A rapidly spreading global pandemic didn’t stop Parisians from crowding public parks and pathways on the first, warm sunny weekend of the year — and then posting the evidence on Twitter and Instagram. The French government was watching.
“We’ve also seen people getting together in parks, in bars that haven’t respected the order to close, as if somehow life hadn’t changed,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a televised address Monday evening, when he announced a countrywide lockdown on top of the government’s earlier efforts to close restaurants and cafes. “It’s not just you that you aren’t protecting — recent developments have shown that no one is invulnerable, not even the youngest of us.”
