A man pushes his bicycle along a row of closed restaurants in Montmartre, during the new imposed curfew in Paris. Photo / AP
A man pushes his bicycle along a row of closed restaurants in Montmartre, during the new imposed curfew in Paris. Photo / AP
As the winter sun sets over France's Champagne region, the countdown clock kicks in.
Workers stop pruning the vines as the light fades about 4.30pm, leaving them 90 minutes to come in from the cold, change out of their work clothes, hop in their cars and zoom home before a 6pm coronavirus curfew.
Forget about after-work socialising with friends, after-school clubs for children or evening shopping beyond quick trips for essentials. Police on patrol demand valid reasons from people seen out and about. For those without them, the threat of mounting fines for curfew-breakers is increasingly making life outside of the weekends all work and no play.
"At 6 pm, life stops," says Champagne producer Alexandre Prat.
Trying to fend off the need for a third nationwide lockdown that would further dent Europe's second-largest economy and put more jobs in danger, France is opting for creeping curfews. Big chunks of eastern France, including most of its regions that border Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, are living under 6pm-to-6am restrictions on movement. The 12-hour curfew is the longest anywhere in the European Union's 27 nations.
Starting tomorrow, the rest of France will follow suit. Prime Minister Jean Castex announced yesterday an extension of the 6pm-6am curfew to cover the whole country, including zones where the nightly deadline for getting home hadn't started until 8pm.
French shops will have to close at 6pm, outdoor activities will stop, with the exception of quick walks for pets. Workers will need employers' notes to commute or move around for work after curfew. Those who have lived with the longer curfew for the past couple of weeks say it's often bad for business and for what remained of their anemic social lives during the pandemic.
A fisherman reels in his line before a curfew is enforced in Marseille, southern France. Photo / AP
Until a couple of weeks ago, the nightly curfew didn't kick in until 8pm in Prat's region, the Marne. Customers still stopped to buy bottles of his family's bubbly wines on their way home, he said. But when the cut-off time was advanced to 6pm to slow viral infections, the drinkers disappeared.
The village where retiree Jerome Brunault lives alone in the Burgundy wine region is also in one of zones already shutting down at 6pm. The 67-year-old says his solitude weighs more heavily without the opportunity for early evening drinks, nibbles and chats with friends, the so-called "apero" get-togethers so beloved by the French that were hurried but still feasible when curfew started two hours later.
"With the 6pm curfew, we cannot go to see friends for a drink anymore," Brunault said. "I now spend my days not talking to anyone except for the baker and some people by phone."
People on the streets of Strasbourg, eastern France, before the curfew comes into effect. Photo / AP
By extending the 6pm curfew nationwide, for at least 15 days, the Government aims to limit infections in the country that has had more than 69,000 known virus deaths. It also wants to slow the spread of a particularly contagious virus variant that has swept across neighbouring Britain, where new infections and virus deaths have soared.
An earlier curfew combats virus transmission "precisely because it serves to limit social interactions that people can have at the end of the day, for example in private homes," Government spokesman Gabriel Attal says.
Curfews elsewhere in Europe all start later and often finish earlier.
The curfew in Italy runs from 10pm to 5am, as does the Friday night to Sunday morning curfew in Latvia. Regions of Belgium that speak French have a 10pm to 6am curfew and in Belgium's Dutch-speaking region, the hours are midnight to 5am.
People out between 8pm and 5am in Hungary must be able to show police written proof from their employers that they are either working or commuting.
There are no curfews in Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Lithuania, Malta, Sweden, Poland or the Netherlands, although the Dutch government is thinking about whether imposing a curfew would slow new Covid-19 cases.
A masked couple walks on the empty Trocadero next to the Eiffel Tower, in Paris, France. Photo / AP
In France, critics of the 6pm curfew say the earlier time actually crams people together more after work, when they pile onto public transportation, clog roads and shop for groceries in a narrow rush-hour window before they must be home.
Women's rugby coach Felicie Guinot says negotiating rush-hour traffic in Marseille has become a nightmare. The city in southern France is among the places where the more contagious virus variant has started to flare.
"It's a scramble so everyone can be home by 6pm," Guinot said.
In historic Besancon, the fortress city that was the hometown of Les Miserables author Victor Hugo, music store owner Jean-Charles Valley says the 6pm deadline means people no longer drop by after work to play with the guitars and other instruments that he sells. Instead, they rush home.
"People are completely demoralised," Valley said.
In Dijon, the French city known for its pungent mustard, working mother-of-two Celine Bourdin says her life has narrowed to "dropping kids at school and going to work, then going back home, helping kids with homework and preparing dinner".
But even that cycle is better than a repeat of France's lockdown at the start of the pandemic, when schools also closed, Bourdin says.
"If my children don't go to school, it means I cannot work anymore," she said. "It was terribly difficult to be all stuck almost 24 hours a day in the house."
