The biggest social event in France this year? The 25 million plus audience for the television address by President Emmanuel Macron on the coronavirus crisis on the evening of Thursday 12 March. His watchword? “We need to gain time!” On the Monday, with only one weekend in time gained, 35 million tuned in to hear him declare six times in 21 minutes: “We are at war”.
In the fragmented world of the modern French mass media, these were record figures, audiences without precedent for an event without precedent in the lifetime of anyone under a hundred years old. More seriously, they are larger by far than the number of French electors who went to vote on the Sunday, just over 20 million out of the 45 million on the rolls. So a moment of generous social solidarity? You might think so from one phrase that stood out in what was a rather haltingly delivered speech on the Thursday: “Trials like these are never surmounted by staying solitary. It is by solidarity, in saying ‘we’ rather than thinking ‘I’, that we will face up to this immense challenge.”
And four days later, he declared that, just as there had been “a before” this epidemic, there would, at some undefined time, be “an after”.
