back to normal, according to Le Monde’s transport correspondent.

That’s the time when shopworkers and other essential members of the workforce go to work. When I lived in Paris, I was struck by the change in the make-up of passengers on métro line 13. The earlier it was, the fuller the trains coming from working-class Seine-Saint-Denis and the more black or north African-origin passengers there were.

Pressure from employers to come to work is likely to increase, especially since Labour Minister Muriel Pénicaud has said that “there is no reason” for the government to continue paying all of private-sector employees’ wages any more.

Masks compulsory, warns this poster at Champigny station Photo: Tony Cross

With up to 1.5 million people expected to use the Paris transport network today, 1,000 police have been drafted in to back up security staff.

But the instructions were not sent out until Saturday evening, so there is a certain amount of disorganisation.

In fact, officials will not have all the powers the government planned.

That’s because the country’s top court, the Conseil constitutionnel, has not ruled yet that the law extending the state of emergency is legal in all its aspects, parliament having spent too long debating it and failed to pass it on time.

So the government had to rush through a decree overnight to enforce wearing masks on public transport and limiting journeys to 100km from your home. But an employer’s certificate to testify that you have the right to travel during rush hour was left out, so you can’t be fined for not having one at the moment.

Some pupils will go back to some schools today.

The return affects the youngest kids and priority will be given to the children of parents who have to go to work.

Paris has estimated that only 15% of pupils will be back in the classrooms and some mayors, including Champigny’s Christian Fautré, have refused to authorise reopening.

Two new clusters of the virus have appeared in the provinces, both in region that are at present classed green for low contamination.

Twenty members of staff at a school near Poitiers have been placed in quarantine, with four of them testing positive. They came into contact with the virus when they attended a meeting to prepare reopening.

Nine people tested positive in a village in Dordogne after a funeral.

The undertakers insist that the obligatory precautions, which include only close family attending, were observed at the ceremony. But at some point they weren’t, since 43 more test results, all negative, were announced on Sunday. People reportedly came from Switzerland and Portugal, the latter being the deceased’s country of origin.

It’s Mum’s shower day today. She doesn’t like it, having developed a certain hydrophobia in her old age.

In pre-virus days we paid a carer to accompany her ablutions. The arrangement was for the sake of my delicate sensibilities, she was unhappy with being helped by a stranger.

Last year, in the brilliant film Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains, I watched a dutiful Chinese son wash his ageing Chinese mother’s back and thought “At least I don’t have to do that!”.

Now I’m doing it, having stopped all visitors to the house when it was clear the epidemic was serious. I suppose you get used to it.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 26,380, 70 in the past 24 hours. 22,569 people are in hospital, down 45, with 2,776 in intensive care, down 36. 56,217 patients have been discharged from hospital.

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Coronavirus diary day 53 – Macron’s haste to revive economy may mean less speed in beating Covid-19

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What’s striking about the plan to end France’s lockdown is how little constraint there is – especially on employers. This does not bode well for the brave new world we’ve been promised when the epidemic is over.

The Paris region is the worst hit by Covid-19. It’s also the most important for the economy, producing 30% of GDP. There is clearly a certain amount of haste to get people back to work, despite the clear danger of a second wave in one of the most densely populated parts of the world.

With cinemas, theatres, bars and restaurants still closed, the place you’re most likely to pick up the virus is on public transport. That will be up and running at 75% capacity on Monday, according to the people who run the Ile de France network.

Passengers will only be able to use every other seat and will have to wear face masks. In rush hour, 5.30 to 9.30 in the morning and from 15.30 to 19.30, you will only be allowed to ride the rails if you are on your way to work and can prove it with a declaration from your employer.

The government has appealed to people to keep working from home. Perhaps some employers are saving money on energy and maintenance, but won’t many of them put pressure on their workers to come to work? How many employees will feel able to resist such pressure and what protection do they have, if they do?

Many people are itching to leave home, inclined to confuse the end of lockdown with the end of the risk to their health and the virus is still out there, looking for people to infect.

I fear there will be packed métro and suburban trains on Monday, bringing the risk of a second wave.

The economy is in recession, companies are going out of business and jobs are being lost. Macron has promised a more socially and ecologically responsible country when the epidemic is over.

