How virus crisis is changing the face - and politics - of French society

TheThe French government keeps repeating the point: the end of the lockdown – which started to be relaxed on May 11th - is primarily a health challenge, as we learn to live with the Covid-19 epidemic. But what the government does not say is the extent to which these first days of monitored freedom and the months to follow are set to become an absolutely unprecedented political experiment.

This health crisis has exposed many failings and as a result some of the power and decision-making systems which until now had been firmly locked in place are starting to fracture. Society as a whole is stepping into the gaps that have been created. This could throw up some radical new opportunities in the coming years. And it could even completely redraw the political landscape.

For what is the current state of play after a crisis that has been extraordinary both in its suddenness and scale? Central government has shown its weakness and faces unprecedented dissatisfaction, even outright rejection – at levels greater than anywhere else in Europe. Its underestimation of the challenge in the first months, its lack of preparedness, the empty warlike posturing of the head of state Emmanuel Macron, the lies, the condescending speeches; everyone, or just about everyone, has understood all this and taken it as a given.
But there are many other factors which will doubtless have a massive effect, even if it is still too soon to know the precise extent. The two months of lockdown – from March 17th to May 11th in France – have profoundly altered our relationship to work, to how we behave as consumers, to managers, to the iron laws governing workplace hierarchy in France, to company strategies, and to the way shareholders think.

These two months have torn down the economic dogma which insisted that it was 'irresponsible' or forbidden to question issues such as the never-ending chipping away at the scope of public services, a tax system which fuels inequality, an insistence on the need for growth, the organisation of the country around large urban areas, and an obsession with public finance deficits and debt.

Who today would dare to insist that “the state's budget is like a household's budget”? Yet we have been listening to this refrain for years from the Right – in the form of former prime minister François Fillon – from the centre in the shape of former justice minister François Bayrou, and President Emmanuel Macron who has declared that there is “no magic money”. And we have heard it from a few leading socialists too.

Finally, these last two months have completely changed our image of social hierarchies. We have rediscovered this phrase from the 1789 'Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen' which has been ignored for too long: “Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good.”. We now question or criticise the social utility of the “first on the rope team” - to use the expression employed by President Macron to describe the better-off in society – when those who were the first to carry on with their everyday jobs in society during the crisis were the very same groups who had previously been dismissed as mere “nobodies”, people who were invisible to and ignored by our authorities.

It is, therefore, a quiet revolution which is taking place in lockdowned flats and houses. As people have been forced to stop work or work in very different ways, they have begun to question their relationships to others, to society and to the idea of the collective. In doing so people have inevitably debated the way we live, our social system, the way our politics works. They have also sought to assess the scale of the social violence and suffering caused by the lockdown, which the coming months will amplify with the looming 'social tsunami' (read the article by Mediapart's Laurent Mauduit, in French, here).

This is what is unprecedented: the pause button has been pressed on the economy yet never before has French society taken part in such a profound debate and with such diverse approaches. They did not need an outline of some hypothetical sunlit outcomes that might occur after the Covid crisis to do this. Instead, from the start of lockdown, and then as it has eased and we start to live in our new restricted freedoms, large sections of society have got to work. And in doing so they have come up with an array of different initiatives and actions.
Healthcare staff were the first to show the way. Faced with government incompetence, health workers have come together and, working establishment by establishment, have reinvented their hospitals, doubling the number of intensive care beds, reorganising hospital units and their functions, and putting in place new networks. Many say that they have rediscovered the “meaning of their profession”, the power of collective efforts, the joy of self-organisation, the freedom to take initiatives and the responsibility that goes along with that.

What has been the government's response to these workers? The offer of a bonus, which has already been shown to be something of an illusion, perhaps a medal revived from the 19th century, the award of the state's highest honour the Légion d'Honneur for the most deserving, and perhaps a special parade on Bastille Day, July 14th! In this way a grateful Nation thanks its nice children; the current monarchy-style Republic rewards its good subjects just as Napoleon Bonaparte showed his support for his veteran Old Guard troops.

The inter-hospital collective which had already been organising protests about the situation in accident and emergency units well before the Covid-19 crisis quickly showed its anger over these latest infantile ideas. For in fact a rather more substantial battle is already underway in hospitals against the “return of the spreadsheets”, bean-counting managers, financial objectives and activity-based costing in the health service. Workers are also fighting for higher salaries and for healthcare careers to be more highly valued.

The new factor now is that the nursing staff, supported by the general public, finally have the upper hand in their fight to make their voices heard. “No Return to the Abnormal!” is their slogan. It is a winning formula. And they are not alone.

Teachers, too, are in the process of making the same case. Faced with an education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, who has been bypassed by events, having been caught unawares by his own president – first of all over the timing of the school closures in March, then their reopening in May - and openly opposed by his own senior civil servants (see their blog on Mediapart by the 'Groupe Grenelle', the name coming from rue de Grenelle, the Paris address of the Ministry of Education), teachers have themselves invented new practices, working school by school and class by class. Away from the education authorities and the school inspectorates, the great majority of teachers have taken it upon themselves to choose and organise the details of the return to school.

The dangerously archaic nature of our political system

During the lockdown teachers had managed to make distance learning work as best they could with the poor IT resources that were provided with by the Ministry of Education. Today, with the help of local councillors and town hall staff, they are experimenting, testing and fine-tuning schools so that they can operate even during this epidemic.

The same thing is also happening in many crèches. In this sector, too, collective groups have quickly been set up, bringing together people from different professions and of different status, as they rethink the way they work in looking after the youngest children. It is the same in some town halls and those councils running départements or counties where new networks combining social help and solidarity have been tried out and set up.

