The premise of one of GenZ’s favorite new social apps is simple. BeReal sends a notification to your phone once a day, at a different time each day. “⚠️Time to BeReal ⚠️,” says the prompt, caution triangles included. You then have two minutes to share a picture of whatever you’re doing at that very moment, using both the front and back cameras on your smartphone. If your room is messy, too bad. It is only after you snap and post your picture that you can see what other users — whether they’re friends or random strangers — are doing that day.

When you select the “Discovery” tab, you can see exactly where complete strangers are at any given time. As I wrote this story, I could see a student studying for an exam in a village in southern Spain, a girl eating lunch in the Mariana islands in the South Pacific and the inside of a high school classroom in a French town on the Belgian border.

BeReal also lets you send a friend request to anyone who’s in your phone contacts — including people you may not want to see online or in real life. When my younger sister first showed me the app, it immediately reminded me of a jealous ex-partner who would demand to know where I was and who I was with at any given moment. How easy BeReal would make life for him, I thought. Gradually, if he was paying attention, he’d be able to build up a pattern. The city park where I take my solitary morning run, my favorite daily coffee spot, my bus route and my after-work wine bar — all could now be revealed on BeReal.

A viral tweet in October by the pop culture writer Engwari sparked a discussion of the same issue. “Am I crazy or does the BeReal app not seem like a stalker's wet dream to anyone else?” she wrote. “When I first found out how it works, it reminded me of those abusive partners who angrily/jealously text you ‘take a picture of where you are and who you're with RIGHT THIS SECOND,’” one person replied. 

Like many chat apps, BeReal strongly encourages users to sync their phone contacts with the app upon download. And while the default is private, BeReal encourages you to switch on the location settings when you post. What it doesn’t tell you is that this means your precise location, down to the square meter and even your longitude and latitude coordinates. Other apps like TikTok, Instagram and Facebook harvest and collect precise location data, but they don’t do it to this degree. On BeReal, unless you turn off the location settings, anyone following you can see exactly where you are and potentially find you. I spoke to a handful of people who had run-ins with stalkers due to these features.

Jem, a 22-year-old recent college graduate from North Carolina, kept her BeReal account private, but a stalker still found her profile through the contacts import feature. “I don’t have his number saved, in fact, it’s blocked. So it was shocking to see it would still recommend me as a friend,” Jem said. When she didn’t accept his request, he made a BeReal profile posing as one of her friends. “Because BeReal doesn’t show you friends’ lists or posts, I just assumed it was actually her and added her back. He then had access to my BeReal,” she said, describing how strange she felt once she realized he had been seeing her daily activity — and her precise location, which she had switched on. “Luckily he doesn’t live near me,” Jem said.

Until very recently, it was impossible to block someone on BeReal — which presented a serious problem for people facing harassment. You could report an abusive user, but this provided no guarantees. The other option was to unfriend them, but this wouldn't make you invisible, in the way that blocking might.

When Shomil Jain, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, noticed the app snowballing in popularity on his campus, he “did a little reverse engineering” and found something that scared him. On the app’s “Add Friends” page, BeReal gives suggestions for friends of your friends to add, similar to Facebook’s much-maligned “People You May Know” algorithm. Jain, who studies software engineering, was easily able to scrape the site and see an entire network of someone’s friends — and their friends’ friends. 

Without too much trouble, Jain found that it was technically possible to see the friends of pretty much every single user on the platform, including those who believed they were protecting themselves by keeping their posts private.

“The sheer amount of data that was exposed was pretty stunning,” Jain told me. “Facebook probably spent years building security around their friend graph, and these folks just casually made the whole thing available for the world to see.”

A BeReal spokesperson named Bryan told me he recommends people only add their close friends and family on the app. Bryan also said the company would soon be launching new settings that allow users to choose whether they prefer sharing an approximate or precise location with their followers.

“Unfortunately, all things of a social nature may attract ill-intended people,” he said. Indeed. In 2022, the app attracted all kinds of people — it topped 53 million downloads by the end of the year. The company, based in France, also raised $60 million in investment funding.

Founded by French tech entrepreneurs Alexis Barreyat and Kevin Perreau, BeReal first gained traction in French universities during lockdown in 2020. It then began snowballing on college campuses in Europe and the U.S. before breaking out into the world at large.

Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz staked $30 million on BeReal in 2022. Anne Lee Stakes, a partner at the firm, wrote a LinkedIn post last week hailing the campus strategy as an “experimental” and “iconic” technique combining “brute force,” word-of-mouth marketing with the student ambassador program. The company paid student ambassadors on campuses across the world “to spread the BeReal mission and support our growth.” At Harvard, students were invited to party at a burger joint and allowed entry and free food, provided they downloaded the app and added five friends.

BeReal doesn’t serve any ads or have a subscription model, so it’s yet to be seen how it will make returns for its investors. Sources close to the company told the Financial Times in September that investors were pushing BeReal to monetize and introduce new features to avoid becoming a flash-in-the-pan app like Clubhouse or House Party. A telltale sign that it’s caught on — and may become a real money-maker — is that other platforms are trying to emulate the premise. Instagram and TikTok have launched copycat plugins of the BeReal format, called “TikTok Now” and “Candid Stories.”

This all hinges on people’s willingness to really use the app every day. Unless you post something yourself, you can’t see what other people have posted that day either. This, the app’s makers say, is to discourage “lurking” — but it also pressures users to post each and every day, making it easier for anyone watching to build a more complete pattern of someone’s life. This could be your stalker. Or it could be a tech company looking to monetize people’s data.