But a green economy won’t grow itself. This can’t be left to the invisible hand of the market. Instead of handing out unconditional aid to airlines and other big polluters, the state must syphon money from the industries that threaten our future into industries that are socially and environmentally responsible. And, if it wants to avoid a Gilets Jaunes-type backlash, it must guarantee jobs with equivalent pay and conditions to workers laid off because of the changes.

Capital will resist such action with cries of dirigisme and authoritarianism. I don’t see Macron, or any of our other present world leaders, facing down that pressure, do you?

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 25,987, up 178 in the past 24 hours. 23,208 people are in hospital, down 775 yesterday, with 2,961 in intensive care, down 775. 55,027 people have been discharged from hospital.

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Coronavirus diary day 50 – French end-lockdown plan in trouble + How bad is humanity?

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“One mask per household from the council” it says. Photo: Tony Cross

We’ve received our municipal masks. Champigny town council has distributed masks to every household ahead of the end of lockdown. And the Communist mayor says he will defy the government order to reopen schools.

This morning there was a package sporting the town’s logo in our letterbox. Inside there were two anti-virus masks, although the envelope only promised one per household. Our neighbour Marianne hasn’t received hers, which is probably just an oversight because her house is right at the bottom of the close.

Inside is a note from the mayor, Christian Fautré, who definitely wants you to know that his administration is behind the initiative. The second round of local council elections, which are in frozen animation at the moment, will take place once this is all over.

Fautré is a member of the Communist Party, which has controlled the council for decades, although nowadays it is obliged to share power with the Socialists, France Insoumise and the Greens.

What was once the banlieue rouge is now in the zone rouge, marked red for hard-hit on the government’s Covid-19 map. 

Ile-de-France, the region that includes Paris, has been the hardest-hit part of the country. It has seen 95% more deaths than there would usually be at this time of year – 10,200 more between 1 March and 20 April.

Paris, one of the most densely populated cities in the world, has suffered badly, with 74% more deaths than usual. But the neighbouring départements have had it even worse – 130% more in Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest département in mainland France, 122% more in Hauts-de-Seine, and 104% in Val-de-Marne, where we live.

Fautré is one of 33 mayors who have written to the president to say that the requirement to reopen schools on 11 May is unrealistic. On Monday he went further than his colleagues and declared he would refuse to obey the order.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has said that, if the recommended anti-virus precautions are taken, only 11% of the city’s pupils will be able to return to school.

There was more trouble for the government in the Senate yesterday. The right-wing controlled upper house of parliament rejected the plan for ending lockdown. It had sailed through the lower house thanks to an absolute majority of the ruling coalition.

Prime Minister Edouard Philippe told the senators that it was urgent to reopen schools and get the economy up and running again.

One concern is that local councils might find themselves in court if a child or teacher dies after the schools have gone back. Employers may share that concern, although the bill does have a clause saying that nobody can be held legally responsible for infections unless they have been caused deliberately or by conscious infringement of the rules.

Philippe admitted that the government is receiving conflicting advice from experts on whether there will be a second wave. Controversial Marseille medic Didier Raoult, who initially said the disease would not be that serious then claimed to be successfully treating it with hydroxcyhlorine, now says that the virus will probably die out in the summer, an opinion that is not shared by all his colleagues.

“We cannot offer you the confidence you are asking is for,” the top right-winger in the Senate, Bruno Retailleau, told Philippe, pointing to the government’s “contradictions” and “confusion” over masks and tests, a criticism that was echoed by the Socialists.

The clamour of lively philosophical debate issued from Marianne’s house as I was sitting in the sun the other day.

“No, you can’t tell me humans are superior to animals,” she told her boyfriend, Christian, with a great deal of audible conviction.

When they came outside, I told them they were both wrong.

The notions of superiority and inferiority, and of good and bad, are not objective but values dependent on human consciousness.

On the one hand, humans have created art, architecture, philosophy, literature, science. On the other, we’re responsible for war, slavery and class society, pollution and the devastation of nature and we could even destroy the planet, if a meteorite doesn’t get there first.

