‘At the beginning of a pestilence and when it ends, there’s always a propensity for rhetoric. In the first case, habits have not yet been lost; in the second, they’re returning. It is in the thick of a calamity that one gets hardened to the truth – in other words to silence.’ Albert Camus, The Plague.
Faced with Covid-19, France has not yet reached that moment of silence when one gets hardened to the truth. Rhetoric still has the upper hand as President Macron’s address to the nation on Monday night revealed. Repeating six times that France was at war with the virus and that consequently she had to move to a state of quarantine, he studiously eschewed the French word confinement, which is the state France finally moved to at 12 noon on 17 March, following in Italy and Spain’s ghostly footsteps. All states have and will make mistakes in dealing with the epidemic.
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