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Restaurants in Paris fear for their livelihoods as Covid-19 closure decision looms

Bars and restaurants in Paris fear the worst as the city prepares to find out whether it has become a Covid-19 'maximum alert' zone, which involves widespread closures.

Published: 2 October 2020 16:05 CEST
Restaurants in Paris fear for their livelihoods as Covid-19 closure decision looms
Ramon, 22 , is a waiter at Gaston, a brasserie in Paris. Photo: The Local
Anger has been mounting in the French bar and restaurant sector ever since the government launched its new Covid-19 alert level system last week, where the worst affected areas are ordered to close down bars and restaurants completely in a bid to halt the spread of the virus.
 

“The problem doesn't lie with restaurants, yet they are making us pay the bill,” said Alexis Dabanian, the owner of Gaston, a brasserie situated on the usually lively Place de Contrescarpe in the Latin Quarter, just south of the Seine.
 
Dabanian worried that he would soon have to close down his establishment completely for the second time this year, after Health Minister Olivier Véran on Thursday evening warned that the capital had surpassed the thresholds to be bumped up to a “maximum alert” level, 

 
“We need a few days to confirm the trends, but if they are confirmed, we'll have no choice but to put (Paris) on maximum alert, from Monday,” Véran said.
 

 
That would mean that bars and restaurants in Paris and its petite couronne (the suburbs of Hauts-de-Seine, Seine-Saint-Denis and Val-de-Marne) likely would have to close down on Monday.
 
Six other French cities – Lille, Lyon, Toulouse, Saint-Etienne and Grenoble – were also put on notice of a possible maximum alert.
 
“If we have to close down, there will be many restaurants that won’t open again,” Dabanian told The Local.
 

 
 
 
The Latin Quarter is usually a flourishing neighbourhood, its many bars, restaurants, bakeries and fast food shops full with both locals and tourists.
 
But Friday at lunchtime, Gaston's tables, like most restaurant tables enclosing the Contrescarpe roundabout, were empty.

“Normally, our tables would be full at this hour and it would have been impossible for me to have this conversation with you,” Ramon, 22, a waiter at Gaston told The Local while he gesticulated around to the empty restaurant. 

Economy Minister Bruno Le Maire has repeatedly vowed that the government would not leave those hurt by the new rules behind, and promised to further bolster already existing help schemes to provide economic aid to ease the blows.

France has set up a dazzling €100 billion rescue package to boost the country's reeling economy and prevent the pandemic from provoking mass bankruptcies and layoffs by keeping long-term economic help schemes in place for struggling businesses.

ANALYSIS: Will Macron's €100,000,000,000 rescue plan be enough to save France?

The government also said the measures were key to stop the spiralling Covid-19 rates and ease the mounting pressure on hospitals in hard-hit areas, a position backed by several hospital spokespeople.

But the decision to target bars and restaurants specifically stirred up a deep-set discontent in the sector that predated last week's announcements.

France’s restaurant and bar owners were, along with the tourism sector, among those who suffered the most from the two months of strict nationwide lockdown this spring. 

Prior to that, they saw their incomes drop during first the “yellow vest” protests every weekend –  especially in Paris where the biggest and most violent protests were held – and then during the transport strikes, which saw their customer numbers plunge in December 2019 and January 2020.

In Bordeaux, celebrity chef Philippe Etchebest called on the whole sector to protest on Friday at 11.45am to show their anger at the new rules. Etchebest called on chefs around the country to wear black ribbons around their sleeves to show solidarity with those suffering from the measures.

 

Northeast in Paris, in the 9th arrondissement, several hospitality sector workers participated in the protests.

 

 

But in the streets around Contrescarpe, no black sleeved protesters were to be seen and none of the restaurants The Local spoke to knew the protest was happening.

“I hadn't heard about it, but I really support the initiative,” said Paolo, the owner of an Italian restaurant in Rue de Mouffetard.

Paolo was angry about what he said was another blow to a suffering neighbourhood and sector, that was trying to do its best to adapt to the difficult circumstances.

“I just filled up my fridge and now I'll probably have to throw away all the food once again, just like I had to before lockdown,” he told The Local.

Paolo had opened his restaurant in February, barely a month before the strict, nationwide lockdown entered into effect in March. Since then, things had just gone downhill, he said.

“Honestly, I just hope we will survive this. But I think that in a few months a lot of establishments will have to close down for good,” he said.

Even after they could reopen their establishments in June, the restaurants around Contrescarpe continued to see their incomes affected by the absence of international tourists, he said.

“The bistros are suffering even more than us, we're doing a lot of fast-food and take-away so we're able to serve the students in the area.”

The government's solidarity fund will provide up to €10,000 per month for the establishments suffering from the new rules, but Paolo said even this would not enough to pay back the several months of rent that had piled on top of each other since lockdown (the hospitality sector has been able to postpone their rents temporarily and pay them back later). 

“My rent is €3,600 a month. Either the government will have to erase our debt, or it's going to be the end of us,” Paolo said.

