Gavin Mortimer

On Thursday morning, I visited the cathedral at Reims. The central door on the north side is dedicated to Saint Nicasius, who founded the first cathedral on the site and who, in 407 AD, was decapitated by the Vandals. It struck me as odd that a burly security guard was checking visitors' bags, but shortly after leaving the cathedral I learned of what had unfolded at the Notre Dame Basilica in Nice. Barbarity is nothing new to France but what is so troubling about the wave of bloody violence that has swept the country in the last decade is the impotence of the rulers. Emmanuel Macron flew to Nice and made an all-too familiar presidential declaration about France 'not giving in to terror'.

The mother of my daughter didn't attend yesterday's rally in Paris to honour the memory of Samuel Paty, the teacher beheaded in a street in the north-west of the French capital last Friday. A teacher herself in a state school in Seine-Saint-Denis in the north of Paris, a district often cited as the most deprived in France, she was profoundly shocked by the death of Monsieur Paty. Naturally, she has nothing but sympathy for his family but she had no wish to stand shoulder to shoulder with politicians, intellectuals, the judiciary and members of an education authority who for years have offered her profession little or no support in their struggle against Islamic extremism.

Emmanuel Macron's bold declaration last Friday that the Republic will eradicate Islamic extremism appeared to draw a swift response in Lyon. On Saturday evening 12 masked men carried out a well-coordinated attack against a church in the suburb of Rillieux-la-Pape in what the Interior Minister, Gérald Darmanin described as a ‘shock against the Republic’. Attacks against churches and other symbols of Christianity are widespread in France; in 2017 there were 1,038 such acts recorded, a figure that rose to 1,063 the following year. Not all the attacks are carried out by Islamists. Some are vandalised by the bored or unhinged, and many are the work of the far-left.

The first thing I heard when I switched on the French radio this morning was a Green activist berating the world for its lack of urgency in tackling climate change. That's why, he explained, Youth for Climate France is organising a series of demonstrations this weekend, including one on Saturday in which Extinction Rebellion will be present. Another protest took place in France today, this one in Marseille where hundreds of angry residents vented their anger at the government's announcement on Wednesday that as of tomorrow the city's bars and restaurants must close for two weeks.

I went for a long walk last night in Paris. I chuntered most of the way, only breaking off to nod a greeting to the handful of other maskless pedestrians. We're a dwindling band, but there's a camaraderie among us, a bond created by our refusal to give in to hysteria. It's an eclectic club, cutting across sex, age and ethnicity. A report this week stated that Frenchwomen in their 50s were the most reluctant to wear masks, but in Paris I would say it's men in their forties and women in their early twenties. But to see someone on the streets in Paris without a mask has become increasingly rare in recent weeks.

If there is a God, He's not French. Last night I was on the balcony of my apartment in Paris enjoying a celebratory 'deconfinement' bottle of wine; this morning on my first day of (partial) liberty there is heavy rain and high wind. So much for getting out and about on day one of post-lockdown life in France. Not that it will be that easy even when the weather does stop misbehaving. Paris is in the 'red zone', one of four regions of France that still has many restrictions in place, affecting 27 million people. In the 'green' zone, effectively the west and south of the country, parks are open, primary and secondary schools and shops are reopening and some beaches are also accessible. In Paris, however, while most shops will reopen the parks remain closed, as do secondary schools.

Today marks the third month of my confinement in my fifth floor apartment in Paris. As I wrote all those weeks ago, shortly after president Macron declared his 'war' on coronavirus, I had adopted a prisoner psychology to see me through what I suspected from the outset would be six weeks minimum of lockdown. I wasn't wrong. I'm due for release on Monday May 11th but I can't say I'm counting down every second with a sense of impatience. Not that I want to stay locked up but I'm not sure life will change that much in the short term once I've regained my liberty: no bars or restaurants to visit, no cinemas or theatres open, no sport to watch and no travelling beyond a 100km radius. It's not going to be a summer of fun.

One of the persistent misconceptions of the riots that swept through France in the autumn of 2005 is that they were solely the result of the deaths of two youths as they ran from the police. The deaths of the teenagers on October 27 in Clichy-Montfermeil provoked unrest in the north-eastern Parisian suburb but it was what happened three days later that led to three weeks of nationwide riots and the declaration of a state of emergency by the then president of France, Jacques Chirac. According to Gilles Kepel in his 2015 book, Terror in France: genesis of the French Jihad, it was a stray tear gas grenade fired by police that landed close to the entrance of a mosque that lit the touch paper.

A couple of hours before Emmanuel Macron addressed France on Sunday night I received a meme on WhatsApp from a French friend. It was a game card for 'Macron's Aperitif Bingo', the rules for which were simple: swigs of a drink of your choice would have to be downed every time the president said a certain word or phrase during his latest declaration about his 'war' on coronavirus. 'War' incidentally was two swigs, while 'shortage of masks' was three and 'sacrifices' was four. I imagine that by the end of the president's speech quite a few players were somewhat unsteady on their feet. One suspects that Macron would not have been amused to learn that while he was making his solemn address to the nation, many of his 'chers compatriotes' were guzzling at his expense.

What with the wall-to-wall media coverage of the coronavirus pandemic it had rather slipped one's mind that there are other serious issues confronting Europe, but France got a bloody reminder at the weekend. On Saturday, a knifeman ran amok in the south-eastern town of Romans-sur-Isere, killing two people and wounding five. According to eyewitnesses, the alleged perpetrator, a Sudanese national who was granted asylum in 2017, accompanied his deadly assault outside a boulangerie with cries of 'Allah Akbar'. It is claimed in the French media that when police searched his flat they found handwritten documents in which he complained of living in 'a country of non-believers'.