When the winter sun sets over the French region of Champagne, the countdown starts.
Workers stop pruning the vines when the light dies at around 4:30 pm, leaving them 90 minutes to return from the cold, change their work clothes, get in their cars and return home before the coronavirus curfew at 6 pm.
Forget socializing with friends after work, kids’ clubs after school or night shopping in addition to quick trips to the essentials. The patrol police demand valid reasons from the people who walk around. For those without them, the threat of increasing fines for curfew violations is increasingly making life in a pandemic even more difficult.
“At 6 pm, life stops,” says Champagne producer Alexandre Prat.
Trying to avoid the need for a third national blockade that would further affect Europe’s second largest economy and put more jobs at risk, France has chosen to expand the curfew. Large parts of eastern France, including most of its regions bordering Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Italy, face movement restrictions from 6 pm to 6 am. At 12 pm, the curfew is the longest anywhere in the 27 nations of the European Union.
Starting on Saturday, the rest of France will follow suit. The prime minister announced on Thursday an extension of the 6 pm to 6 am curfew to cover the entire country, including areas where the night time limit for returning home did not begin before 8 pm.
French stores close at 6 pm. Outdoor activities are interrupted, with the exception of quick walks for pets. Workers will need notes from the employer to commute to work or work after curfew.
Those who have lived with a longer curfew in recent weeks say it is often bad for business and for what remains of their anemic social life during the pandemic.
Until a few weeks ago, the night curfew did not start until 8 pm in the Prat region, the Marne. Customers even stopped to buy bottles of their family’s sparkling wines on the way home, he said. But when the time limit was advanced to 6 pm to decrease coronavirus infections, drinkers disappeared.
“Now we have no one,” said Prat.
The village where retiree Jerome Brunault lives alone in the Burgundy wine region is also in one of the 6 pm curfew zones. The 67-year-old man says his loneliness weighs more without the opportunity for drinks in the early evening, snacks and chats with friends, the so-called apéro meetings so dear to the French that they were more hurried, but still viable when the curfew began, two hours later.
“With the 6 pm curfew, we can no longer go to see friends for a drink,” said Brunault. “Now I spend my days without talking to anyone, except the baker and a few people over the phone.”
By extending the 6 pm curfew across the country for at least 15 days, the government plans to limit infections in the country, which has recorded more than 69,000 COVID-19 deaths. He also wants to slow the spread of a particularly contagious virus variant that has spread to neighboring Britain, where new infections and virus deaths have soared.
An earlier curfew fights transmission “precisely because it serves to limit the social interactions that people can have at the end of the day – for example, in homes,” said French government spokesman Gabriel Attal.
Curfews in other parts of Europe all start later and usually end earlier.
The curfew in Italy runs from 10 pm to 5 am, as does the curfew in Latvia, which runs from Friday night to Sunday morning. Parts of Belgium have a curfew from 10 pm to 6 am.
People who leave between 8 pm and 5 am in Hungary must be able to show the police written proof from their employers that they are working or commuting.
There is no curfew in Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Lithuania, Malta, Sweden, Poland or the Netherlands, although the Dutch government is considering imposing a curfew.
In France, critics of the 6 pm curfew say that the early hours really crowd people after work, when they pile up on public transport, clog roads and buy groceries in a narrow rush hour window before they return home.
Women’s rugby coach Felicie Guinot says that negotiating rush hour traffic in Marseille has become a nightmare. The city in the south of France is among the places where the most contagious variant of the coronavirus began to manifest itself.
“It is a mess for everyone to be home at 6pm,” said Guinot.
In historic Besançon, the fortified city that was the hometown of the author of “Les miserables” Victor Hugo, the owner of the music store Jean-Charles Valley says that the 6 pm deadline means that people will no longer show up after work to playing guitars and other instruments that he sells. Instead, they run home.
“People are completely demoralized,” said Valley.
In Dijon, the French city known for its spicy mustard, hard-working mother of two, Celine Bourdin, said her life was reduced to “dropping the kids off at school and going to work, then going home, helping children with homework and preparing dinner “.
But even that cycle is better than a repeat of France’s blockade at the beginning of the pandemic, when schools also closed, Bourdin said.
“If my kids don’t go to school, it means I can’t work anymore,” she said. “It was terribly difficult to be stuck almost 24 hours a day at home.”