But the universe is indifferent to all that. Worlds, some with sentient life on them for all we know, vanish all the time. Nobody apart from ourselves is passing moral judgement on us, not even the creatures whose habitats we are destroying.

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands, at 25,201, with 306 people dying yesterday. 25,548 people are in hospital, down 267 in the past 24 hours, while 3,696 are in intensive care, down 123. 51,371 people have been discharged from hospital, 587 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 48 – Is France really ready to end lockdown?

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A poster welcomes “responsible” mask-wearers to Champigny Photo: Tony Cross

After a cabinet meeting yesterday the papers are claiming that the rules for post-lockdown France are becoming clear. I’m glad they think so, the government’s announcements don’t seem particularly earth-shattering to me.

Here are the main decisions:

  • Anyone arriving in the country will be placed in quarantine, which can’t be longer than 30 days. By the way, the French quaintly call 14 days’ quarantine a “quatorzaine”, since they speak what is essentially a dialect of Latin and quarantaine still shows its origins as a period of 40 days, apparently the time Venetians obliged plague-infested ships to remain isolated if they arrived on their shores;
  • Infected people will be expected to isolate themselves and their households, either at home or in hotels set aside for that purpose, but this will not be legally enforced;
  • Tracing the infected and those they have been in contact with will take place but not via the controversial StopCovid app. It will be done by doctors and other health professionals and there will be regional and national data banks.
  • Various quasi-police officers, such as security officers on public transport, will have the power to stop and check people. We won’t have to fill in forms to leave home, so they won’t have those to look at, but their duties will probably include making people wear masks on public transport, enforcing safety precautions in shops and stopping people stray more than 100km from their homes.

It is still unclear to me what the difference between red (high infection), orange (medium infection) and green (virus-free) zones will be.

The announcements are accompanied with appeals not to drop our guard. But this seems to be happening already.

There is more traffic on the roads than there were a couple of weeks ago, there are more cars parked on Champigny’s Place Lénine, where the Chinese greengrocers has reopened and the bookshop is taking orders to be collected two afternoons a week, and my neighbours are coming out of their homes to sweep in front of their front doors and chat.

Italy has reported a rise in deaths, ahead of its phased ending of strict lockdown. Those people must have caught the virus a week or two ago but there does appear to have been a relaxation of precautions there as deconfinement approached.

The Algerian Kabyle singer Idir has died.  I saw him perform with French singer Maxime Le Forestier in the grounds of the Palais Royal one Fête de la musique. They changed the French song Paris s’éveille into Tizi Ouzou s’éveille, in honour of the main town in Kabylie.

Idir’s song Avava Inouva heralded a renaissance of Kabyle culture, my friend Omar Bouraba comments on Facebook. “It gave us back pride and colours and we needed that.

“I remember as a kid when the song arrived on our old radios, for my family a Grundig,” he goes on. “We often subscribed to buy batteries to listed to Idir. We didn’t have electricity.

“Later, as an immigrant, I learnt how precious his songs were to help bear the absence and how easy it was to make connections, to exchange with other cultures thanks to Idir’s songs.”

Desperate for a haircut after lockdown? Try this hairdresser, which appears to be somewhere in French-speaking Africa.

The advertising slogan is “Come inside ugly, leave pretty.” Admit you’re tempted.

The photo appeared on a rather niche Facebook page devoted to French shopfronts 1950-75. Well, I like that sort of thing.

Paris’s rue de Rivoli will be closed to private cars as part of the city council’s fight against pollution.

Here’s how it looked in 1863, before the invention of the infernal internal combustion engine. I don’t think they plan to bring back the horse-drawn vehicle.

Rue de Rivoli, Photo Hippolyte Jouvin 1863

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 24,760, 166 in the past 24 hours. 25,827 people are in hospital, down 60 in a day, with 3,827 in intensive care, down 51. 50,562 people have been discharged from hospital, 350 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 45 – Happy locked-down birthday, Mother!

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It’s Mum’s 96th birthday. She agreed that’s a pretty impressive accomplishment, once I had reminded her that it was her birthday and how old she was. We’ve made it through the epidemic so far, so that’s another accomplishment. Coming out of lockdown and a second wave, if it comes, will bring other challenges.

