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.
