And suddenly, it was August; grudgingly but obediently, the rue des Martyrs in Paris’s ninth arrondissement entered lockdown at midday on Tuesday, the few people on its pavements making their way home, baguettes and shopping bags in hand, reports The Guardian.
By 12.30pm, half an hour after France’s new reality – in essence, no going out unless to buy food or essentials, visit the doctor or get to a job certified as not doable from home – came into force, the normally bustling shopping street had emptied.
“It feels quite weird,” said François Cornet, 31, hurrying back to his nearby apartment with his partner, Suyaka Sudre, 29, and their seven-month-old son. “Though as long as we can shop for food, I guess we’ll manage.”
Sudre said the couple had debated long into the night, after President Emmanuel Macron on Monday evening announced the country’s toughest restrictions on public life outside wartime, whether to leave Paris and stay with relatives in the countryside.
“In the end, we decided we couldn’t,” she said. “None of them are getting any younger, and we didn’t feel we could take the risk of infecting them. So we’ve stayed. We’ll have to see how it goes. I don’t think it’s going to be much fun.”
France’s cafés, bars, restaurants and non-essential shops were ordered to close their doors at midnight on Saturday. On Monday night, Macron decreed the new measures, repeating six times during a sombre address – watched by a record 35 million people – that the country was “at war”.
Anyone flouting the restrictions, in place for at least the next two weeks, risks a fine of 38-135 euros. “I know what I am asking of you is unprecedented, but the circumstances demand it,” Macron said. “The enemy is there: it is invisible, it is elusive, but it is making progress.”
The interior minister, Christophe Castaner, said 100,000 police officers would be deployed to enforce the lockdown, with checkpoints to be set up nationwide and anyone stopped outside their home asked to justify the reason why on a form downloaded from the interior ministry website.
The form, a legal document that can also be copied out by hand, requires any French resident who goes outside to declare, on their honour, that they have done so for one of a handful of permissible reasons - which also include walking the dog and “brief individual exercise, excluding team sports”.