John Keiger John Keiger

France is revolting against Macron’s second lockdown

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Second lockdowns are increasingly difficult for democratic governments to impose and maintain. Violent anti-lockdown demonstrations in Spain and Italy have hit the headlines recently. It was with considerable trepidation, then, that French political leaders ordered France’s second lockdown to begin at midnight last Thursday. It did not help that Macron like Boris had repeatedly said there wouldn’t be a second one. 

Ahead it went, to last officially until 1 December with a mid-term review around 14 November. In his TV address to the nation, president Macron foolhardily declared that lockdown would end when daily infections – running at 50,000 – were reduced to 5,000. The next morning, the head of France’s equivalent of SAGE, professor Delfraissy, witheringly declared that there was no way positive tests could be reduced to 5,000 by 1 December. A bad start. But France’s governing class were already extremely fearful of what a second confinement might provoke. Why?

It is trite to cite the historical banality of France’s revolutionary tradition. Yet of all democratic states (perhaps even undemocratic ones) France has had the most successful revolutions: 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, not to mention those that, while causing mayhem, didn’t quite overturn the government, 1936, 1968.

But these are just the revolutions. They do not include three coup d’états (Napoleon I, Napoleon III, Vichy, sort of) or attempted ones (1889, 1934, 1958, 1961). Nor do they include mere insurrections, riots, strikes.

Of greater importance is that France has an array of historical insurrectionary recipes that she can pick and choose from her cook-book of insurrectionary history according to the current occasion. These modes d’emploi are, to coin a phrase, ‘oven-ready’ in the collective minds of the French people.

Thus the bonnets rouges protests in the early 2000s or the gilets jaunes of the last two years were updated templates of local peasant revolts dating from feudal times that in the collective consciousness are well remembered as la jacquerie.

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