This is a problem, said Jules Polonetsky, a lawyer and privacy expert and the CEO of advocacy group and think tank Future of Privacy Forum. “BeReal’s main legal risk is requiring its huge teenage audience to post a photo, or be blocked from their friends’ photos. This runs smack into privacy standards in Europe and California that require privacy by default for kids and teen services.”

Bryan at BeReal told me: “BeReal’s business model is not based on the monetization of its users’ personal data for the purposes of commercial profiling or targeted advertising.” But that leaves plenty of room for other kinds of data-driven profits.

“Clearly, you have to monetize something,” said Jon Callas, the director of public interest technology at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. While it may seem nice that these services are free of charge, “instead of paying for things in cash, we're paying for them in information.”

The coercive element of BeReal also caught Callas’ attention. 

“I thought it was a joke the first time I heard of it,” he said. What was the funny part, I asked him. “It’s using social coercion to say, ‘you have two minutes to drop what you’re doing and interact with social media.’”

Even the name “BeReal,” Callas said, added to that sense of artificial peer pressure — “because if we’re not doing this thing, we’re not Being Real. And who doesn’t want to be real?”

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“What we do when we prevent migrants from crossing is that we save their lives,” Darmanin told a group of reporters.

The following month, on November 28, Darmanin returned to Calais. Instead of his usual retinue of staff, he was accompanied by officials from around the European Union. They had gathered for a crisis summit after a fragile dinghy capsized five days before, drowning 27 people in the cold, grey waters that separate Britain and France. 

Before the meeting, Prime Minister Boris Johnson sent a letter to President Emmanuel Macron, calling for closer cooperation between French authorities and the U.K. Border Force and millions of euros’ worth of investment in surveillance technology. Among his suggestions were ground sensors, radar, and aerial surveillance by manned aircraft and drones. Towards the end of the letter, Johnson also proposed the return of migrants to France. In response to the letter, which Johnson posted on Twitter, Darmanin summarily disinvited U.K. Home Secretary Priti Patel from the talks.

In September, Patel had suggested that, if France could not bring the flow of migrants to British shores under control, she would renege on an earlier promise of £54m ($72m) to help fund the policing of crossings from Calais and the surrounding area. On Sunday, Darmanin said he had received a fraction of the money. Meanwhile, record numbers of people have managed to make their way across the Channel and into the United Kingdom — more than 25,000 so far, this year. 

The drive to improve surveillance is an enormous and transformative undertaking. In recent years, residents of Calais say their city has become almost unrecognizable. The roads leading to the port, where ferries loaded with trucks depart for Dover, are now surrounded by new, high-strength fences. Along the beachfront, every 50 feet or so, new Chinese-made Hikvision CCTV cameras watch over passersby. 

And, yet, the crossings keep happening.

After Darmanin’s first visit, I climbed among the sandy hillocks at Dunes de la Slack, not far from Boulogne. It was a clear morning and, across the water, Dover’s famous white cliffs were sharp against the dawn sky. A black police truck, with what appeared to be a camera mounted on top of it, was crawling along the beach. 

Policing the 50-mile stretch of coastline between Boulogne-Sur-Mer and Dunkirk is a colossal task. The beaches are huge and the dunes full of natural hiding spots. Among them, I saw footprints weaving back and forth, where people had run down to the beach to board small boats to England.

 When migrants hoping to make the journey to the U.K. arrive in Calais, they contact local migrant smuggling networks, usually via WhatsApp, and pay upwards of €3,000 ($3,380) to cross the Channel. A smuggler tells them he will text or call when it’s time. When that message comes, migrants set to leave from Slack board a train from Calais down towards Boulogne, where they then walk for almost an hour to the beach and uncover a dinghy buried in the sand. The boat is inflated and scrambled to the water, where around 30 people clamber aboard. It then makes its hazardous way across the busiest shipping lane in the world. 

The 27 deaths on 24 November constitute the single biggest loss of life in the English Channel since the International Organization on Migration began keeping records in 2014. Since then, 166 migrants have been reported dead or missing as a result of trying to reach England from France. The danger of such crossings is one of the reasons why the U.K. and French governments are funneling resources into monitoring these waters.

In 2019, an EU research group began a project to explore new frontiers in maritime surveillance, testing out new ways to use manned and unmanned craft, both underwater and in the air, with the aim of “beefing up the European Union’s external borders.” The project wrapped up on October 31, 2021. Alongside the U.K. Border Force, Britain’s Royal Air Force has been deploying military surveillance aircraft and a civilian contractor has supplied Portuguese-made Tekever drones to patrol the Channel. High-speed, unmanned boats have also been trialled and, according to documents leaked last year, plans for “marine fences” — floating walls that block small vessels — have also been considered. 

On the French side, it’s more about boots on the ground, with gendarmes and police searching for migrants, using infra-red binoculars and increased patrols. But, at the port of Calais, they also have access to heat scanners, carbon dioxide, motion and heartbeat detectors, which, backed up by sniffer dogs, seek out migrants trying to cross the Channel by stowing away on trucks. 

In both France and the U.K., the operations are presented as a multi-million-euro rescue operation. But the life-saving argument was significantly diminished earlier in 2021, when Priti Patel ordered British officials to rewrite maritime law, so that the U.K. Border Force could carry out “pushbacks” in the Channel, forcing migrant boats headed towards British shores to turn around and go back where they came from. In September, it was revealed that Border Force staff were being trained to drive small vessels back into French waters using jet-skis, a move condemned by the French government. 

