Benjamin Sire is a composer. He is a member of the Board of Directors of Printemps Républicain.
The coronavirus epidemic, and even more the confinement it induces, is profoundly changing our lives and our habits. It also changes our outlook on certain professions which, sometimes humiliated, often despised, devalued almost permanently, yet form the admirable cohort of the front lines of the Republic.
It is these medical staff who, for months, if not years, have been crying out for their discomfort in the appalling indifference of the public authorities. Those who, in the daily life of a dilapidated public service, face the violence and the growing incivism of the populations at the time of the individual king. And here we are every evening applauding them at our windows, between awareness and sometimes hypocrisy, realizing that they are putting their lives in danger to save ours.
These are the firefighters, who, not long ago, let their anger burst on the boulevards, pointing to the constancy of their lack of salary upgrading, as much as the increasingly dangerous exercise of their interventions, in certain districts in particular.
It is these teachers, with too low incomes, whose whole invisible work is mocked, who sometimes exercise the fear in the belly, whose lives and mobility are subject to the Kafkaesque whims of their administration, and who, in recent days, bend over backwards to ensure improbable educational continuity.
It is these exhausted police officers, mobilized every week for months by the crisis of the yellow vests, then by the demonstrations against the pension reform, who are today summoned to expose their health on the altar of maintaining order and control of these French exit certificates. These same police officers who, in the grim aftermath of the 2015 attacks, also saw themselves applauded by some of those who yesterday still nailed them to the pillory in ignorance of their condition.
The artists' works are today the last bulwark against the madness that awaits us in our sanitary enclaves.These are all those who hold the State at arm's length, when its head sinks into contradiction, inconsistency, amateurism and dilettante arrogance. These are all those whose merit is suddenly recognized at a time of danger ... probably before turning their back on them again when the threat has passed. Or not.
But these professionals are not the only ones who are the subjects of our versatility. There are others, of which the author is a modest member, who now see their imperative usefulness as a recourse to the gravity of confinement, when they have been, lately, only objects of jibes. I thus summon artists, filmmakers, musicians, writers ... all those whose works are today the last bulwark against the madness that awaits us in our sanitary enclaves. No doubt we will not have the decency to recognize it, as the observation of our past irony is today severe for ourselves. But the facts speak for themselves and bind us, whether we like it or not.
Social networks are teeming with suggestions of films to watch, books to meditate without moderation, series to cling to like the ropes of the Raft of the jellyfish, while Netflix and others are on the verge of clogging the flow of the canvas. Our evenings follow each other to the rhythm of the lives and videos of various artists who, from their home, like the radiant Keren Ann, or the Capuçon brothers, brighten up our partitioning with the poetry of their souls. Sometimes with more or less success, certainly, more or less sincerity too, more or less decency finally. Because mockery has a hard skin, that even nasty humor remains a weapon against despair, and that our divisions will not stop at the pretext of a virus, showing moreover its potential to exacerbate them. Because also certain artists do not have the talent to know the place that society plans to concede to them. So we will quickly sweep away these confinement journals, produced by a few bourgeois feathers reversing the postulate of creation and the relationship so much commented on today between the work and the one who produced it. Convinced that their person is the motive of art, they have committed the odd to knock us out of the banality of their seclusion, the very one that we all undergo, most of us with less comfort. We need Kessel (or others) telling us the nights of Siberia more than Leila Slimani telling us the secrets of her navel; of authors with strong experiences, drawing lessons for everyone, than plumitives with no other destiny than their boredom. And again, even this is subjective.
We prefer artists who are fully artists rather than drawing up the breviary of our uncertain turpitudes during their holidays.What is less so is the origin of the denigration which the artists undergo and which, once again, is due to their propensity to give themselves a role which is not theirs. We prefer them investing all their strength and their time in shaping a work, than deceiving their neuroses and their guilt by incontinent petitions on subjects that escape them. We prefer them giving themselves body and soul to the tyranny of the muses, rather than in approximate chroniclers of public affairs. In short, we prefer them fully artists rather than drawing up the breviary of our uncertain turpitudes during their vacation.
But behind all this, behind the screen of those we know and who chronicle our dreams, there are these thousands of craftsmen and technicians who, some in the live performance, others, more numerous, in the cinema as on television, are the architects of the creations that we admire, or comment forcefully when they do not have the leisure to please us. The very people who, like other sectors of activity, see their professions today suffering excruciatingly from the consequences of the coronavirus, and which are already precarious on a daily basis, tremble at not being able to contemplate the next day. The very people who make up the despised legion of show intermittents, whose permanent questioning of their status is a toy in the hands of those who support employment policies. This famous annex 10 of the unemployment insurance scheme, as extensively commented on as its financial reality is ignored by those who condemn it. Because these technicians, the very ones who are behind the films and series that ensure the viability of our confinement, have nothing in common with the easy caricatures that we make at leisure and that follow them like shadows sarcastic. Because on the pretext that everyone claims to have a uncle who knows a sister-in-law who thinks he knows an intermittent who abuses his rights to hang out somewhere between Goa and Kathmandu (which is improbable in terms of the rigor and the precariousness of 'a status that is difficult to renew), this makes it possible to disparage the vast majority who work more than any other employee. Because some people consider the hard work and finances of such a machinist in terms of what they know about the contingent microcosmic of stars lying on a bed of euros, this allows the majority to ignore what it means to leave for 3 months on a shoot by abandoning woman and children to bend to insane work schedules, often at night, often in extreme cold or scorching heat ... Because ... What does it matter, since thanks to them, we do not crack yet in the derisory civic duty of our renouncement of light and real social interactions. What does it matter, because thanks to them, our containment evenings are less dark and sad than we imagine.
So thank them too. Thank all those who, in their own way work to make possible the surreal present we live in and prove to us how art, in all its forms, is an essential pillar of our humanity. Like many other areas. And it is then in these circumstances that we measure the importance of all trades, that we measure how much we all need each other to make society and create common.