With rumors of a total lockdown circulating, Macron addressed the nation on television Monday night. Read The New Yorker’s complete news coverage and analysis of the coronavirus pandemic. People went out to parks and squares-selfishly, but perhaps only half-comprehendingly, as they’d been told by the Prime Minister to stay home, except “to do essential shopping or to do a little bit of exercise.” On Monday morning, Le Monde reported that the government was considering putting the population under confinement, in view of the crowds that had materialized in such beauty spots as the banks of the Seine and the Luxembourg Gardens, and in markets such as the Twelfth Arrondissement’s marché d’Aligre, wanting to allow themselves “one last moment of insouciance.” Parisians with the luck or wealth to have accommodations in the countryside fled the city-many of them by train, and to their older parents’ houses-an exodus which can only exacerbate the problem. Sunday was gorgeous, for the first time in quite a while. The coronavirus arrived in France at the end of January, with two people who had recently visited China, and has now reached the exponential stage, with the number of infections, now more than six thousand, basically doubling every three days. But the concept of social distancing as civic duty has induced a special sort of fatigue, confusion, and even heartbreak here, where, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 20, the height of solidarity was showing up on a café terrace for a glass of wine. ![]() ![]() ![]() Hibernation for springtime feels viscerally wrong anywhere. In France, it comes on the heels of anti-pension-reform strikes that shut down the country for much of the winter, which themselves came on the heels of the gilets jaunes protests that shut down the country for much of the winter before that. The coronavirus pandemic is a global catastrophe with local peculiarities.
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