Paris | Curfew requires, there will be no big festivities on December 31 to say goodbye to 2020 in France, enough to sadden some who hoped to release the pressure, while museums, theaters and cinemas are protesting their prolonged closure until January.
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“We had a hell of a year of shit, and it continues”, cowardly, disillusioned, Arthur Lacombe, a 23-year-old geography student.
Usually, he spends December 31 in Lyon (east), with lots of friends. But this year, the government decided otherwise by imposing a curfew to fight COVID-19 between 8:00 p.m. (7:00 p.m. GMT) and 6:00 a.m.
“There is a strong resignation. There is guilt among young people, while confinement is respected, ”he continues, without understanding why the Christmas party is the only one exempted from this curfew.
This year, the famous Parisian avenue of the Champs-Élysées where thousands of people traditionally gather to enter the New Year will be deserted.
Some small arrangements with the rule are however already planned to avoid a solitary New Year’s Eve.
Elie, a student in Marseille (south), explains that she will sleep where she will spend New Years Eve, probably with six or eight friends.
“If we find friends, we’ll stay there until the next morning,” she explains. “Where we go, we will sleep,” adds her boyfriend Lucas. Sofa, inflatable mattress on the floor: “We even pile up in a small apartment”.
In 2020, faced with the different waves of the coronavirus epidemic, France will have been confined for nearly three months and will be under curfew from December 15.
Cold shower
But beyond the frustration of not being able to party, other government decisions are struggling to pass.
The maintenance of the closure of museums, cinemas and theaters at least until the beginning of January, had the effect of a cold shower in the culture sector which denounces a “double standard”, facing the opening shops and supermarkets.
“It’s stupor! I don’t see any objective justification. Commerce seems to be preferred to culture. For Chantilly, it is a blow of the sledgehammer that we did not need ”, storms Christophe Tardieu, vice-president of the foundation of the domain, located north of Paris.
“Why can a shopping center open, and a museum remains closed, where circuits have been set up, where the gauge is easy to respect,” he observes.
He expects during the Christmas holidays a loss of ticket receipts of 600,000 to 800,000 euros, for the castle, where an exhibition on Meyssen porcelain is presented, and for the equestrian shows in the stables.
Thousands of museums in France thought they were seeing the end of the tunnel, actively preparing for weeks for a reopening on December 15. They believed in it all the more since in often vast spaces, and without foreign visitors, the risk of saturation is less.
Same anger in the world of the theater, where the performances had already been interrupted in the spring and in November and which hoped to be able to reopen the rooms on December 15.
“This ‘stop-and-go’ is extremely painful and exhausting because it demobilizes everyone, and that’s what, in my opinion, is going to be the most dangerous collateral damage in the very short term, it is demobilization, that is to say that people are exhausted, whether it is the permanent teams as well as the artists ”, regrets for AFP, Claire Dupont, director of Prémisses, production office dedicated to young creation.
“We are erasing a link, a relationship which is essential, that of culture, of the meeting between an audience and artists, and that, I believe, is the worst thing that we can do in the times we are going through, ”she adds bitterly.
The government, which has promised new aid to the cultural sector and also keeps bars, restaurants, sports halls and casinos closed, says it wants to limit the brewing and the permanence of the public in closed places. He fears “an epidemic rebound” when the pandemic has killed nearly 57,000 people since March.