Mum in the courtyard earlier this month (when it was sunny)

I’ve promised we’ll open a good bottle this evening. “Peter [my brother] will have to come and share it,” she said. Another reminder: “He can’t, because we’re locked down because of the virus.”

The memory is going. I’ve given up rehearsing the anti-Covid precautions with her. Even if she remembers them, she ignores them. “You should wash your hands for 20 seconds!” “I don’t know how long 20 seconds is.” “Don’t take your teeth out unless you’ve washed your hands first.” She looks at me like a naughty schoolkid: “You weren’t supposed to see that.”

So both of us staying well means me being extra-careful not to bring the virus into the house. Unpacking the shopping is especially tedious but I expect you all know that by now.

Mum also has macular degeneration, which has been gradually depriving her of her eyesight for over 15 years. Eating is a chore now because she can hardly see what’s on her plate, meaning that she often puts an almost-empty fork to her mouth. She’s too proud to use a spoon.

She has survived my Dad by a bit more than 10 years now. I moved to Champigny so that she could move in. I couldn’t have afforded a two-bedroom home in Paris itself.

Despite her memory and eyesight problems, I think she’s fairly happy here.

It’s an ill wind that blows no good. The fall in air pollution due to lockdown has saved 11,000 lives, the recently established Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (Creca) estimates. Given the epidemic’s death toll, this is a bit of a win-some-lose-some situation but it could lead to more responsible environmental policies after it’s over. Or is that too much to hope?

“Other avoided health impacts include 1.3 million fewer days of work absence, 6,000 fewer new cases of asthma in children, 1,900 avoided emergency room visits due to asthma attacks and 600 fewer preterm births,” Creca tells us, although, as one imagines they have noticed, there’s more win-some-lose-some so far as days off work are concerned.

The study actually puts the number of lives saved as between 7,000 and 21,000.

The reason is a fall of 40% in nitrogen dioxide emissions and of 10% in fine particle emissions. That’s because of drastic cuts in consumption of energy produced by coal and oil burning, as well as a reduction in road traffic.

If I understand the science, fine particle pollution has fallen less than nitrogen dioxide because of agriculture and wood-burning. Another study shows that halving the use of ammonia in farming – which was responsible that bucolic smell that has wafted over Paris at times during lockdown – could reduce early deaths from air pollution in Europe by 20%.

Lockdown has inspired some major cities to adopt more ambitious environmental policies. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has in the past been vilified by the right because of her moves to clear cars from the city centre.

Last year’s transport strikes reportedly changed some right-wing voters’ minds about the virtues of cycling. Maybe lockdown-induced blue skies will convince more people that we can’t go back to breathing filthy air.

The French government has promised 20 million euros to encourage bike riding once lockdown is over. As one of the few people in the world who never learnt to ride a bike, I have mixed feelings about this. It will definitely increase my chances of being mown down by a wannabe Tour de France winner while I’m strolling the city streets.

These photos of empty city streets. Am I the only one to be singularly unimpressed by them?

Didn’t any of you ever go out early in the morning or on public holidays?

I have one vivid memory of riding a bus through the Louvre – the complex not the museum – on my way to work one Christmas morning. Nobody there. But I did see one or two intrepid Japanese tourists elsewhere in the city.

Back to the bad news. France’s GDP fell 5.8% in the first quarter of 2020, the biggest fall since 1949, greater even that the 5.3% decline called by the strikes in the second quarter of 1968. The period includes the first fortnight of lockdown, so this quarter will be equally grim, if not worse.

The eurozone’s GDP has fallen 3.8%.

France’s unemployment rose a record 7.1% in March. Household spending was down 17.9%.

The health state of emergency is set to be extended for another two months.

France’s Covid-19 death toll is now officially 24,087, up 427 in 24 hours. 26,834 Covid-19 patients are in hospital, down 650 in 24 hours, with 4,207 in intensive care, down 180. 48,228 people have been discharged from hospital, 1,342 of them yesterday.

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Notre Dame fire sparks right-wing conspiracy theories

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The French authorities are not exactly slow to spot a terror attack but they have said there is no evidence that the Notre Dame fire was caused by one. That hasn’t stopped the far right from hatching conspiracy theories. They just can’t help themselves.

