François Clauss: "My daughter and I will belong to the Covid generation"

"At nearly 60, I will never have lived five, six, seven, even eight weeks in a row 24 hours a day with my parents' only company.

Dad for a little over 30 years with four children, I never had the opportunity to live five, six, seven, even eight complete night and day with one of my three sons, I now live with my daughter, she like me will belong to "the generation Covid".

What will remain… difficult to measure but I remain firmly convinced that to one degree or another, we will remain deeply marked.

At the age of seven, I was confined for almost a month with a string of children, on a farm in the middle of Sologne, it was in May 1968, the school was closed.

I have never forgotten this "extra-ordinary" period when we ate the two farm produce daily, asparagus and strawberries. Not a single month of May since when I can not resist the consumption of these two gustatory wonders from the sandy soils of Solognotes.

In the adjoining room, the grown-ups listened to the radio over and over again, to experience what was going on there from a distance ... far away in the capital of the burning barricades. I never forgot these echoes, this sound, I will become a journalist on the radio a few years later.

What will remain tomorrow of this strange word, completely obsolete and absent from our vocabulary yesterday that we use hundreds of times every day: containment?

On the antenna of Europe 1 this morning, the great sociologist of the François de Singly family told how this confinement revealed in a striking and sometimes conflicting way what have been the great mutations of the family bond since the revolution of May 68. The assumed coolness parents delegating authority to the educational institution, finding themselves destitute, forced to become custodians of education and authority, the generation of dads lying on the carpet watching a DVD of Tchoupi or playing lego, forced to get up to learn the multiplication tables. What will remain of it? Too early to answer ...

Those who passed their bac in June 1968 underwent the biting irony of their elders or their cadets, generation of the braded bac. Those who pass their baccalaureate in 2020 will forever remain the generation of distance education, from the pain of confinement, bubbling with hormones, but confined. They may come out stronger, different for sure.

Of this generation Covid, how not to have a thought this for those henceforth so patronized "seniors". These 790,000 residents in Ehpad, these two million French people aged over 85 who have necessarily felt the abandonment, at the edge of the road of social community. Some already, according to testimonies emanating from the Ehpad, would have preferred to leave the path themselves, "what good is it?", For the others, of these elders ostracized in the name of sanitary well-being, what will remain of it? it, from this confinement?

As a child, I made fun of my grandfather and then my father when I heard the famous maxim "you have never known war". Without any will on my part to make the slightest inappropriate parallel, and any proportion equal, I imagine my daughter and my sons tomorrow saying to their own children: "You, you have not known confinement". This strange parenthesis, so briefly enchanted and so painful, sometimes mirrors our joys, so often our sorrows. "