Confinement: "The biggest event in my entire journalistic career"

On November 10, 1989, by telling the Berlin Wall that collapsed before my eyes live in the 6:00 p.m. newspaper of Europe 1, I thought I had experienced the strongest event of my whole journalistic life.

22 years later, in Cairo, by telling in this same newspaper of 6:00 p.m. the collapse before my eyes of an indestructible military dictatorship, unbolted by the only force of the people on a place, I thought I had experienced the most intense emotions of my life as a journalist.

And yet Wendy, 9 years later after this spring of 2020, I have the feeling of having been confronted with the greatest event of my entire career as a journalist, combining the strength of the event of 1989 and the emotion flush with skin of spring 2011.

These three months ... locked up ... in a strange feeling of suspended time, this planet which suddenly stops spinning, all of us connected to the world by such a tenuous thread between chilling fiction and agonizing reality ...

The impossibility of rubbing shoulders with the reality on the ground - the very essence of our profession - the obligation (breaking a taboo of the profession) to write and speak in the first person…

To be able every Sunday evening with you, Wendy, to transmit at a distance and write my feelings was a great opportunity, and on the occasion of this last chronicle of the season, it's time to thank you for having me, in September last, offered this precious niche of expression.

We all remember what we did on September 11, 2001 when NY collapsed, we all remember what we did on November 13, 2015 when Paris was bleeding.

Without the same tragic dimension of course, we all found ourselves plunged into the same collective stupor during these 3 months of spring 2020.

Going up the thread, Wendy, of these 34 chronicles that we have shared since September 2019, I am seized with a form of vertigo.

Everything that seemed “huge” to us at one point T, Balkany in prison, Neymar conspired, Australian dromedaries machine-gunned on a burning continent, the Joxe trial and the “me too” wave, England leaving the European ship, all of which becoming so “small”, forgotten, swept away by the pandemic tsunami…

What will be left of this spring 2020 ???

Shall we tomorrow chronicle the air of a new time?

I would almost believe it… seeing the enthusiasm and the seriousness of these 150 citizens drawn at random on the lawn of the Palais de l'Elysée, sketch the outlines of new political decision software. I would almost believe in seeing this new generation of feminized and green elected officials who are about to take the reins of all the largest cities in France from Bordeaux to Lyon, from Marseille to Strasbourg, I would almost believe in discovering that 'after 3 months of despair, booksellers in France have never sold so many books since the beginning of deconfinement ...

On the contrary, will we have to chronicle tomorrow a “Houellebecquien” world that before and worse?

I sometimes dread it when day after day, Renault, the hall of shoes, Airbus grows and amplifies the long litany of social plans I sometimes dread it like these 56% of employees who express their fear of a return to the office after 3 months of confinement, I sometimes dread it by discovering this Trumpian America which decides to preempt with blows of billions of dollars for her and for her alone the available stocks of Remdesivir which will be can -to be tomorrow the only protective drug against the virus.

Hope or fear this world after, it may be the subject of another series of chronicles tomorrow…

And that will remain the very essence of our profession, Wendy, telling about these times that change especially when they remain out of the ordinary.