A Village Ignored by the Coronavirus

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/01/opinion/france-coronavirus.html

Version 0 of 1.

VIALAS, France — I’m spending the coronavirus lockdown in this tiny village in southern France. Vialas, with only 400 residents, is part of Lozère, the country’s least populated department. Parisians, 400 miles to the north, typically don’t even know where Lozère is.

Which is all to the good, because people here are a little wary of visitors from the capital. When a few showed up to find refuge in their vacation homes or the hometowns they left long ago, my neighbors worried that they were bringing the virus to us. But that hasn’t been the case.

As it turns out, the virus has largely bypassed Lozère. In Vialas, no one has died, nobody has fallen ill, not even at the home for the elderly. In a country where Covid-19 has killed more than 28,000 people, the world’s fourth-highest toll, Lozère has had a single death and very few cases of infection.

Is that because the virus, so hard on other parts of the country, forgot this remote area? Or maybe it’s because, as Gianni, a landscaper here, told me, “This isn’t France,” a phrase said proudly, signifying that we’re special.

We may be special, but we nonetheless endured the same lockdown rules as everybody else. France is a centralized country, and everything is decided in Paris. And those rules have been strict: Until a couple of weeks ago, for instance, the number of times and the errands for which you could leave your home were limited, and you had to carry a signed and dated form listing the hour and reason for your excursion. By mid-May, the authorities had stopped and questioned people 20.7 million times and issued 1.1 million fines for violating the rules.

In contrast to Switzerland and Belgium (where people didn’t need to carry signed forms) and Germany (where rules were issued by local governments), the lockdown in France has been rigid, bureaucratic and infantilizing. I have been astonished by the obedience of the French, which has belied their reputation as undisciplined and defiant.

Once the shutdown was imposed nationally in March, life stopped in the center of Vialas. Dominique, the bookseller, said that the village was reminiscent of a ghost town of the American Wild West. The local government got calls from villagers telling on their neighbors for bending the rules.

Frightened, most people hunkered down at home. Of course, since many of them lived far away from anyone else, that wasn’t much of a change. The bakery stayed open, as did the superette (our little grocery store) and the cigarette shop, all essential businesses.

After a few days, though, new forms of social life appeared. A handful of regulars at our sole cafe, Chez Teuffy, gathered, socially distanced, at the same time every morning on the square. Fabienne Ambs-Szafarczyk, the village pastor, set up telephone services on Saturdays, and every evening at 5:30, people sang hymns from their open windows or their terraces. People chatted while waiting in line to enter the shops still open (only two customers allowed inside at a time).

Why has this village, and so many others in Lozère, been spared by the pandemic? The natural social distancing caused by low density has no doubt played a role. Also, the authorities here have been well organized. The village administration set up a hotline and crisis team to make sure that vulnerable residents remained in good health. The departmental government distributed cloth masks sewn by volunteers. And residents made sure that neighbors who couldn’t leave their homes were supplied with food and medicine. Such mutual aid is a real thing here.

But amid all this cooperation, in a faint echo of the lockdown protests in parts of United States, there has been discontent. Some villagers have been unhappy that the same strict rules applied to Vialas as to hot spots like Paris. I heard an elderly resident grumble, “They’re overreacting with this virus. Things were a lot worse during the war.” Anonymous protesters have put up posters saying, “Let’s get rid of them” — that is, the politicians — “with the virus.”

Indeed, a rigid lockdown doesn’t make sense in such an empty region. As my retired neighbor Astrid said, “We live socially distanced. The state doesn’t have to impose it on us.”

Like a lot of other business operators, Dominique, the bookstore owner, complains about rules coming down from on high that restrict, in a Kafkaesque manner, his ability to run his business. Stopped by a gendarme at his door a few weeks ago — he was going to the superette 30 feet away — he was fined 135 euros (about $150) because he hadn’t filled out his trip form correctly.

The mayor, Michel Reydon, is more tempered. “This centralization is excessive,” he said, “but without the lockdown, we might have had an influx of outsiders coming here from regions with stricter rules.”

Now France has started easing the lockdown, with shops and schools reopening, but much remains closed. Vialas’s little blues and jazz festivals, which take place in the summer, have been canceled. At the post office and at the closest pharmacy four miles away in Genolhac), plexiglass barriers to block germs have been set up on the counters.

In Vialas, even if people are still not kissing each other to say bonjour, they have started to have friends and family over. One recent morning I ran into Isabelle, the mail carrier, who has kept us connected throughout the lockdown. She told me, “Yesterday I saw friends for the first time in two months, and it was like a party!”

But life will be completely back to normal only once Chez Teuffy reopens, which, Paris has declared, it can do on Tuesday. When that happens, the whole village will be there.

Corinne Maier is the author of “No Kids: 40 Good Reasons Not to Have Kids” and “Heroes of the Mind: Marx, Freud, Einstein.” This article was translated by The Times from the French.

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.