French Press Review 24 March 2020: Doom, gloom and confinement

Today's French front pages offer a range of emotional possibilities, from the extreme gloom of business daily Les Echos, where the headline story tells us that the Eurozone economy is going down the tubes even more dramatically than during the subprime financial collapse in 2008.

A currency dealer, wearing a mask to prevent contracting the coronavirus. via REUTERS - YONHAP

The French economy minister, Bruno Le Maire, is quoted on the same front page as saying that we are facing a global crisis worse than the 1928 crash.

Which is, let's be honest, less than cheerful. The antidote is to be found, perhaps unsurprisingly, on the front page of Catholic La Croix.

There we read that life is returning to normal in China and in South Korea. But even that good news is tempered by the fear of re-contamination as restrictions are eased, and people resume the sort of traveling that made the virus so dangerous in the first place.

Le Monde reports hen-house mutiny

Le Monde, normally a sober, centrist newspaper, may have blown a fuse. They have started a live forum to which readers can contribute messages, anecdotes, recipies, reading lists . . . anything they think might help others to get through the next 24 hours with their sanity more-or-less intact.

So there are stories about a mutiny in a hen-house, about an enthusiast who has mowed his garden lawn so many times in the past week that his neighbours are now trying to recruit a professional hitman.

There are also messages of support from some big names, not all of them necessarily from the person supposedly in question.

For example, I've just read a message of support for all those who are finding confinement difficult from a French champion, Thomas Pesquet. But it's clearly a fake, since Pesquet did his six months of confinement on the ISS, the International Space Station, not as this message claims, with ISIS, the French initials for the Islamic State terrorist organisation.

Le Monde's moderator points out the cheat, and uses the occasion to remind those of us who are going mad in small apartments of the sacrifices made by submarine crews, astronauts and prisoners, for whom this sort of life within limited horizons is nothing out of the ordinary.

The main story in the right-wing daily Le Figaro looks at the transfer, currently in progress, of Covid-19 sufferers by military plane from the overwhelmed north-eastern area around Mulhouse in Alsace, to hospitals in the western city of Brest where there are, for the moment, emergency beds available.

Globe-trotting Tesson calls for change

Le Figaro also carries a remarkable interview with the writer and traveller, Sylvain Tesson.

Tesson says that this tiny virus has put an end to the nightmare of the global marketplace. "We knocked down walls," he says, "barred barriers, opened doors, so that the monster of global cyber-commerce could devour the world. Until Covid-19 took advantage of the planetary scale at which we now live to provoke a planetary hecatomb." Tesson compares the coronavirus to the Twitter message, saying that both are toxic and quick.

In a few weeks, he continues, we've gone form a world without borders to a world limited by the walls of our own homes. If we don't use this tragic experience to reconsider our recently vaunted globalisation, Sylvain Tesson continues, then we will have missed a rare opportunity.

Closer to home, he suggests, we may learn to have a new respect for the institutions of the state, which have enabled the making and enforcement of decisions that, we hope, will save thousand of lives.

There are, Tesson reminds us, no Yellow Vested protestors or other revolutionaries trying to burn motorway roundabouts or posh restaurants anywhere in France right now.