PARIS (AP) – As the pale winter sun sets over the French region of Champagne, the countdown begins.
Workers stop pruning the vines when the light goes down around 4:30 pm, leaving them with 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 any socializing after work with friends, kids clubs after hours or any night shopping in addition to quick trips to the essentials. The patrol police demand valid reasons from the people seen around. For those without them, the threat of increasing fines for curfew violations is increasingly making life outside the weekends just work and no fun.
“At 6 pm, life stops,” says Champagne producer Alexandre Prat.
Trying to avoid the need for a third national blockade that would further damage Europe’s second largest economy and put more jobs at risk, France is opting for gradual curfews. 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.
The rest of France could follow suit quickly, losing two extra hours of freedom that were just enough for residents to maintain a basic social life.
Until a few weeks ago, the night curfew did not start until 8 pm in the Prat region, the Marne. Customers still 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 reduce viral 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 “apero” meetings so dear to the French that they were hurried, but still viable when the curfew started 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.”
Imposing a 6 pm curfew across the country is among the options that the French government is considering in response to the rise in infections and the spread of a particularly contagious virus variant that has spread across Britain, where new infections and deaths by viruses soared.
Prime Minister Jean Castex may announce an extension of the curfew on Thursday night, as well as other restrictions, to combat the virus in a country that has seen more than 69,000 confirmed deaths from the virus.
An earlier curfew fights the transmission of the virus “precisely because it serves to limit the social interactions that people can have at the end of the day, for example, in private homes,” said French government spokesman Gabriel Attal.
Night curfew has become the norm in areas of Europe, but the 6 pm to 6 am curfew in 25 regions of eastern France is the most restrictive in any of the 27 European Union nations. All curfews in other countries start later and usually end earlier.
The curfew in Italy runs from 10 pm to 5 am, as does the curfew from Friday night to Sunday morning in Latvia. French-speaking regions of Belgium have a curfew from 10 pm to 6 am, while in the Dutch-speaking region of Belgium, the time is from midnight to 5 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 wondering whether imposing the curfew would delay new COVID-19 cases.
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 virus variant began to manifest.
“It is a mess for everyone to be home at 6pm,” said Guinot.
In historic Besançon, the fortified city that was the hometown of “Les Misérables” author 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 pungent mustard, hardworking mother of two, Celine Bourdin, says her life was reduced to “dropping the kids off to school and going to work, then going home, helping the kids with homework and preparing dinner “.
But even this cycle is better than a repeat of France’s blockade at the beginning of the pandemic, when schools also closed, says Bourdin.
“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.”
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Leicester reported in Le Pecq, France. AP journalists across Europe contributed.
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