Notre Dame viewed from the south, 16 April 2019. Photo: Tony Cross

“More and more people agree with me,” claimed the ageing gent on the banks of the Seine on Tuesday afternoon. He was part of the crowd looking at the damage done to Notre Dame Cathedral in the previous night’s fire.

Having blamed immigrants for the lack of affordable housing, he went on to express scepticism about the “theory” that the fire had started by accident.

Indeed, he is not alone.

Officials and experts say there is no evidence of arson or a terror attack. The conflagration is most likely to have been set off by an accident, possibly connected to restoration work being carried out in the cathedral, they say. But that hasn’t stopped the conspiracy theorists soaping the ropes for a prospective pogrom.

With sickening predictability, far-right websites, known as the “fachosphere” in France, launched a desperate search for evidence that the disaster was the result of an Islamist terror attack.

Here are some of their claims:

  • The two fires theory: A tweet by Pierre Sautarel of fachosphere favourite Fdesouche.com claimed there were two fires and therefore that they must have been started deliberately. As evidence, it cited well-known newsreader David Pujadas, who in a live broadcast did point out that there were two  lots of flames, but without implying  they had been started separately. That did not prevent other far-right fantasists, in France and abroad, from spreading the rumour.
  • The mysterious imam/Yellow Vest: A Spanish tweet claimed that a figure filmed walking along the side of the cathedral was there when the building was supposed to have been empty and must have been an imam or, failing that, a Gilet Jaune. As Libération newspaper established, the report was broadcast live on Spanish TV after emergency services had arrived and the figure was wearing a high-visibility jacket and safety helmet because, well, you would in those circumstances, wouldn’t you?
  • Well, look, it just must have been terrorists: All France’s main parties, even the party previously known as the Front National (FN), have abstained from claiming the disaster was a terror attack. Not the Islamophobes posing as secularism-defenders at Ripostelaïque, however. They declared that “inevitably, we’re all thinking it might be an attack on France and all that she stands for … And if it’s an attack it can only be a Muslim attack.” Philippe Karsenty, a right-wing councillor from the posh Paris suburb of Neuilly, won the distinction of being fact-checked by Fox News when he told an interviewer that the “politically correct will tell you it was an accident”. Perennial presidential candidate Nicolas Dupont-Aignon, an anti-tax obsessive who backed the FN’s Marine Le Pen in the 2016 second round, demanded an official inquiry “to know if it was a terror attack or not”. And vehemently pro-Israel MP Meyer Habib managed to combine both the above items of fake news in one tweet that asked “Accident or criminal attack?”, following it with another that indignantly denounced government ministers who have condemned conspiracy theories.

In today’s digital world fake news spreads before the truth has the time to put its boots on, so inevitably these and other unfounded rumours found their way to dodgy sites from Australia to America. In the US Alex Jones’s Infowars gave a headline to a tweet that was soon deleted by its author, who told BuzzFeed News “I never should have tweeted it.”

The hate-mongers have had a little help, however. Two members of the national committee of the left-wing students’ union Unef gave them just what they wanted when they sneered at “some cathedral woodwork burning”, people “crying over some bits of wood”,  one declaring that she “couldn’t care less about the history of France” and that the outpouring of emotion was white people’s ravings.

Police cordon off Notre Dame on Tuesday afternoon. Photo: Tony Cros

Conspiracy theories also put in a brief appearance on the Gilet Jaunes’ social networks. Some contributors judged it suspicious that the fire led to the cancellation of the president’s address to the nation on prime-time TV. Macron was due to outline his response to the national debate he organised in the wake of the high-vis protests.

It’s difficult to imagine the president declaring “Shit! I haven’t finished my speech. Somebody set fire to Notre Dame!” and, knowing what we do about the man, we can be fairly sure he was convinced of the brilliance of his proposals. Gilet Jaune moderators seem to have shut down those debates, in any case. And Macron’s main proposals have been leaked. Surprise, surprise, he leads with tax cuts, which the prime minister has already explained will mean more cuts in services. Not really worth setting a national monument on fire for.

To listen to me talking to KPFA radio’s Kris Welch about the Notre Dame fire (including the strange story of the kings’ entrails), click here


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