Les « personnes âgées » pendant la crise de la covid-19 : un bouc émissaire commode ou un révélateur des dysfonctionnements sociaux ?

With the arrival of the coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) pandemic, the French society has been deeply shaken in its overall functioning. The proliferation of patients and the increased demand for care, particularly in hospitals and intensive care units, have particularly disrupted the health and social functioning of French society. In this particular context of crisis, the latter played the role of “social analyzer” in the sense given to it by sociologists, that is to say, it shed new light on the social practices instituted normally. We have chosen for this article to examine the way in which a particular category of people “the elderly” had been treated on three registers which appeared to us to be emblematic of the social treatment of these “elderly people” during the covid-19 crisis. First there was the reactivation of what some have called “the struggle of ages” or even the war of generations. Then, this crisis has particularly highlighted the situation of elderly people residing in nursing homes: their increased mortality, their problematic confinement and their priority vaccination. Finally, this crisis raised the question of the relevance of setting up specific confinement according to age. Our conclusion is that crises are conducive to simplistic explanations and the search for scapegoats, but that they are also a formidable indicator of social dysfunctions that predate the crisis. In this sense, the crisis has brought to light an obvious fact in French society of the primacy of “life course inequalities” as a major vector of social exclusion.