 

 

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JOHN LICHFIELD

OPINION: France’s economy is far from doomed, but not quite booming either

Depending on who you ask, France's economy is either booming or doomed - John Lichfield takes a look at who is right and where French finances are heading.

Published: 15 May 2024 11:12 CEST
Updated: 18 May 2024 11:17 CEST
OPINION: France's economy is far from doomed, but not quite booming either

France is booming. France is also doomed. Take your pick.

On a much-visited French news site Le Figaro this week, consecutive stories collided head on.

The first story reported that the annual ‘Choose France’ conference will bring a record number of foreign investments to French soil in 2024 (56 projects worth €15 billion). France is the most attractive country in Europe for foreign investment for the fifth year in succession.

The second story – an essay by the political commentator and pollster Jérôme Fourquet – said that the French economic model of the last 40 years, had “reached the end of the road and left the country in a cul-de-sac”.

France no longer “made anything”, the essay said. The economy was being kept alive by state and consumer spending, funded unsustainably by twin deficits of trade and public finance.

Which is true? Both, up to a point.

The Choose France foreign investment conference in Versailles this week will be the most successful since President Emmanuel Macron launched the project six years ago. France opened 200 more factories than it closed last year, returning to a modest trend of “re-industrialisation” interrupted by the Covid and Ukraine crises.

Jérôme Fourquet’s essay was brilliant but also over the top. It ignored some of the positive developments in France of recent years.

It suggested that France “made nothing” but also admitted that the country was a world leader in arms, cosmetics, perfume, luxury goods and wine.

France, Fourquet might have added, is also one of the world’s largest exporters of cereals. It holds a major part of Airbus, the world’s most successful plane-maker. Unlike the UK, it is still a train-maker and a car-maker, although both industries have declined.

All the same, the essay made good points about the “French model” created unconsciously over four decades by governments of Right and Left and only timidly changed by Emmanuel Macron’s Centre in the last seven years.

Fourquet defines the French model as “state-consumerist”, a mixture of excessive public spending and taxation and generous pensions and welfare payments which allow most French people to live reasonably well. Unfortunately, the high taxation is never enough to cover the public spending and the consumers consume more from abroad than the country exports.

The result is twin, expanding deficits in public spending and the balance of payments which cannot be sustained indefinitely.

In 2003, France’s accumulated state debt was the equivalent of 63 percent of annual GDP. It is now 110 percent of GDP. The annual service charge is about to overtake education as the single biggest item in the state budget.

In 2006, France’s trade deficit was €4.3 billion. In 2023, it was €99.6 billion (admittedly inflated by the high cost of oil and gas).

Fourquet says the cost and bureaucratic weight of the French state make creating businesses – and wealth and jobs – more difficult than in other EU countries. This is covered up by more state spending which, in turn, sustains consumer spending which, in turn, boosts the twin deficits. A vicious spiral.

He concedes that Macron has tried to chip away at the state in the last seven years. The President has also splashed the cash on pet projects and has done little to reduce the regulatory burden.

Rather than lighten the entire system, Macron suspends rules and norms when he wants to get stuff done (such as the rebuilding of Notre Dame cathedral). The success of his foreign investment drive is also partly based on “keys in hand” offers of low or no-regulation factory sites which are not always easily accessible to domestic investors.

Some of those criticisms are justified. Macron has not been the revolutionary that he promised to be in 2017. He has been a plodding state reformer, extending with some success the job-friendly policies introduced by President François Hollande. France being France, neither man gets any credit.

There are signs that the economic downturn late last year (and the explosion in the budget deficit) may have been a temporary set-back as Macron insisted. Growth in the first three months of this year exceeded expectations at 0.2 percent of GDP. Jobs are being created again. (More than 1 million extra jobs since pre-Covid days).

High energy costs are crippling business across Europe but they are lower in France than elsewhere. The boom in foreign investment in France has tended to be high in value but low in jobs. The industrious and energetic minister for industry and energy, Roland Lescure, says that is now changing.

One of the projects under discussion at Choose France is a home-grown plan for a €1.6 billion solar panel factory in the Rhône delta which would create 12,000 jobs.

So is it boom or is it doom?

Neither. There has been a gradual, positive shift in the French social-economic model in the last seven to ten years which Jérôme Fourquet plays down or ignores.

Macron promised to do far more but he has had to surmount to two international crises (Covid and Ukraine) and to adjust to two domestic revolts (Yellow Vests and pensions reform). His unpopularity is partly explained by his failure to sell a convincing narrative of reform; it is also explained by France’s obsession with “reform” (in the abstract) but hatred of all “reforms” (in detail).

But what are the alternatives? All the opposition forces, from far-left to far-right, offer policies which would preserve or worsen an unsustainable status quo.

Macron’s final three years are unlikely to achieve much in the way of new reforms. A recovery of the economy might warm attitudes to Macronism (a big ask) and allow his would-be successors in the Centre to block Marine Le Pen in 2027.

Otherwise, Le Pen’s zombie economics – extra spending, no new taxes, breaking the European single market – could tip a heavily indebted France into the abyss.

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