Confined to the countryside, Jean Viard began to find the containment decreed to curb the epidemic of "a little painful" coronavirus. Invited to Frédéric Taddeï's broadcast on Europe 1, the sociologist highlighted the lack of others. "I am a man of relationships," he explains. Not really done, nor used to being alone for such a long time. "There are unbearable things, like not seeing my youngest grand-forwards. I can't talk to them on the phone and they don't understand why their grandpa suddenly disappeared."
>> During the confinement intended to slow the spread of the coronavirus epidemic, Frédéric Taddeï reinvents En Balade with and questions, from a distance, personalities on the way in which they live this period. Find all his shows in podcast and replay here.
"When we pass on a screen, we reduce the corporality"
But what Jean Viard especially noticed is that "what is missing is the corporality, the body of the other". And that does not necessarily come from the intimate sphere. "Not necessarily the spouse but the bodies of others, people on the street, office colleagues," he explains. "When we pass on a screen, we reduce the corporality. It lacks a thickness of reality, and that is what, I believe, the most painful."
More generally, Jean Viard sees this confinement as a "historic event". "The great confinement will take place in the history of societies. There will be a before and an after," he predicted. He saw in the era "a totally contradictory movement". On the one hand, the world is closing and barricading itself, blocking its borders, reducing freedom of movement to curb the spread of the disease. "And at the same time, humanity has never cooperated so much," said the sociologist.
"We have become civic citizens again"
"We can criticize the Chinese who manipulate the figures, but the sequences of the virus he gave us [to study the disease] are correct. Compared to previous pandemics, it is the cooperation of humanity that will allow n "have" only "one or two million dead", continues Jean Viard. "Whereas the usual rate for a pandemic is usually 50 million dead."
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Another change brought about by the epidemic: "we have again become civic citizens", who obey the rules laid down. Whereas before, "we were mostly grumpy consumers", points out Jean Viard.