How the French view their weekly clap for carers

Once a week we break French emergency law and have a friend round for drinks on the terrace. The terrace overlooks the village rooftops as if it were a box at the theatre. Two weeks ago we were pleasantly lit up, when, at one minute to eight, the villagers below came out on to their terraces or stood at their windows and front doors to make a noise in support of the ‘essential’ workers: nurses, doctors, carers, postmen, shopkeepers, council workers, and so on.

Some banged saucepans together or beat them with wooden spoons. Some blew horns of one kind or another, including what sounded to me like one of those long prayer horns blown by Tibetan monks from monastery rooftops. And on the dot of eight o’clock the priest advertised the Catholic church’s approval by energetically tolling the church bell. Perched high up on one of the two hills enveloping the village is a social housing estate of small attached block houses partially concealed among the scrub oaks. By the sound of it the people living up there had been drinking all day. Their elated primal screaming and wolf howls added a shrill, minatory note to the communal applause.

Smirking at each other with embarrassment, we put down our drinks and stood in a row and unctuously clapped for about half a minute. As we clapped, I wondered which sentiment of the various plausible options we were supposed to be expressing. Were we perhaps apologising, for example? Were we perhaps saying: ‘Okay. Sorry. This pandemic. Blimey. Talk about caught with our trousers down. Of course we had hoped that this polite fiction of an equal society would continue for a good few more years yet.