On January 26, 2020, a plane from Wuhan landed at Roissy. The authorities welcome the repatriated French people. Among them, Aurélien Rousseau, the boss of the Regional Health Agency (ARS) of Ile-de-France, which manages the Ile-de-France health system. The senior official, who today heads the cabinet of Elisabeth Borne in Matignon, after having served Manuel Valls and Bernard Cazeneuve, will be at the forefront of the health crisis for months. He will not come out unscathed: “I had walked in the depths. »
In a first-person account, the enarque delivers both a meditation on the State, public action in heavy weather, and a personal, even intimate, testimony behind the scenes of a crisis where he will have to find resuscitation beds, decide on evacuations or organize the vaccination plan. “I was a kind of general in charge of holding one of the fronts of the conflict, that of the largest French region”he wrote.
Unvarnished, the author evokes this “fear from the body” who hasn’t let go during these “dark days” of March 2020, the “more terrible” of his life, during which “we didn’t know if we would be able to cope”while the hospital system was on the verge of cracking.
The story, dark and serious, is not devoid of humor, and it is gratifying. Especially when Mr. Rousseau recounts that night spent in the room of one of his (absent) children answering text messages: one of them, sent at 3 a.m. to the President of the Republic, ends with obscure signs, to the great shame of the senior official, who had… fallen asleep. He will leave his post in the summer of 2021, exhausted. Without regret, but haunted by melancholy.
“Dead of being poor”
While the management of the crisis by the Ministry of Health and the action of the ARS have been highly criticized, and the State – as a whole – has been deemed improvident, even ineffective, centralizing and finicky, Aurélien Rousseau, good soldier, defend his house. He assures us that, on the contrary, this period has “produces more collective intelligence than is often said”. Even if he recognizes, timidly, some shortcomings, like this “inability to develop a process of collective deliberation” who leads the French.
By opening the ” Black Box “ of the decision, the author hopes to help prevent the flourishing of “readings that weaken our social contract by bringing to bear on it the suspicion of conspiracy or inconsistency”. He tries to draw some lessons from the crisis. One of them would be to recognize that the State cannot do everything, and does not have a monopoly on the general interest.
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