It’s no surprise Brits are denouncing each other for breaching lockdown rules

The mayor of Paris’s 20th arrondissement has asked residents of her neighbourhood to stop denouncing each other. ‘When it’s a question of violence against women or children, or selling drugs, I’m still all ears,’ said Frédérique Calandra this week. ‘But these calls stigmatising Parisians who wish only to get a breath of fresh for a few minutes, they’re unacceptable.’

Passing on a message from the police, Calandra told people to stop denouncing their neighbours for petty infractions of the confinement regulations because it was overwhelming their emergency phone lines.

In reporting the case, Le Parisien newspaper headlined its story ‘Halte à la délation’, which is the word for passing on information to the authorities. It was common currency during the war, when a large minority of French society enthusiastically denounced their neighbours and acquaintances during the German occupation.

There was an expression for it: J’irai le dire a la Kommandantur [I will go and tell the commandant], taken from the headline of an article written by the poet Robert Desnos in September 1940 in the newspaper Aujourd’hui.