It was a Season 1 Containment ritual that went out of circulation in Season 2 of the Containment.
The French who, by the millions, applauded caregivers at 8 p.m. sharp in their windows in March and April are no longer making any noise.
This ceremony, inspired by our Italian neighbors during the first wave, did not survive the second, muted with a few exceptions.
The support banners on the balconies were also taken down!
But then why did the citizens, very grateful last spring to their hospital heroes, collectively decide to stop cheering them in the fall, leaving their windows closed, and not just because the weather has cooled?
For sociologist Catherine Lejealle, researcher at ISC Paris, times have changed from one confinement to another.
“The first one fell on us, we had no knowledge of the virus, it was opacity.
We were dazed, in amazement, as if frozen in the unknown with this fear of seeing hearses everywhere.
This 8 p.m. ritual was intended, very selfishly, to reassure us, to create emotional closeness by opening our windows to look at the living around us and sometimes to discover new people.
Vis-à-vis caregivers, there was a feeling of admiration but also of injustice that they were sent to the front when they were not all equipped with masks, ”she recalls.
"The grumpy Frenchman regains the energy of criticism"
Seven months later, the hexagonal population, now all masked and familiar with barrier gestures, is no longer in this state of mind of "astonishment".
“We moved on to other emotions.
We are more actors.
The grumpy Frenchman regains the energy of criticism, he will rise up against the government's failings, sign petitions, defend other socio-professional categories as much victims as the medical profession such as hairdressers and private restaurateurs of work or the cashier. in the front line which takes the postilions, ”she observes.
This distancing is not, in his eyes, synonymous with “disenchantment” with white coats.
“It's not that we forgot them, that we no longer love them.
But the spotlight is no longer on them, ”she says, referring to the relay of“ small traders ”.
If history has not repeated itself, it is also because social networks, which had spread the habit at the speed of the virus, hate repetition.
"What matters is the novelty which must allow to create the buzz permanently", recalls this expert in digital uses.
For Atanase Périfan, founder of the Neighbors Day who “has not found in our country the momentum of solidarity of the first confinement”, the context is also no longer the same.
“For some, letters of dismissal have arrived in the meantime.
The attacks also damaged morale.
The French are stressed, depressed, they do not even know if they will be able to celebrate Christmas with their family.
There is a phenomenon of weariness.
We applaud when there is hope, when we want to go outside.
There, people are in the process of turning in on themselves ”, he warns before launching a“ new call for solidarity mobilization ”.
The phenomenon of learned resignation
According to the Belgian Nicolas Pinon, doctor in psychological sciences who observed, across Quiévrain, the same turnaround in terms of applause, a "part of the population" has reached what is called "a phenomenon of learned resignation", this feeling of helplessness and loss of confidence in the future without horizon.
“Since nothing seems to work like the applause and barrier gestures, we give up, we give up.
Whatever we do, it will not change, ”decrypts this lecturer at the Catholic University of Louvain and at the Haute École Vinci in Brussels.
For him, “another part of the population” also reported “a lack of recognition of collective and individual suffering”.
“People have made interpersonal comparisons by groups or corporations:
caregivers suffer, ok, but we also suffer - restaurateurs, workers, freelancers… - and nobody seems to care about us so why applaud the caregivers?
»Analyzes the specialist.
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Gone are the days when society, "faced with the collective threat of the virus", was "won over by a phenomenon of emotional contagion", the precursor of "affective empathy".
“The applause and messages at the windows appeared as a form of social synchronization.
At such and such an hour, we would go out to our windows to salute the efforts of a few for the benefit of everyone, ”he recalls.
At that time "prevailed a feeling of control over the perceived threat where our acts of applause were a way of responding to it to ward off it."
“The caregivers were idealized because they were supposed to be able to help us overcome the ordeal,” he argues.
But since then, anxiety has intensified in the face of the authorities' “failure” to “find a collective response”.
However, according to the actors of the nocturnal cheers of yesteryear, it would not take much to rekindle the flame of sound offerings.
“All it takes is a scout, a pitcher.
Me, I am like everyone else: I am ”, testifies Sandrine, saleswoman in her forties and former faithful to the 8 pm ritual in the capital.
"If it resumed, if the watchword was given, I would do it again even if there is no longer the surprise effect and it is deja vu", agrees, for his part, Olivier , 46 years old, engineer in Montbéliard (Doubs).
He was not content in the spring to clap hands from the window of his living room, this multi-instrumentalist also played the trumpet to "thank" the caregivers while distracting the neighbors of the buildings opposite.
"But today, I'm afraid of having no audience, of being all alone like an idiot at my window curdling my ass ..."