> cases were symptomatic

Agreed, that is a major difference, that affects both body count and popular perception of the virus.

> There were the Gilets Jeunes, whose numbers were falling

Yet many polls agreed the gilets jaunes were as popular as ever. And if you think that dozens of thousands is a low number, can you name any other protest movement that has gathered so many people weekly for over a year? There was also a growing uproar about the new pension reform, the last of which back in 2010 led to the almost-collapse of the government (many petrol stations across the country were already out of fuel).

So my case is not that there was an actual revolution taking place in France, but rather that there were epicenters of insurrection which cost the State en private sector billions of euros: the gilets jaunes, the anti-5G movement, the ZADs, riots against police abuse in popular districts, growing and more coordinated strikes across all sectors. The elites tried to ridicule those movements (such as pretending the gilets jaunes were antisemites), then tried to repress them (including deploying armored military vehicles on the streets of the capital), but nothing killed the ideas so they were growing afraid of an actual revolution. They seized the pandemic as an excuse to reinforce social control on every level and make "acceptable" totalitarian measures while disseminating propaganda that the danger to you and your loved ones is your neighbor, not the State or the bosses. Some kind of anti-social opportunism, as described by Naomi Klein's Shock doctrine.

> Hospital beds were reorganised and more emergency ones were added

Reorganization is a word like reform, which means very little in itself but works fine in the mouths of neoliberal apparatchiks to downplay their tragic actions and their human cost. Also, you seem to be acknowledging it's possible to cut beds and at the same time expand "emergency ones" to appear like you're doing something good when you're in fact tearing down public service, so my point stands. "Look at this pie i baked just for you (while i was robbing your house)"

There were many health workers protests and strikes before and during the pandemic, denouncing the hypocrisy of the government's measures and exposing their terrible working conditions and the (bad) effects it has on patients. Are you saying these people (who know best because they talk about first-hand experience) are wrong and the government propaganda is right? I'm tempted to believe the health workers i've met who were severely burnt out and depressed (yet did their best every single day), rather than the psychopaths in power.

> Mask stocks have been falling since 2009, so you can't pin that on the current government

Oh i'm not blaming it on the current government. When i say the government, i liberally mean "those who hold power, whatever their party is". This was indeed a problem with the previous Hollande-formed government, but may i remind you that most of LREM (including Macron himself) were key players of that previous government? Whoever the head of this monstrous hydra, the result for the common people is the same: hard labor and unlimited suffering.

> It wasn't illegal to go and breathe fresh air, there was just a distance limit from your home.

On this specific point, you are wrong. The "going out for under 1h and less than 10km from home" checkbox on the laisser-passer forms was added late into the first confinement. For over a month, maybe more, it was illegal to go out just to breathe fresh air, unless you had a pet to walk (another checkbox).

> Honestly i think the French government's action was among the best possible

Breaking news: according to the french government propaganda in various news outlets controled by the State or private billionaires close to the State (Dassault, Lagardère, etc) i just read, the french government is the best government in the world. /s

Sarcasm aside, the government's actions and hypocrisies have been widely criticized, but the most striking fact about this whole pandemic is that the president single-handedly decided the fate and civil liberties of millions of individuals behind closed doors (the scientific community at large was not consulted, and when it occasionally was, it was ignored): do you think having a single unskilled individual announce surprise securitarian measures every other week on television is what we can call a democracy? It sounds like the very definition of a dictatorship.

Related: why are cops the only civil servants exonerated from wearing masks and getting mandatory vaccines? Why then are reactionary media fixated on the fact that lawless (non-white) proles in the suburbs are not civilized enough to respect the quarantine, and not addressing the elephant in the room? (it's a rhetoric question) It's a feature of authoritarian regimes than their armed hand (the police) needs to benefit from some forms of privileges, in order to keep the status quo intact.

Overall, we may agree or disagree on specific points, but i would recommend you check out more independent media sources every now and then to get a different perspective on things. There's only a handful of nation-wide independent publications left and they're worth encouraging: Mediapart.fr, CQFD-journal.org, reporterre.net. If you're more interested in popular analysis/discourse than professional journalism, i'd recommend medialibres.org, a planet [0] of various self-organized outlets for social critique.

Happy reading

[0] A planet, for the younger among us, is an aggregate of different RSS feeds. It's sort of like Google News, but you can setup your own to track the news sources of interest to you. For example, Planet Debian has a collection of blogs from the Debian ecosystem.