In response to questions about the recent deaths in the Channel, the U.K. Home Office would not confirm whether it was continuing to propose pushbacks as a valid method of immigration control.

Despite all the money spent on technology and manpower on both sides of the Channel, people are still willing to risk their lives to board a fragile boat and attempt to reach the U.K.

According to estimates by humanitarian groups, there are currently around 2,000 migrants staying in and around Calais. Before they have even attempted to cross the Channel, the increasing securitization of the area makes it difficult for them to exist and forces them into the city’s shadows. 

Outside the imposing walls of a ruined 16th-century fort in October, near the entrance to the Channel Tunnel in Coquelles, I met Jackson and Gago, two teenagers from South Sudan. 

They were at a phone-charging station organized by a local NGO, even though they didn’t have working phones themselves. Jackson, who requested that his name be changed, had sold his to pay for his journey to Calais. Gago’s was broken. The two boys met in Libya, lost each other on the journey to Europe, and then were reunited in Calais. They told me that they planned to stay together for the rest of their journey. 

Since arriving in Calais, Gago said that he had only had basic interactions with police. He did, however, explain that there was an unremitting soundtrack to his life. “The police find you, and they tell you, ‘Allez allez.’ I think it means, ‘Go, go.’”

Neither Jackson nor Gago were aware of all the measures in place to stop them crossing the Channel. They just knew that the journey is arduous. Gago’s arm was in a sling. A smuggler slashed it with a knife, he said, when he tried to get onto a boat for a journey across the Channel that he hadn’t paid for. 

Jackson described how he could see the lights of England from Calais. 

“We don’t have anything and there’s no way to go,” he said, “The only way is on the river and the river is too big. We can’t swim.” 

I asked if he meant the sea. 

“Yes, the sea.”

For many people migrating across Europe from the Middle East, Africa and Asia, Calais is the end of the road. Crossing the Mediterranean, through the Balkans, Greece or Italy and into France, it’s where they end up. In many cases, the journey has taken months, or even years. But, what they find is far from a safe haven.

In October 2016, the last shelter in the “Jungle” — a migrant encampment that had sprung up the previous year and grown to a peak population of 10,000 people — was destroyed. But people continue to come to Calais. Now, they bed down whenever and wherever they can, hiding from the authorities under bridges and tracts of scrubland. Every 24 hours, they are moved on by police. 

On a gloomy morning, I sat in a car, parked on a road a few streets away from the headquarters of the Gendarmerie Nationale in Calais. I was accompanying volunteers from Human Rights Observers, a group formed in 2017 to monitor police and gendarmes operations and document violations of migrant rights. In practice, that means filming daily evictions. 

After a few minutes, one, two, three, four vans pulled out of the parking lot. We followed them to six successive sites in Calais. Uniformed officers combed the areas, confiscating any forms of shelter and forcing migrants to get up and leave. 

In Calais, everyone is watching each other. While filming the police and gendarmes, HRO team members are regularly subject to ID checks. “Sometimes they laugh at us. One officer said, ‘Instead of filming us, just send us nudes,’” recalled a project coordinator named Emma. “Sometimes we are a bit paranoid. We think that everything is against us.”

Shortly after, I went to speak with Franck Toulliou, chief commissioner of police in Calais. “The aim is to prevent a new camp like the Jungle,” he said. “But we remain humane with people, whether they’re Afghan, African or French.”

Ibrahim, a 20-year-old man, originally from the Gambia, is constantly aware of the cameras installed around Calais. Every time he sees a police van, he wants to take cover. He has even had residents filming him with their phones. 

 “This is not the life I want to live. I want to move freely, because I’m young and I’m not a criminal. I don’t want to hide myself like a convict,” he said. “Cameras are everywhere in Calais. Even this place, that we are in now, there is a camera.” 

We were sitting in a garage, attached to the home of Brigitte Lipp — known to many migrants as “Mama Charge.”

An entire wall of the building was taken up by a makeshift phone-charging setup. Power strip after power strip, giving life to devices belonging to the many migrants in her neighborhood. Twice a day, every day, 66-year-old Lipp, a lifelong Calais resident with cropped blonde hair, a sing-song voice and a sharp sense of humor, opens up to provide her much-needed, free service. 

Though cell phones are vital for migrants in Calais, it’s common practice for them to be thrown into the sea once the boats reach British waters, for fear of the devices being taken by the Home Office and the information they contain used to deny asylum claims. 

Often, the most privacy-conscious people in Calais are the smugglers. In order to protect their own identities, they often warn migrants to delete their phone histories before they reach the U.K.

In 2018, the U.K. Border force paid £133,000 to Cellebrite — an Israeli surveillance company that builds mobile phone extraction technology — to scrape phones for evidence of migrant journeys. Similar payments of £335,000 were made to Swedish extraction company Micro Systemation, according to an analysis by Privacy International. Cellebrite markets its technology as able to “audit a person’s journey to identify suspicious activity prior to arrival.” 

Running down one side of Lipp’s road is a 20-foot-high fence. It’s there to keep people out of what used to be a migrant campsite. “There used to be trees all along the street,” Lipp said. “But they cut them down.” 

