It’s perhaps the most publicized worry of the week: the threat of bedbugs. What does this media hype mean? A social question that sociologist Jean Viard is looking into today.
There threat of bedbugs, widely publicized this week in France, and even across the Atlantic where. the American press is talking about this new French psychosis.
franceinfo: What should we think and decipher Jean Viard, in relation to this information which has worried many French people?
Jean Viard: It has above all become a political question, because of the Olympic Games. Because the bedbug does not kill, it is very unpleasant, but it does not kill. And the problem is that the bedbug is around fifty years old. But 50 years ago, we used the products that we had already used in the Camargue to eliminate mosquitoes, and we were basically able to make them disappear a little, but not disappear, mutate. So, the bedbug that is coming back now, first of all, it has a much thicker skin. And it produced an antibody against our mosquito control products.
And then, it turns out that the government, the public authorities, considered that it was a private problem, like if you have mice in your home, we don’t immediately call the police, we try to get rid of them. . And then the international press started laughing because of the Olympic Games, especially the Americans. But if we come to France, etc. Suddenly, it becomes a political problem.
The question is: how do we try to get France to make a sign to say that it is going to reduce this problem, when the truth is that it has become an absolutely extraordinary business. There is almost 900 million in turnover from those who remove bedbugs. More than 3,500 businesses have been created. But it is first of all, I believe, the effect of the Olympic Games which made politics take it up.
But it’s not just a psychosis, it exists, even if there is perhaps a little exaggeration?
Absolutely. There is approximately 1 in 7 families who have been confronted with these beastly rooms. It hit a low point, after the Marrakech earthquake, all of a sudden, we released the bedbug, in a sort of catastrophic atmosphere, which is characteristic of our media society. There is a kind of competition between the media that I understand. But at the same time, we are constantly creating a feeling of urgency and catastrophe which is extremely worrying, which worries the whole of society. Because obviously, for example, the SNCF, 37 customers said: “we saw bedbugs”. The SNCF, we told us, we went to check, there was none, there was something else.
There is a kind of paranoia, a fear as soon as you scratch. Remember, last year, these were the horses found mutilated in the fields, for 15 days, a month. Then we realized that it was false. There were successive accidents linked to accidents. I think we need to be very careful. We must stop panicking society because it makes people feel unsafe, it makes us all feel unsafe. It takes a little to calm things down.
Don’t we also like to scare ourselves collectively?
That’s true, there is a phenomenon of acceleration, but there are great fears. I remind you that after the French Revolution, in the south of France, we were certain that there were going to be armies, wars, people fled. Societies always tell each other tragic stories. As we live in an ultra-media world, we need one every three days to keep us interested.
Whereas before, with the Great Fear, we could last several months. It’s one of the games of life, I understand it very well, scaring yourself, finding yourself, reassuring yourself, these are psychological processes, but there, it almost becomes a kind of successive collective anxiety. We have a real anxiety at the moment to highlight, it is global warming. We have a war to wage, it is to restore nature. That’s the central object. You have to be careful not to make the others the main objects.