After more than 50 days of hard lockdown in France, we're beginning to see more clearly how this exceptional- once in a lifetime- health emergency is being handled by the authorities.
FROM FRANCE- France is part of a group who rapidly saw the emerging virus spreading through the population, along with Italy, Spain, the United Kingdom, and now the USA. Governing a nation through a pandemic demands first and foremost a tightly interwoven fabric of executive acts and discourses, in order to tackle the problem while keeping in mind the acceptability of the methods for both the people and the rule of law.
In order to contain the epidemic and avoid a disaster in the under-funded hospitals, the French government decided to impose a hard lockdown on the population. We saw our constitutional freedoms - of movement, of assembly, of trade - suspended for the good of our fellow citizens and our national community. To legally suspend these existential liberties, the French President had to declare the State of Emergency: it consists in putting on hold the regular, daily rule of law in order to fight an impending peril for the nation, granting extended powers to his government and himself. Given the nature of that peril, this sanitary State of Exception is the only legitimate response: the way other countries without lockdown are dealing with the pandemic - like the US - is a prominent example of how seriously the public opinions are taking their State's duty to protect its people. That is the theory.
In practice, having to fill a paper authorization each time we have to go to the grocery store is a special kind of violence. We know it is for the greater good, and we don't want our actions to undermine the collective effort; but being forced to do it reminded us that freedom, of any kind, is never everlastingly granted. This general shrinking of basic freedom had to meet some sort of acceptability in order to function. Hence, to prevent systematic disobedience while governing uncertainty, the executive and legislative powers valued that a basic form of repression was needed (growing fines for trespassing lockdown rules). But governing being easier with people's consent, the President and the government began a tight collaboration with a team of medical doctors and public health experts. Together, they brought to life a public discourse aiming at inciting people, instead of punishing them. At first, the key element of their daily press updates was the unfamiliarity. Delivering discourses about the virus and its spreading was uneasy, given the quickly shifting nature of our recent knowledge about it. It produced an effect of invisible and diffuse threat, demanding strong measures that some of our fellow citizens struggle to accept at first. A collateral effect was the changing crowd on TV news anchors' seats, replacing the usual politicians and commentators by medicals doctors of any branches.
Their knowledge about the virus was fresh too, adjusting along with the discoveries. In other words, this first period of lockdown understandably didn't bring about a very unified, coherent speech about the silent threat. Then, the French President pronounced a speech where he made the medical response to the epidemic a war against the virus. It singled out the enemy clearly, as well as the effort we had to make to contain the peril, bringing together the national community.
While weeks passed and days looked alike for non-essential workers, the executive power increasingly relied on experts and medical doctors, and a special scientific committee was created. Although it is legitimately needed, the systematic reliance on science suggested a depoliticizing effect on the political response to the situation. A smart move willing to change the narrative by directing attention away from the French government mishandling of protective gear stocks, such as masks and hospital gowns. Equally, the public health's chief daily press briefings announcing the dead and hospitalized, warning about the infinite diversity of the fatalities' profiles clouded us with dread, leading us into fearful compliance.
As the death toll rose, the thirst for scientific discourse grew stronger among people, as well as public and scientific controversies. Interestingly, this thirst for expert speech obliterated someway a loud character in French politics, the right-wing populists: being denied their usual seats on news TV sets, they fell back on their personal Twitter and Facebook accounts to speak their truth addressing a scattered set of topics.
These elements show how substantially this virus collided with our daily lives, to the extent that we struggle to find one area of our existence that is left untouched by the Covid-19 aftermath. The entirety of our behavior is now closely monitored by public health institutions and experts, telling us to wash our hands a hundred times a day, not to touch anyone, respecting one meter of safe distance... the rules we have to live by to eliminate the Covid-19 are implemented in our very bodies, through a wide range of recommendations, nudges, and repressive methods.
Today, the lockdown lift is taking it further. Once managed the relative containment of the virus, the main danger once collective isolation is lifted is to rekindle the infection rate. Along with now well-known social distancing gestures, the French government is building, like a dozen other countries, a tracking app, with the close collaboration of tech giants. Its efficacy remains unknown, and numerous scientists are puzzled about it. Likewise, public transportations are mobilizing to implement those new norms, transforming our subways and train stations into giant tic-tac-toe to impose social distancing in crowded areas.
This pandemic brought us collectively in an uncomfortable place, tormented between a will of complying with hard rules for the greater good, and the sheer fear and anger of seeing or freedoms shrinking. The legion of new sanitary norms are indeed meant to be temporary to tackle the pandemic, but they might define new normality in the post-COVID world, where physical contacts get frowned upon, and behaviors and bodies get overly governed.
By Prune Zammarchi
Prune Zammarachi, aged 26, is a french student post-graduated in Contemporary Philosophy and Political Science. She seeks to develop her career in Geopolitics and International Relations. Throughout years of research, she specialized in Political Philosophy and Science, more precisely on logics of power. She worked at political and social institutions on the effects of the political speeches, on the grassroots of speeches, and on government policies.
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