At Le Porge, three months after the fire, the displaced queue for a roof

According to franceinfo, more than three months after the fires that swept through more than 3,000 hectares of forest at Le Porge, in the Gironde, and destroyed 183 homes, many of those affected are still waiting to be compensated or rehoused on a lasting basis. Faced with the slowness and complexity of procedures imposed by the insurance companies, weariness is giving way to growing anger. One resident sums up his days: he goes to the town hall every week, and the planning department replies: "Come back on Monday."

What the dispatch does not say, and what we therefore do not know: how many households are affected exactly, where they are sleeping, how many claims have been settled, or what the insurers are answering. What follows is our reading, not an established finding.

So let's look at the scene, the Monday that never arrives. Losing your home is a catastrophe. But the waiting is work. Files must be assembled, photographs taken of what no longer exists, clauses reread, calls made, follow-ups chased, trips back to the counter. Who does this within a family? One can bet, without asserting it, that it is often women, between two working days, with children to feed and to drive to school from makeshift accommodation. This is what Marxist feminists call social reproduction: all the work, paid or unpaid, that allows people to live, eat, sleep and set off again in the morning. When institutions balk at doing their part, this work does not vanish. It falls back on households.

Under capitalism, a home is also an asset: a value to be insured, assessed, contested. For the insurer, the victim is a file whose amount is up for discussion. For the victim, it is a roof, a child's bedroom, a kitchen. These two logics do not speak the same language, and it is the language of the strongest, the one who holds the purse strings and sets the tempo. Every week of delay is a saving for one side and a debt of exhaustion for the other.

We will be told that procedure is procedure, and that the administration does what it can. Perhaps. But a machine that requires the victim to prove the loss, to travel, to come back, effectively organises a transfer: the cost of the disaster passes from those who manage the risk to those who suffer it. And the more frequent fire becomes, the longer that bill grows.

The anger rising at Le Porge is not irrational. It says something simple: rebuilding is not just timber and tiles, it is time, security, and everyday routines to be recovered. A counter that answers "Monday" repairs nothing. What is needed, at the very least, is a single point of contact, deadlines that are kept, and support that does not rest on the endurance of families. That is what we expect from the next stage of this story.