These iconic images of the Covid-19 pandemic in France and around the world

Diaporama Covid 2025

It’s the story of a world that stops, caught off guard by an unknown virus that spreads like wildfire. China, Italy, France… The countries are “falling” like dominoes under the Covid surge. Panicked, governments are forcing populations to confine themselves to avoid exponential inflation in the number of deaths. It’s a real pandemic, like you see in the movies.

Five years later, what do we have left? The memory of this episode often seems distant, diffuse, vaguely unreal. Difficult to remember accurately the fear experienced, the urgency, the loss of meaning, the incomprehension. Between new guides and false prophets, the medical and scientific world has walked on a crest line. Regularly, the border between intelligence and stupidity, common sense and absurdity, has lost its obviousness, its clarity.

As the epidemic rebounds, as new variants appear, history seems to stutter. The arrival of effective vaccines will ultimately make it possible to put an end to the crisis, to gradually return to “normal life”, after a more or less long period spent respecting sometimes radical or ridiculous health rules.

The images are there to remind us to what extent this event changed our lives. The deaths piling up in certain countries; the deserted streets of confined megacities; full body suits for exhausted caregivers; the distress of forgotten elderly people; etc. Le Figaro has selected around twenty photos which powerfully bear witness to this long, tragic and strange parenthesis of what the world has been like under Covid.