This is true all over Calais. The local government has deforested large areas, to make it more difficult for migrants to hide and easier for police to spot them.

In addition to the fence, a large CCTV camera has been installed a few doors down from Lipp’s house. “I’m sure it’s for me,” she said, as the camera swiveled round to follow a passing car. 

At a heavily securitized truck stop just outside Calais, razor wire, 360-degree cameras and spotlights circle the vehicles. Police vans are stationed there, and at other locations like it, 24 hours a day. A guard buzzed me in to meet Stuart and Tina Malcolm, who were eating a full English breakfast with their young son, while they waited for a ferry back to Dover. The British couple run a business specializing in cross-border removals. 

“I’ve been coming here for about 20 years. The fencing is the major change. Before, you could see the beaches, you could see everything. I know it’s necessary, but it does feel a bit Berlin Wall,” said Stuart.

 “The personality of Calais has been completely wiped out,” Tina added, remembering childhood day trips, when she and her family would eat mussels and fries. “It used to feel really welcoming, but now it feels cold and uninviting.” 

In 2015, Stuart found three young men from Mali hiding in his truck, after he arrived in the U.K. Preventing stowaways is a constant worry. British hauliers face fines of up to £2,000 for each migrant found in their vehicles. He described how, just one week earlier, he had spotted people trying to open the rear of his truck at a roundabout near the port. He showed me the scrabbled fingermarks, still visible in the dust on the door. 

“The desperation you could see in them, trying to get on the back of these trucks... it’s the scary aspect of them putting their lives at risk just to cross a body of water,” Tina said.

Both described the painstaking journey their vehicles make through the border zone.  Before they can board a ferry, trucks are scanned with X-rays, heartbeat monitors, carbon dioxide detectors and, finally, checked by dogs. Privacy campaigners have described such technology as a multi-million-euro industry that profits from the misery of migrants. But, for Stuart, it is reassuring. 

“I had an exhaust gas recirculation valve in the van. I was blowing exhaust fumes into the back. You wouldn’t want somebody in there,” he said. “The technology, when it works and is used properly, is safer, and quicker.”

Many privacy advocates believe that the border zones traversed by migrants provide ideal testing grounds for surveillance technology that will, eventually, affect the rest of us. Most migrants are undocumented and, therefore, unlikely to assert, or even be aware of their rights. Some sections of the local community, convinced that they are at the epicenter of a crisis, might also be more accepting than others elsewhere. 

“Migrants have a lot more pressing concerns than their own privacy. But I think those of us who can challenge the closing down of their rights, should,” said Chris Cole, director of the UK.-based organization Drone Watch. He argues that Calais and the south coast of England constitute a beta version of a future when “the amount of surveillance will just rocket” for everyone.

The skies over the English Channel, where Spitfires and Messerschmitts duelled during the Battle of Britain, are now the preserve of a different kind of military aircraft. In August 2020, Patel appointed a new “Clandestine Channel Threat Commander,” Dan O’Mahoney, tasked with “saving lives by making dangerous Channel crossings unviable." As of January 2021 a new command center, based in Dover, has been using drones to keep a watchful eye over the sea and search for people arriving by boat. 

The Ministry of Defence has provided the U.K. Border Force with state-of-the-art hardware including three planes and the Thales Watchkeeper winged drone. In August 2020, the Ministry of Defence announced it had deployed a Boeing P-8 Poseidon maritime plane to spot migrant vessels. Later that year former British Army officer James Cowan told a U.K. parliamentary committee that the deployment of large aircraft like the Poseidon, which has a quoted flying cost of £35,000 ($47,000) per hour, was like using “a very expensive hammer” to crack a walnut.

In contrast, Cowan went on to explain that drones provide better and much cheaper support. “The English Channel has proved to be an excellent opportunity to test the utility of two fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles,” he said. 

The Home Office has not published the number of drones in operation over the Channel, citing security concerns. 

“As part of our ongoing operational response, we continue to evaluate and test a range of safe and legal options for stopping small boats,” a Home Office spokesperson said in an emailed statement.

In France, the rollout of drones has been less smooth. In July, Darmanin said he had asked Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, to help the country “deal with” the coastline of Nord-Pas-de-Calais. 

According to the former director general of U.K. Border Force, Tony Smith, France has not been keen on using air surveillance assistance from the British government. “There has been a reluctance to accept technology from us. They didn’t want any of our surveillance capability.” he told the Telegraph newspaper in July. 

The use of drones was actually banned by the French privacy watchdog in January, in a ruling that found their use to monitor compliance with coronavirus restrictions would be a violation of citizen rights during the pandemic. Darmanin, however, is still pushing for more aerial surveillance of migrants. On Sunday, following the crisis talks with European ministers, he announced that a manned Frontex surveillance plane would now patrol the channel “day and night.”

"We have to prevent lives being lost. We have to prevent chaos coming to our external borders," EU Home Affairs Commissioner Ylva Johansson said.

As winter sets in, there’s a common feeling among migrants in Calais that time is running out. The days are getting colder, the sea more treacherous, and staying in and around the city is becoming harder. Most of the people I spoke to said they were battling colds and infections as a result of sleeping outdoors, night after night. 

Last week, I got a text message from Jackson, one of the South Sudanese boys I met near the fort. He had made it to the U.K. in a small boat, and was, for the time being, safely installed in accommodation in a Kent seaside town. He had managed to get a new phone in Calais, which the Home Office took for inspection when he arrived. “They gave it back to us, finally,” he texted me. 

