Cafes,
brasseries
and restaurants closed on time.
Minutes earlier, on Rivoli street, dozens of bicycles and some electric scooters formed an extensive peloton that accelerated in a
final
sprint
to return home on time.
At midnight from Friday to Saturday, the Parisians who a few minutes earlier were still filling the terraces or strolling through the city center, had disappeared.
Everybody?
Not.
Four young people sat on a bench outside the Hôtel de Ville, the monumental headquarters of the Paris City Council, defying the curfew that French President Emmanuel Macron had ordered in a television interview on Wednesday.
They say their names are Kenzio, Moha, Leah and Jul. They are devouring the hamburgers and potatoes they just bought at McDonald's.
They are between 17 and 19 years old.
Three minutes have passed from the time they are supposed to be locked up.
They are not in a hurry. The dialogue is accelerated, at times delusional.
The night is long.
Kenzio: We don't care.
If the police control us, I'll run away.
Or my mother will pay.
We are not going to stop leaving because France goes bad.
If France does not take care of us when we go wrong, we are not going to take care of them.
Moha: It's a shitty country anyway.
Leah: Well I love France.
Kenzio: It is a poorly managed country.
Anarchy would be better.
Moha: Don't mix it all up, you don't know what anarchy is.
Kenzio: Yes, no law.
In the television interview, the President of the Republic had a few words for the young people who, already during the confinement between March and May, spent weeks without going out at night, who had to learn to follow their studies from home and by computer and who In the middle of the economic crisis, they have seen their job expectations lowered.
"It's hard to be 20 in 2020," he said.
Kenzio: Suffer, us?
We still hang out more than before.
Moha: Macron makes me nervous.
They interrupt, laugh, take a picture with the Hôtel de Ville behind.
It is 10 minutes after midnight, Paris and eight other major French cities are under curfew.
It is a nightly confinement that, for at least four weeks, will prevent almost 20 million French people from going out into the street between nine at night and six in the morning.
It will only be possible to circulate with a receipt.
But there are hardly any police on the streets of Paris.
No control during a walk of more than two hours, neither in the streets nor the subway.
In a television program, the philosopher Bernard Henri-Lévy had said: “A curfew is when the Germans are in Paris, when there are attacks by the OAS [the terrorist organization that in the sixties opposed the independence of Algeria], it could be justified when there are Islamist attacks.
It is not justified by a virus ”.
"It's terrifying, it's morbid, it's sordid!" Actor Fabrice Luchini said in a video on social networks, complaining about the closure of restaurants and shows, the main victims of the measure.
The beheading on Friday afternoon of a professor near Paris relativized the debate over the curfew.
All the discussions of the last few days - about civil liberties and authoritarianism, about the errors of crisis management or the fear of the second wave - seem less serious, as if in these hours France had remembered that the serious threat lurks and disturbing of Islamist terrorism.
"It is exciting to be with you the last night before curfew," the writer Virginie Despentes had said a few hours earlier in a crowded room at the Center Pompidou where these days a seminar is being held - with invited artists, intellectuals and activists - around to the philosopher Paul B. Preciado.
“It is 8:30 pm.
Tomorrow, at this time, we will all be home, "he added.
News of the attack had not yet reached the room.
The spectators and protagonists would discover it with horror when leaving.
It was the last show at that time for the next several weeks.
Meanwhile, no cinema, no theater, no concerts from 9:00 p.m.
After eleven o'clock, the moviegoers left the multiplexes in the Les Halles shopping center.
"It is annoying, because there are not many people in the cinemas at night and hygiene regulations are respected," says a neighbor of the neighborhood who is a regular at these cinemas.
Outside, the cafes and restaurants are packed.
"I remind you that you must be home before midnight," the patron of Le Saint Honoré, Francis Richard, told his customers, some of whom lingered on the terrace before their beers and cocktails.
“Today there are more people than usual.
They know it's the last day, ”he says.
Nothing indicates that midnight has struck, Paris has not changed suddenly under curfew, but after a while the traffic is more fluid and it becomes more rare to meet someone on the street.
Three men argue at the Saint-Michel metro entrance.
"After midnight," says one, "you are outside the law."
It is 00.28.
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