Coronavirus is pushing Macron’s government to breaking point

Last week, the French were amused at Anglo-Saxon hoarding of toilet paper, known vulgarly here as ‘PQ’ — papier cul. Now France itself has tested positive for panic. Supermarkets across the country have been under siege, shelves stripped bare of loo roll and much else. The government has already requisitioned all supplies of face masks and slapped price controls on hand sanitiser — with foreseeable results. Sanitiser is now scarcer than PQ and not even hospitals have enough face masks.

When President Emmanuel Macron first went on television to reassure the French, his typically prolix message served to fertilise general nervousness. He returned to the nation’s screens on Monday night to declare France to be ‘at war’ with an invisible enemy. The strategy he had announced a few days earlier was abandoned. Restaurants and bars are to close and a 15-day lockdown was imposed, with €135 fines for violations and 100,000 police to enforce the rules — plus the army too, where necessary.

‘The one way of making people hang together is to give ’em a spell of the plague,’ wrote Albert Camus in La Peste, the existential classic invoked by Macron last week. Macron has surely read Camus, but it’s not clear that the French are hanging together. As he knows, this is an unruly country: imposing order is tough at the best of times.

French self-confidence is shaken to the bone. Macron’s early boasts that French virologists are the best in the world looks doubtful as the government struggles to contain the outbreak, or even supply the hospitals. The President’s appeals for European solidarity reflect wishful thinking. There’s a French idiom, ‘sauve qui peut’, which translates as ‘every man for himself’. This seems to have been the motto of every EU nation state: national interests are trumping every-thing.