“What about Gago?” I asked. 

“He’s still in Calais,” came the reply.

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“We have let down old people. We didn’t smile at our newborns because women gave birth wearing masks,” she exclaimed. “This is the society that we don’t want anymore. We want to re-establish human connection.” 

Until 2018, when she stepped down for personal reasons, Alexandra Henrion-Caude had enjoyed a successful career as a geneticist at INSERM, the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research. She was already known to be a conservative Roman Catholic, with links to groups that oppose gay marriage, but during the coronavirus crisis, has emerged as an influential figure within the country’s anti-lockdown and anti-vaccine movements, telling her 60,000 Twitter followers that the mRNA technology used in some coronavirus vaccines can modify human DNA and railing against Covid-19 restrictions. 

Henrion-Caude is just one of a significant number of prominent French medical professionals with such views. France exhibited high levels of resistance to vaccines long before the coronavirus ripped through the world. According to a June 2019 study, conducted by Gallup World Poll for the medical charity Wellcome, one in three French people believed all vaccines to be unsafe. That same year, the virologist Luc Montagnier — winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for medicine, in honor of his discovery of the HIV virus — made public statements linking childhood immunizations to instances of sudden infant death syndrome.  

The movement against the French government’s pandemic response first rocked cities across the country in autumn 2020, with the Yellow Vest anti-lockdown protests. Its momentum has not diminished. Since July, more than 200,000 people from across the political spectrum have taken to the streets every Saturday, from Paris to Marseille, chanting for the restoration of “liberté” and demanding that “Macron, get out.” 

France has now recorded more than 116,000 Covid-19 deaths. In December 2020, just 40% of people said that they intended to get vaccinated, according to figures from the French health authority Sante Publique. While that number has climbed steadily — 84% declared that they were in favor in July — thousands continue to voice vociferous opposition to health passes and vaccines. 

I recently spoke to a number of French doctors who have publicly criticized Covid-19 vaccines. Michel de Lorgeril, a 70-year-old specialist in cardiology and nutrition at CNRS, the French National Centre for Scientific Research, has written several books in which he has attempted to demonstrate that the science behind all vaccines is flawed. During a telephone conversation, he lectured me at length and declared, “I’m a CNRS researcher and no one has disputed my standing as a scientist.” 

De Lorgeril’s latest book, which disputes that vaccination is a suitable solution to the coronavirus crisis, has been accompanied by a small number of media appearances. One — broadcast by the Russian state-controlled TV channel RT France and viewed more than 99,000 times on YouTube — saw him pitted against experts encouraging people to get their shots. Bombarding the presenter and his fellow guests with purported evidence of his ideas, he appeared worryingly convincing. 

“The main question, the one that towers over all the others and has been entirely dodged by health authorities and the media, is whether we have demonstrated that these vaccines are safe, and therefore, useful,” he told me. “If you go back in history, the idea that vaccines have helped eradicate diseases is indefensible.”

As in many other countries, French suspicions about Covid-19 and the measures necessary to slow its spread can be traced back to a series of political blunders. In March 2020, Health Minister Olivier Véran, stated that wearing a mask in public was not necessary for the general public and failed to provide health workers with sufficient personal protective equipment. On September 10, Agnès Buzyn, who ran the ministry when the pandemic first hit, was indicted by a special court of ministerial accountability for “endangering the life of others” during her response to the pandemic. 

Thomas C. Durand is a biologist who runs La Tronche en biais, a website and YouTube channel dedicated to encouraging critical thinking. He and his colleagues have done a great deal to debunk false information about coronavirus and the vaccines designed to combat it. He explained that many medical professionals are angry at the government’s mishandling of the crisis, which may have made some of them less willing to believe its health messaging.

“Macron said, during lockdown, that medals would be given to doctors. Who gives a damn? There was also a clap for carers at 8 p.m. Great,” Durand said. “The current government has carried out policies that undo the French health system, and suddenly we should trust them?”

Some have other grievances. Violaine Guérin, a 61-year-old endocrinologist and gynecologist who works as a private practitioner in an affluent area of Paris, remains aggrieved that she was not allowed to treat patients in person during the height of the pandemic. She also told me that she began to notice a series of “anomalies” after the crisis started. 

“One was to tell people to stay at home,” she said. “Usually, when a person gets sick, they get an appointment with their general practitioner. Changing this process wasn’t normal. Some patients saw their condition deteriorate and died at home.”

Guérin added that, in conversations with other doctors abroad, she and her colleagues got the sense that healthcare workers around the world “had all received the same instructions” and that “something abnormal was taking place.”

For French coronavirus and vaccine skeptics, pronouncements made by the prominent microbiologist Didier Raoult proved a major turning point. In March 2020, Raoult, who is the founder and head of the Marseille-based Institute of Infectious Diseases (IHU), said that he had successfully treated patients displaying Covid-19 symptoms with hydroxychloroquine, a cheap anti-malarial drug, and the commonly prescribed antibiotic azithromycin. 

Raoult, 69, built a huge audience, posting videos on the IHU’s YouTube channel and making frequent TV appearances. He now has more than 800,000 followers on Twitter. His ideas spread across the globe. Embraced by Donald Trump in the United States and President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, they confused millions of people desperate for solutions and eroded faith in vaccines on a massive scale. 

