Le Printemps de Bourges ends this Sunday evening April 24, after several days of festivities, meetings and concerts since April 19. No mask, no gauge, no health restrictions for this first major music festival of the season, while the Covid-19 epidemic is not yet contained. We are talking about it today with the sociologist Jean Viard. This example of Printemps de Bourges is not the only one, far from it. There is also, for example, the Paris Book Fair this weekend.
franceinfo: We act as if the Covid was behind us. What does it say about our state of mind?
John Viard: First of all, we were “fed up” with it, and since we found ourselves with two successive Covids which are low-toxic variants, it’s a less severe form, we all says: go, basta until summer, we forget it. So that, we will talk about it again in October, I think it may restart, it will be more complicated. That’s the first thing. We had a need to live, we need to breathe and basically, this less dangerous variant allowed us to do so.
Afterwards, it’s true that the Paris book fair at the Grand Palais, where indeed, the Bourges Festival, is the restart of major events. There are seven events in France, like this, which make more than 150,000 admissions, they are really great places, Bourges being the first each year, and one of the best known. But afterwards, what you have to see is that behind that, there are 4,000 festivals in France, and 7 million French people go there. And certainly much more popular French people, much less subscribers. For example, in the private theater in France, there are just over 6 million spectators who are often subscribers. And moreover 4.3 million are Parisians, two-thirds of the private theater is in Paris, then there are also public theaters.
But what I mean is that the festival is a more diffuse audience, more culturally open, because basically, it’s an opportunity to stay. The festival is much more democratic, basically than the other theatres, so it’s very important that it restarts, it mixes the populations, it mixes the city and the countryside because it’s often in the countryside or in small towns, and increasingly, these festivals often rely on local volunteers, whether at the Saint-Malo Festival or in Carhaix, so locally it’s a great meeting place.
People get together from year to year, they become drivers, guards, they sell tickets, there, it’s the local society that hosts. And it’s also important because there is, on one side, the spectator, it’s an absolutely major issue, but on the other side, there is this work of society, the mutual knowledge of the inhabitants in running the festival.
But we also remember that for the municipal elections in 2020, and for the regional ones last year, it had been a question, the presence of the virus in the polling stations, there. Today, that is no longer the case. While there are still more 1,500 Covid patients in intensive care units. Are we taking risks?
I won’t go as far as you. On the one hand, in many polling stations, there are masks. Many assessors have them. In my town, for example, there were about two-thirds who had different choices. And in public, the same. So everyone basically manages their own security and somewhere, that’s not bad too. It is a learning of responsibility.
The truth is that there are a lot of Covid. 15 days ago, I was with the people working on this. There had never been so many contaminations, so it went down a bit. But it is true that it is a milder contamination, and that since most people are vaccinated, even if they catch the Covid, it becomes a flu like type of fatigue.
This is also one of the results of vaccination! We are almost 90% vaccinated, I do not know the exact figure and therefore we consider that it has become a commonplace disease. But it is entirely possible that the next virus will be extremely violent. Viruses do not follow one another becoming more or less mild. But let’s say that there, we’re going to say until next October, until next fall, we’re in a period of rest. If we forget the Covid for a bit and if we breathe for a few months, I don’t think we’re going to cry.