And what is happening in the public sector, which has been denigrated for so many years with staff salaries held down, is also true of the private sector. In many companies groups of workers have themselves taken on the organisation of the return to work and tackled the issue of the new health and safety requirements in the workplace.

Amazon was forced to close its warehouses after legal action by trade unionists. And car maker Renault's plant at Sandouville in northern France was shut pending the implementation of new health measures after a court ruled in favour of legal action brought by the CGT trade union. A large collective including trade unionists, politicians and intellectuals greeted this ruling by calling for “citizens, trade unionists, associations and politicians” to “mobilise” and rethink working conditions and guarantee safety in the workplace (see their appeal in Mediapart Club here).

The clarion calls from the agriculture minister Didier Guillaume for the public to head for the fields and join the “army of farmers” have proved a spectacular flop; there were around 250,000 candidates but there were just a few hundred work contracts on offer (see this article, in French, by Amélie Poinssot). But far removed from the Ministry of Agriculture some local farmers have set up groups and come up with new ways of marketing their produce at local level.

Finally, there is the world of associations and voluntary groups, where people have mobilised and come together on the basis of solidarity, sharing and mutual help. Numerous initiatives have sprung up, of which Mediapart has been able to give a flavour. At Creil, north of Paris, the merging of three associations to deliver shopping to people on their own or in difficulty is one example among many others: see the video here at 9 minutes, 20 seconds. Examples at Pantin, a north-eastern suburb of Paris, in neighbouring Aubervilliers, at Morlaix in western France, and at Noiseau, a south-east Paris suburb, can be seen here at 44 minutes, 17 seconds.

All these dynamic initiatives might at first glance seem to be nothing particularly unusual. What could be more normal than a society mobilising itself when faced with a crisis? But everyone feels that something quite different is now taking place. First of all, because this mobilisation follows on from two years of social tensions and on occasions revolts; the 'yellow vest' protest crisis; the climate movement involving young people; the strikes and protests over the state of hospital accident and emergency units; and the protest movement against pension reforms, the biggest social conflict since 1968.

The next point is that this form of mobilisation raises fundamental political questions: about health, education, work, the environment, the economic model and the political system. Finally, such actions are taking place at a time there is a widespread rejection of the government and a sense of dissatisfaction with a helpless and often ineffective state.

In other words, Emmanuel Macron and his government are confronted with a new power struggle, the novel aspect of which is its sheer negativity towards them. Calls by the president for people to “reinvent themselves, and me first of all” were quickly forgotten. After the failures of presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, has Emmanuel Macron not become the latest incarnation of a presidency that has in effect already been deposed and which the country can no longer stand?

For what this flurry of initiatives and mobilisation, and this capacity for self-organisation and innovation, have also shown is the extent to which a health crisis has ended up revealing the dangerously archaic nature of our political system. An arrogant and self-important government has been stripped bare at a stroke by a shortage of face masks. A top-down, centralising government has now suddenly been obliged to trust in the local councillors it once scorned and the citizens it preached to.

The image that Macron has evoked since his election in 2017, that of a providential man, an all-powerful and all-knowing president, a Jupiter-like figure, no longer exasperates people. People now simply cannot stand it. Because it is precisely that image which has caused the endless problems (see the article by Ellen Salvi in French here), the collapse in democracy and the widespread poor governance.

It is now down to the opposition to grasp the true nature of the very political movements which French society is now engaged in. Not so that they can produce the umpteenth 'national saviour' candidate for the next presidential election in 2022. That is doomed to fail, as have all previous such candidates since the switch from seven-year to five-year presidential terms in 2002, and the subsequent holding of Parliamentary elections in the same year as the presidential poll.

In fact, what these mobilisations show – and this had already become apparent during the earlier crises – is the urgent need to sweep away our political system. It is about finally bringing in – and not just talking about it – new ways to debate and make decisions, and a new way for citizens to monitor actions taken by the public authorities and elected officials. It is also about installing new Parliamentary checks and balances, a new form of decentralisation which does not lead to the creation of regional barons or provincial bigwigs, and a new social democracy.

Yet an obsession with the presidency continues to gnaw away at the still-divided Left and the Greens. Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the radical-left La France Insoumise ('Unbowed France') promises to be the “last president”. However, his devotion to the memory of the late socialist president François Mitterrand (as he showed in this Tweet on May 10th) and his personal style of managing La France Insoumise allows for a certain scepticism about this. Arnaud Montebourg, a socialist minister under President Hollande, has also started to reappear on the political scene, and has been giving more and more interviews (such as this one with Mediapart) just in case....Meanwhile, the former 2007 socialist presidential candidate and former minister Ségolène Royal is making her own plans, and the Green politician Yannick Jadot devotes his thoughts to it day and night.

But those who want to put to stand for office should be looking to agree an altogether different kind of pact with society. Mélenchon knows full well that his political model Mitterrand was only elected in 1981 because the Socialist Party had fed off society's political movements and struggles throughout the 1970s.
One can assess how far the Left still have to go down this route by reading the appeal launched by left-wing figures and party representatives (with the exception of La France Insoumise) on May 13th 2020. In this long article the signatories propose organising a “one-world convention” in the coming months, a convention whose functions are as unclear as the name.

At least these political representatives are speaking among themselves and are trying something. But they lack the links and bridges to society which they were unable to construct during the yellow vest movement - which they looked down on with the greatest suspicion - and scarcely any more during the protests against pension reforms in late 2019. This society of social movements is today passing them by. It is up to them to wake up quickly and refashion themselves by forgetting the old political habits of the world before Covid-19.

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• The French version of this article can be found here.

English version by Michael Streeter