A-Infos (en) France, OCL CA #340 - "The attestation", book by T. Boulakia and N. Mariot at Anamosa (September 2023) (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

For 55 days, from March 17 to May 10, 2020, confinement prohibited the 
movement of the population in France. This book questions how this 
obedience was imposed through two axes. The first is the analysis of 
forms of state coercion. The second is reserved for behaviors, 
conformist or rebellious, and the issues that underlie them. Reading it 
allows you to extract yourself from your personal experience and to have 
a general snapshot of this period supported by many examples. We only 
report the most salient aspects but the work is much richer than this 
brief summary.

The first part of the book, the longest, returns to the form of 
confinement applied in France, the State having opted for very strict 
modalities compared to other countries, in particular by the absolute 
ban on public spaces which will only rarely be applied elsewhere. 
However, today, epidemiological studies seem to show that this has at 
best had only a very weak effect on reducing contamination compared to 
more flexible policies. The authors therefore question the motives of 
the different policies and they note that the most coercive States are 
those which have a greater presence of law enforcement: "There is a 
marked affinity between confinement and usual repressive practices". 
France has therefore experienced one of the most severe forms of 
confinement which is linked to its usual repressive practices, in 
particular the state of emergency (from November 2015 to November 2017). 
She will thus experience the obligation to stay at home, with a shower 
of even more restrictive local regulations which will be added to the 
national rules. The new legal regime imposed has transformed any person 
present in public space into a potential offender. Any exit required 
completing a self-certification on "honour" justifying the reason. This 
certificate "materializes the double play of constraint and obedience... 
Do I have my form? Is it full? Am I overstepping the boundaries? Am I at 
risk of an inspection? ". People "perversely" became the agents of their 
subjugation, "transforming everyone into their own policeman." Access to 
public space was regulated by the State and its relays. 100,000 law 
enforcement officers were mobilized who had little else to do than 
repress offenders, helped by auxiliaries (game warden, forest ranger... 
and even hunters). There will be 21 million checks and more than 1 
million arbitrary fines because anyone found outside was a priori 
suspected of an offense (fine for buying only one baguette, for sitting 
on a bench , to use a bike for shopping, to go out in flip-flops, etc.). 
It was "a disciplinary device... to monitor and punish" relying on all 
the available arsenal (from drones to boat or helicopter patrols). This 
repression particularly affected the poorest and most immigrant areas, 
with excessive verbalization in working-class neighborhoods ("financial 
bludgeoning of young men from the "neighborhood"").

The second part discusses the different attitudes during confinement. 
The authors look at the logic of obedience and we only take up a few of 
their very interesting analyses. They recall that the repressive 
situation prohibited organizing collective protest in the public space. 
Apart from extremely rare public protests (all the media and political 
organizations have generally relayed the need for this confinement in an 
uncritical manner), people have had to "tinker" with individual 
strategies. The absence of public protests should therefore not be 
understood as a marker of consent because there have been discreet forms 
of protest (such as chants in windows denouncing the government). A 
fraction of people frequently circumvented the rules (falsifying 
certificates, going out beyond 1 km, etc.). Another fraction of the 
population scrupulously respected the rules imposed in the continuity of 
respect for the social order. Furthermore, part of the population seems 
to have remained cloistered at home... and the sociological profile does 
not refer to elderly people. What explains this compartmentalization 
refers to cultural and political capital. The unclear nature of the 
exceptions allowing exits, their frequent modifications, seem to have 
prevented these people from calmly understanding the possibilities 
available to them and therefore did not resort to what the law 
authorized them. There is therefore clearly a social divide in the 
different strategies adopted, particularly between men and women. Women 
will be caught between work (a result of the gendered segmentation of 
the labor market) and domestic activities. In addition, the policing of 
the home imposed by men means that "confinement has become an additional 
instrument to regain control over their partner". Finally, the authors 
return to the numerous accusations and try to understand the levers. 
Confinement and the permanent imposed promiscuity will generate a 
nuisance, particularly noise, "instead of saying 'my neighbor is making 
noise', we could now say 'my neighbor is not respecting the 
confinement'[...]These denunciations are not emanations of spontaneous 
popular participation in the restrictions, but are part of the efforts 
made to protect against their consequences.

This book is rich both in accounts of what really happened during 
confinement and in detailed analyzes that go beyond the false evidence. 
However, although the authors discuss methodological constraints at 
length and in an educational manner, they seem to perhaps overinterpret 
some statistical results. Despite this minor drawback, the approach 
taken makes it possible to provide indications on the differentiated 
strategies during confinement and in the end it is much more their 
analyzes than the figures presented which are interesting.

VR

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