In May 2020, the nation’s health ministry banned the use of hydroxychloroquine to treat coronavirus patients. In December of that year, Raoult was one of six doctors against whom the country’s general medical council filed complaints related to their statements on the treatment of Covid-19. He was also accused of various breaches of medical ethics. Raoult has since retired from his teaching job at Aix-Marseille University, but remains as head of the IHU. 

Yet, Guérin and some of her colleagues are convinced that he was treated unfairly and still believe his supposed cure to be effective. In response, they launched an organization known as Laissons les médecins prescrire (Let doctors prescribe). The movement was supported by Martine Wonner, a 57-year-old psychiatrist and member of parliament, who has described masks as “absolutely useless” and was expelled from Macron’s centrist La République En Marche party in May 2021 for voting against the government’s lockdown plans. 

“We were reacting to the ban on prescribing hydroxychloroquine, but keen to defend the freedom to prescribe in general,” Guérin told me.

Despite his other problematic positions, De Lorgeril is scathing about the idea of allowing doctors to prescribe whatever they like.

“This idea is all very nice but, in practice, it’s catastrophic. You have all sorts of examples, from statins to opiates in the U.S., which have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths around the world in the space of a few decades, and were prescribed by doctors,” he said. “Given how mediocre doctors’ training is, one should really not let them do what they want to do.”

While Raoult falls short of being an outright anti-vaxxer, his support for immunization against coronavirus has been muted. In July, he posted on Twitter, encouraging healthcare professionals to get their shots. Other than that, he appears ambivalent, stating that people who have recovered from the disease are better protected against the virus than those who have been vaccinated. In early September, he cut short a TV interview when he was asked whether he recommended that people get vaccinated. 

“He’s only done one tweet encouraging vaccination,” said Durand. “Why doesn’t he say that the vaccine works? I think he wants to boost his personal image, and avoid hurting the anti-vaxxers’ feelings.” 

Christian Perronne — a 66-year-old doctor, who, until December 2020, headed the department of infectious diseases at Raymond-Poincaré University Hospital in the Parisian suburb of Garches — is another well-known vaccine skeptic. Since the pandemic began, he has published two books, including a best-seller titled “Is There A Mistake They Haven’t Made?” He was dismissed as a department head for his claims about coronavirus, but still works at the hospital as a doctor and teaches at Versailles Saint-Quentin University. 

Speaking by telephone, Perronne said, “These products that are called vaccines should never have received the authorization to be sold, given that we have several products which work very well against Covid-19 and cure 100% of patients if they are treated sufficiently early. There are hundreds of publications proving this, and all of this has been ignored by manufacturers and by the authorities because, if they acknowledge that a drug is effective, they will lose the right to commercialize the vaccine.”

He then alleged that a number of his personal acquaintances had suffered devastating side-effects after receiving coronavirus vaccines. 

“Around me, four people I know well have died after being vaccinated, some had very serious accidents, malignant hypertension, thrombosis, pulmonary embolism, paralysis, loss of vision,” he said. He also described how others had “become zombies, who are not like before and have lost all their energy.”

Henrion-Caude, Perronne and Wonner were all interviewed in Hold-up (2020), a French film that puts forward the idea that the coronavirus crisis sits at the center of an elaborate international conspiracy. Despite having been removed from several video-sharing platforms, it has been viewed more than two million times. 

Slowly, French people are getting vaccinated. According to a health ministry press release, published in September, 69% are now fully vaccinated. But all of the vaccine-skeptic doctors I interviewed told me that they had not and were proud to openly express their resistance.

“I hope the French people will not submit and will say, 'Enough,'" Perrone said. 

The post The French doctors railing against vaccines and Covid-19 restrictions appeared first on Coda Story.

Lenta is part of the French protest that started in November as a collective outcry against higher taxes and declining social benefits. But the 29 year old is not like thousands of fellow citizens who have taken to the streets. Lenta is an ideological warrior who fought with Russian-backed paramilitaries in the eastern Ukrainian province of Donbas before bringing his militant politics back home.

“We must end the Republic and democracy,” said Lenta at a weekly demonstration in late February.

The Yellow Vest movement has revealed the deep-seated fractures of French society and mistrust of politicians like President Emmanuel Macron to fix economic problems. At the same time, the movement has become a new battleground of ideas — and possible recruiting ground for fringe Kremlin-linked groups to take advantage of the social disorder for their own ends.

Lenta and least three other members of his former Donbas battalion have inveigled themselves into the heart of the protests as self-appointed security guards. They don’t bear arms, but they do carry a sense of authority and self-importance that matches the rising tide of right-wing movements across Europe, many of which have links to Russia and share the common goal of undermining European institutions that Moscow considers enemies.

In December French officials told The Wall Street Journal that they were looking into any possible role that Russian bots or actors had in amplifying the anti-government protests. Macron’s election victory over pro-Russian candidates François Fillon and Marine Le Pen was a shock for Moscow, and Macron has since become one of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s most outspoken critics.

There is no evidence to suggest that Lenta and the Donbas militia members participating in the Yellow Vest movement are receiving financial support from Russia. But their presence on the streets of Paris has been provocative nonetheless.

In January, Lenta’s Donbas comrades were widely photographed at the Paris rally holding the flags of the Donbas breakaway republic, which is backed by Moscow but condemned as as illegal political entity by the rest of the international community.  

