Jacques Julliard: "We lived happily and we didn't know it"

The historian notes that what seemed important to us yesterday seems paltry today. That yesterday's invisible ones have become today's essentials. These exceptional circumstances call for crucial political choices, which the people alone have the key to.

Jacques Julliard is an editorial writer for the weekly "Marianne".

Extreme situations, such as the one we live with coronavirus and containment, have the effect of calling into question the conventions that, for convenience or conformism, we accept in everyday life as obvious. Failing to change life, the Covid-19 is changing, at least temporarily, our way of seeing it.

When life is in danger, the whole system of the social hierarchy collapses

To help me survive, my doctor, my nurse, my baker suddenly become characters infinitely more important to me than my deputy or my banker. Television, which is the arbiter of social elegance, attests to this. As a little boy I knew told me:

"When

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