Rogue French Mayor Reopens City Museums Against Covid Rules

THE ROGUE mayor of Perpignan has reopened the city’s museums against the French government’s Covid rules ordering cultural venues to stay closed.

The mayor Perpignan, Louis Aliot, has gone against the rules set by Paris and ordered the reopening of museums in the southeastern French city – which is close to the Spanish border.

Aliot, who is deputy leader of France’s far-right National Rally party, broke the restrictions set by President Macron’s government to curb the country’s stubbornly high infection rates. Since October, cultural venues have been forced to shut alongside restaurants and bars.

“It is time to open cultural venues”, Aliot told local media – as the city’s museums reopened their doors to the public on Tuesday (February 9th). Perpignan’s Hycanithe-Rigaud art museum reported that at least 50 visitors had passed through its doors within thirty minutes of its reopening.

The Casa Pairal museum of Catalan art and the Natural History Museum also confirmed they had reopened. The fourth – the Joseph Puig coin museum – was only due to reopen on Wednesday (February 10th).

Recently France’s culture minister, Roselyne Bachelot, promised that museums and galleries would be the first institutions to reopen when Covid cases dropped. She said that cultural venue directors had been receptive to plans to limit visitor numbers to one per square ten metres.

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