Government officials immediately tried to tamp fears of Russian infiltration into French politics, while also conceding that they were worried about the rise of militant ideology in the country that traditionally has been known for liberty, unity and equality. “Yes, there is this far-right/pro-Russian trend but it’s not the only one in the [Yellow Vest] movement,” said French government spokesman Benjamin Griveaux on the television program “The Great Rendezvous.”

Some French political analysts view the situation with more equanimity, saying the ex-Donbas fighters are more comical than dangerous.

“Their aim is to parade themselves and pretend to be war heroes,” said Jean-Yves Camus, an expert on the French far-right movement and director of the Observatory of Radical Policies of the Jean-Jaurès Foundation. “They live in a permanent fantasy and are constantly hoping to participate in something historically important.”

Russian and French right-wing intellectuals have historical ties to religion, nationalism and monarchism, but it’s only been since 2014 that Russia has seen these political views gain momentum in France. In that year, French political leader Marine Le Pen confirmed she had secured a €9 million ($11.1 million) loan from a niche Moscow bank, funds that helped propel her right-wing National Front party to a string of municipal election victories and more seats in the European Union parliament. At the same time, the National Front has become a leading critic of European sanctions on Russia and provided political cover for Putin’s annexation of Crimea and the war to split Donbas from Ukraine.

Lenta, an ex-French soldier and member of a banned neo-fascist French organization, was among a group of foreign right-wing activists who joined the pro-Russian separatists in Donbas in 2014 in a battalion known as the Continental Unit.

While in eastern Ukraine, Lenta spent significant time online posting about the unit’s alleged exploits, but other French volunteers, including 26-year-old student turned fighter Sergei Munier, found him too passive for their taste. “I didn’t want to join Lenta’s group because I wanted to go to the front, in the real battlefield where we were fighting every day, instead of sitting behind in the trenches,” Munier said.

In late 2018, both men found themselves reunited on the streets of Paris, along with other former Donbas fighters.

The men say they were questioned by French intelligence services when they returned from Donbas, but the French security forces have not interfered with them as Yellow Vest members.

Since January, the Donbas militia members have participated in the protests as members of the self-appointed security teams. Their job is to keep order in the ranks of demonstrators and avoid violence with the police.

With their their white armbands, earphones and communications protocols, they carry themselves with a martial sense of discipline and duty.

Both Lenta and Munier say they are participating in the protests not as members of an armed movement, but as regular French citizens — who also happen to advocate the overthrow of the democratic republic.

“I have a duty to my country. We must fight the illegitimacy of the current power,” Munier said.

The post From Donbas to Paris – meet the militants who now want to overthrow the French government appeared first on Coda Story.

“Wow, a mosque...here!” Marie-Christine Paquot says to her 60-year-old husband Lionel, echoing a common reaction to the site. He quickly corrects her: “It’s an Orthodox church, you can see the crosses.”

The couple from the French Alps have just discovered the new monument to Russia’s emerging role in Europe. The controversial Sainte-Trinité Russian Orthodox cathedral, set to be consecrated by the Russian Patriarch Kirill in early December, is the result of determined diplomacy by the Kremlin and lobbying of French officials, including Francois Fillon, the new favorite to win France’s 2017 presidential election.

Having established its function, the Paquots discuss the building’s merits. Marie-Christine quite likes it. Lionel is bothered. “It’s very strange to see domes in front of the Eiffel Tower,” he says.

Located on prime real estate, the Cathedral conveys modern restraint at street-level and is topped off with what one local office worker described as “imperial bling-bling.” The main dome sits 120 feet above the pavement and is encircled by four others. It took 90,000 pieces of gold leaf to cover them.

The $120 million cathedral was financed by the Russian state and backed by President Vladimir Putin. The structure was completed as his country’s relations with France and its NATO allies nosedived over the deployment of Russian firepower in Syria and Ukraine.

While those interventions have come to define Putin’s presidency, the riverside “St Vladimir’s,” as the cathedral has been nicknamed, represents another side of his foreign policy. Also divisive, it is a high water mark in his use of faith and power abroad.

Resurgent church

The Orthodox Christian community in France has been expanding. It is now thought to number 350,000-500,000, swelled by recent immigrants from the Balkans and the Middle East.

Like elsewhere, worshippers look to one of several branches of the church. In France, the politicized Moscow patriarchate used to command the biggest following, but over the last century it has lost out to the more neutral clergy in Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul.

Under Putin, attempts to claw back this loss of prestige and influence have driven a wedge through the community.

“There are tensions which there shouldn’t be. It’s regrettable,” says Alexandre Troubetzkoi, executive president of the Paris-based Association for Franco-Russian Dialogue, which has links to the Kremlin. This ostentatious monument to Eastern Christianity comes at a time when staunchly secular France is soul-searching about the role of religion in public life.

The opening of the cathedral was also overshadowed by larger, political tensions between France and Russia. Putin was due to visit Paris in October to inaugurate the complex, but cancelled his trip after French President François Hollande insisted that he would only meet the Russian leader to discuss the conflict in Syria.

This ostentatious monument to Eastern Christianity also comes at a time when staunchly secular France is soul-searching about the role of religion in public life. After attacks by Islamic-State-inspired extremists in Paris and Nice, a top government advisor recently implored Muslims to live “discreetly.”

Having watched the edifice grow on a corner of “picture-postcard Paris,” local office worker Paul Le Cuziat is struck by the timing.

“The question I have, and it would amuse me to know the answer, is how they [French officials] would have reacted if instead of the crosses above the cupolas, there were crescents,” he says with a smile.

