Il faut savoir terminer un confinement - France moves to ease lockdown
A week after announcing the broad framework of le déconfinement, on 7 May 2020 Edouard Philippe and six key ministers presented further details of how easing the lockdown will work in France from 11 May. The whole of France will go into déconfinement, but a map, shown below, that distinguishes between red and green departments (see my blog last week here) indicates the departments where the conditions for easing the lockdown will be more or less strict.
Essentially, four metropolitan regions, plus the island of Mayotte in the Indian Ocean, where the spread of the virus is causing considerable concern, are classified red. The ‘mainland’ regions are the Hauts-de-France (an amalgamation of the old regions of the Nord-Pas-de-Calais and Picardie), the Ile-de-France, the Grand-Est (Alsace, Lorraine, and Champagne-Ardenne) and Bourgogne-Franche-Comté. Essentially, the top right-hand quadrant of France will experience stricter limitations on movement and the reopening of businesses and schools. At one point it had looked as if the Hauts-de France was moving away from the red classification, but because one of the criteria, pressure on resuscitation units, is based on regional data, the reality is different. Otherwise a department such as the Oise (60) might well have been classified as green…
In demographic terms, the red zone concerns 27.2 million people, or 40% of the population of France.
From Le Figaro based on government statistics provided by Santé publique France
The process of mapping déconfinement has not been without its problems. As I mentioned last week, some departments (the Lot, Haute-Corse and the Cher) protested that they had been incorrectly classified as red when the provisional map - which also had orange to show departments that could go either way - was published. That, of course, is what provisional means. But there have been other criticisms of the map and how and what it represents, most noticeably from the demographer Hervé Le Bras in Le Monde and Juliette Morel, a cartographer at the Université de Limoges, in Libération. Le Bras in particular has been a pioneer of developing maps that try to authentically represent, for example, the extent and location of the Le Pen or the Macron vote in the 2017 presidential election. For him, reducing politics to how a department voted is no longer a subtle enough instrument, given the tools now at our disposal. Morel, on the other hand, takes issue with the criteria used to establish the maps and the semiotic meaning of choosing green and red, rather than a more nuanced range. Most cartographers, she argues, would employ a five-shade range of intensity to convey the significance of the risk, in this instance. (I absolutely recommend French readers to look out both.)
However that may be, this is the manner in which the government has chosen to convey to the French people the gravity of the situation, despite the easing of lockdown, and to help them understand where and how a range of measures will apply. It’s also a map of France that the public broadly understands, perhaps better than using the (relatively new) regional titles.
So what does déconfinement à la française mean? The general terms have not altered much since PM Philippe made his announcement last week, but there are some noteworthy changes and additions.
In the first place, the French will no longer need to fill in an attestation when they leave their homes, unless they are planning to travel more than 100km (as the crow flies) and then they can only do so for what is termed a motif professionnel ou familial impérieux, i.e. on serious work or family business. Thus, visiting a sick relative is okay, heading off to your holiday home is not. On the other hand, people who fled their main homes at the beginning of lockdown may now return. You can have a look at documentation on the interior ministry web page. Paper or electronic versions are available.
People can return to work, so long as their employers have arranged for social distancing to continue in the workplace, but the government is encouraging as many people who can work from home - faire du télétravail - to continue to do so. The minister for the economy, Bruno Le Maire, reckons that some 400,000 business will reopen on Monday, including hairdressers, florists and bookshops. Except in the Ile-de-France, large shopping centres will be able to reopen with permission from the préfet.
Nursery and primary schools will open, but not fully and with measures in place to (try to) ensure social distancing. But here, as I reported last week, opening schools will be negotiated between local maires, headteachers and the préfet’s office in each department. On this point, the PM has made it clear that the préfets are to defer to maires and headteachers where there is a difference of opinion about the feasibility of reopening any school, and that goes for the green zone as well as the red. Last Tuesday (5 May), in an ever-so-slightly excruciating exercise, Emmanuel Macron visited a school to the west of Paris where children of key-sector workers have been attending, in an attempt to calm fears among parents that sending their children back is risky. However, while middle schools (collèges) in the green zone will mostly open in the week beginning 18 May, those in the red zone will not and a decision on when France’s lycées will reopen will not be taken until the end of May. Still, education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer estimates that a million children will be turning up on 11 May and some 130,000 teachers will be ready to greet them. You can be sure that these numbers and Le Maire’s will be scrutinised to the nth degree.
The government anticipates that the wearing of masks in public will be the norm and it will be absolutely compulsory on public transport everywhere. Stations and bus stops have been marked out to help ensure travellers keep their distance (only one metre in France, as it goes) and in the red zone they will have to carry notification from their employer to justify travelling, especially during the rush hour. To facilitate the process, the Ile-de-France regional council and public transport providers have drawn up new timetables to ensure higher volumes of metros, buses and trams and similar measures have taken place in France’s other major cities and across the national and local rail networks. SNCF hopes to be running at about 40% of capacity by the end of May. Employers have also been asked to stagger working hours.
As in the UK, getting hold of and distributing masks has become something of a national scandal/obsession, but in France a nation of Singer-owners has emerged from the shadows to produce homemade cotton masks to a pattern. (‘Sew, old woman. Sew like the wind’.) Testing capacity has also been a moot point, but it remains to be seen whether the French state is any better at delivering on its promises than the British… For the moment the StopCovid app is not ready, though the programme for tracing contacts of those who test positive is in place and both the infected and their contacts will have to go into a two-week quarantine* - la quatorzaine.
France’s borders remain closed at least until mid-June except for those whose work is transfrontalier or for separated couples who share their children’s upbringing. (Remember, France has a lot of border.) In a last minute outbreak of common sense, interior minister Christophe Castaner has announced that a decision to open beaches and lakes can be left to the local préfet, at the request of the mayor and on condition that local councils have put in place measures to ensure la distanciation sociale. In the red zone, for now at least, parks and forests remain closed. The situation for bars, cafés and cinemas will be reviewed in three-weeks time, but small-scale museums and galleries can open. Castaner also underlined that people should not gather in groups of more than 10, either in private or in public. All large-scale events (a threshold of 5,000 had been mentioned previously) are banned until September. At the same time, the government will allow acts of worship to resume from (tentatively) 29 May, although that will be too late for France’s Muslim population to celebrate Eid al-Fitr.
The next three weeks are, Edouard Philippe was keen to stress, crucial and critical. One of the first people to use the term déconfinement, he is also willing to warn of the risk of reconfinement and that the authorities will not hestitate to punish transgressions. To that end, this week the government has asked parliament to extend the state of medical emergency from 23 May to 23 July.**
But there is good news. Care home workers will receive a one-off bonus of €1500 in the 33 departments the worst hit by the pandemic and €1000 in the other departments.
And yes, pétanque is back on the menu, boys.
*As any skoolboy kno, the English word quarantine comes from the French quarantaine, in this sense a period of forty days. Normally the French call a fortnight une quinzaine on account of the fact that they count from today (8+7=15 innit), not tomorrow. But, with Covid-19, the quarantine period is very specifically 14 days - quatorzaine.
** - correction added 10 May 2020 - on Saturday 9 May the Senate and the National Assembly approved an amended form of the legislation extending the state of medical emergency to 10 July 2020, i.e. two months from the date of ratification. In the interests of transparency, the speaker of the Senate, Gérard Larcher, announced on the same day that he would use his constitutional prerogative to refer the bill to the Constitutional Council for verification. Macron had in fact already signalled his intention to refer the bill if neither Larcher nor the speaker of the National Assembly, Richard Ferrand did so.