‘He won’t let go.’

The Sainte-Trinité cathedral has been a priority for Putin for nearly a decade, pursued through diplomacy and lobbying at the highest levels of the French state. One of its biggest backers, a top Putin aide, almost gave up hope when former Paris mayor Bertrand Delanoe vetoed the initial design in 2012.

“It wasn’t easy. At one point, we felt like we were really close to abandoning everything,” said Vladimir Kozhin as he unveiled a second and final design before the press in 2014.

The project began in earnest in 2010, when the Russian state trumped offers from Saudi Arabia and Canada and paid the French $78 million for the land in the heart of Paris. The Sainte-Trinité Cathedral has been a priority for Putin for nearly a decade, pursued through diplomacy and lobbying at the highest levels of the French state.

French security services objected because the land on which the Russians were to build a cultural center, offices and a school in addition to the cathedral was located near sensitive sites and there were reportedly concerns about the location’s spying potential: the French foreign ministry is a short walk away on the Quai d’Orsay, as are several foreign embassies and a nearby palace that contains private apartments used by aides to the French president, including one where former president François Mitterrand spent time with his mistress.

But security concerns were brushed aside, largely because of crucial interventions by Putin and his associates.

“It’s thanks to the Russian state because it provided the financing,” says Troubetzkoi. “The state cooperates enormously with the church.”

On a visit to Moscow in 2010, then Prime Minister François Fillon remarked on Putin’s single-minded pursuit of the cathedral. “He won’t let go,” he told culture minister Frederic Mitterrand, according to Mitterrand’s memoirs.

Fillon, a devout Christian like Putin, was involved with the project and his friendly ties to the Kremlin leader are now under scrutiny as he emerges as one of the favorites for next year’s presidential election. The prime minister publicly opposed Western sanctions imposed on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine. His political ascent is excellent news for Putin who has watched the Brexit vote in Britain and the US election go his way in 2016.

The Cathedral is one of the most symbolic foreign policy achievements of Putin’s Russia. The $120 million bill for the religious complex is the sort investment in religion more common to proselytizing Gulf monarchies, not for a country that separates church from state in its constitution.

But Vladimir Putin has made Russian Orthodoxy an increasingly important pillar of his presidency, using the Church to legitimize the Kremlin’s conservative social agenda on issues such as gay rights and to back what Russia calls its “responsible use of force” in Syria.

‘Grand imperial mission’

Could a visible and powerful symbol of Russian culture and influence in the heart of Europe create a rallying point for the Russian diaspora and the growing Orthodox community in France, energizing a network of people seen as open to Putin’s illiberal agenda?

If this is a goal of “St Vladimir’s,” it seems to face some resistance.

Thousands of Russians lived in and traveled regularly to France during the imperial era, and grand Orthodox churches and cathedrals were raised to serve their needs. Several hundred yards up the Seine from Sainte-Trinité lies the equally eye-catching Alexandre III Bridge, built to honor the Tsar and French-Russian friendship at the turn of the 20th century.

The Revolution of 1917 swelled the Russian community, as tens of thousands of aristocrats, political exiles and migrants fled their homeland for the security of France.

When Soviet leadership began repressing the Russian patriarchate, the devout diaspora in France slipped out of Moscow’s orbit. Their churches in France aligned themselves instead with the branch of Orthodoxy based in Constantinople.

This was the case with the existing Russian Orthodox cathedral in the capital, Saint Alexandre Nevsky, built in 1861 with private donations. It remains aligned with Patriarch Bartholomew I in modern-day Istanbul, and has refused to return to Moscow’s orbit.

Its defection meant the only Moscow-oriented church in the capital was housed in a cramped flat-roofed building, reportedly a former garage, in the unfashionable 15th arrondissement.

On the southern Riviera in Nice, a center for émigrés and a magnet for modern-day expats from Russia, Moscow fought parishioners and the rector, Jean Gueit, through the courts to take possession of the Saint-Nicolas Orthodox Cathedral, which aligned itself to Constantinople.

France’s highest court finally ruled in 2011 that the Cathedral belonged to the Russian state. Moscow church and embassy officials had to smash the lock off the door to gain entrance.

“All these pre-revolution churches represent a symbol of Russia and its grand imperial mission that they want to recover by any means possible,” says Gueit, now a priest at a much smaller church in Marseille.

He says he and most of his congregation are horrified by the new “nationalist statement” in Paris.

“We represent Orthodoxy and nothing else, not the grandeur of Russia,” he says. But he concedes that newly arrived Russians are more susceptible to the message from Moscow. “We are Christians and we don’t want religion to be mixed with international politics,” said a church official in Biarritz who asked not to be named for fear of harassment.

An Orthodox church in the southwestern town of Biarritz was also the subject of a courtroom battle. On December 26, 2004, parishioners convened and voted for San Sebastian Church to switch its allegiance from Constantinople to Moscow—festive news announced by the Russian state media. However, church officials opposed to the switch argued that the list of voters had been falsified and a French judge ruled in their favor. Today the church remains allied to Constantinople and parishioners there look back on the tussle as a “putsch.”

“We are Christians and we don’t want religion to be mixed with international politics,” said a church official in Biarritz who asked not to be named for fear of harassment. He said he was convinced that the dark arts of the Russian state had been deployed in the failed bid to seize control.

“Do we really need a second cathedral in Paris?” he adds. “That’s the question we are asking ourselves. To what end, for what reason?”

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