Coping in the Canicule: Parisians, it’s cool to be cool!

by Richard Pooley

In the shade in Vayrac, France, 22 June 2026

We Brits have never been good at coping with heatwaves. How will we cope in thirty years time if this forecast from the UK Meteorological Office is correct?

But the French are not much better. At least the ones in the north aren't, especially those know-it-all Parisians.

It’s not as if canicules (heatwaves)* of the intensity of last month are recent phenomena. La canicule of 2003 killed about fifteen thousand French people (and an estimated seventy thousand across the European Union). Talk of how highly unusual it is to have a heatwave in June is wrong. The last severe one lasted from June to September just seven years ago.

In the late afternoon of 17 September 2019 I wrote the following in an article:

I am writing this in my house in the upper Dordogne valley, south-west France. The thermometer on the vine-shaded balcony reads 38.4°C, 14°C above the norm for this time of year. There is not a cloud in the cerulean blue sky. The window shutters are closed so I can type without my forearms sticking to the table. It’s only 26°C in here. It’s been like this for most of the period since the beginning of June. Maximum daily temperatures have been as much as 16°C above the norm. Friends who were here in late July photographed that thermometer registering 44.4°C in the shade.**

Perhaps the reason that the 2019 canicule has been forgotten by French commentators is because it didn’t happen in the north and Paris. Temperatures in the 40s were recorded only in the south.

In 2018 I was driving to our nearest large town, Brive-la-Gaillarde. The car’s thermometer registered 41°C outside. As I followed a car out of the village of Turenne my windscreen was suddenly hit by dark globules of tar. I slowed and watched the wheels of the car in front tear up the road surface.

I was at our house in France during the most recent canicule. The thermometer in the shade outside reached 40°C on 22 June and 41°C the next day. Inside, at the same time? That depends on which floor the thermometer was. The house is hundreds of years old (we don’t know the exact date it was built because the village’s land registration records were destroyed in a fire in 1840). It’s on a steep south-facing slope. The limestone walls are 55 cm thick. There are four floors – the rez-de-jardin or basement (below ground level on two sides), a ground floor, first floor, and the loft which the previous British owners converted into a double bedroom/shower-room. The only air-conditioner (and heater) was installed by us in this roof bedroom a few years ago. The temperature in the basement at the hottest time (17.00)  on those two hottest days was 22°C, on the ground floor 28°C, on the first floor 29°C, and in the roof bedroom (without air con.) 35°C. The basement temperature surprised me: summer and winter (when it can be -10°C outside) I had never recorded it outside the range of 14-17°C, which is why we keep our wine down there.

A brand-new pavillon - with car, clim and cat.

The villagers’ ancestors built houses like ours which were able to stay relatively cool in summer and warm in winter. However, many of their descendants and incomers prefer to live in pavillons, thin-walled detached houses, sometimes on one floor with small rooms and low ceilings, surrounded by a garden, built  on what was farmland on the edge of the village. Out of a total of 34.5 million houses/flats in France, nearly 20 million are pavillons, almost all built since the second world war. In a canicule they can be very hot boxes indeed.

Any US American reader would by now be shouting “Haven’t these people heard of air con?” Many have. In the south. Walk around our village and old houses as well as new often have the ugly evidence of la clim (climatisation – air conditioning). But in France as a whole only 25% of households have at least one air-con unit. In the north it's 17%. Hardly any are in Paris. Worse, very few hospitals, care homes or schools in the north have la clim. Yet our village in the south-west has just opened a 520 m² “multidisciplinary health centre” … with air con units discreetly hidden away.

In Spain and Italy about half of dwellings have air con, and in the USA it’s 90%. When I started renting an unfurnished flat for me and my family in Tokyo in June 1990, I wasn’t aware how hot and humid a Japanese summer can be. My landlady took charge of furnishing the apartment. The first thing she made me buy was an air conditioning unit. We needed it. That summer was the hottest ever recorded in Tokyo (since superseded multiple times of course). Today, like the USA, nearly every Japanese household has air con.

A digression: one of my strongest childhood memories in the early 1960s was of new air con units weeping water in Doha, Qatar, where my father had been posted. They were being installed across the then tiny capital as the traditional buildings with their wind towers were being torn down and replaced by apartment blocks. A wind tower catches whatever breeze is blowing and channels it down through the building, reducing the temperature inside by between 8°C and 12°C. Qataris have realised how sensible their ancestors were and Doha now has many buildings with wind towers included (as well as air con units) Perhaps the French should hire some Qatari architects.

Why are the French (and the Germans too) so far behind their southern neighbours? Why is there a north-south divide on la clim in France itself? Politics, ideology and health myths.

French environmentalists, represented by this mouthful, Les Écologistes – Europe Écologie Les Verts, have long argued that air conditioning uses a vast amount of electricity, can emit greenhouse gases, and – a big argument in cities like Paris – sends hot air out into the street, increasing outside temperatures in urban areas by two or three degrees.

The first argument is only worth considering in countries where electricity is generated by burning oil and gas, which does contribute significantly to climate change. Most of France's electricity comes from nuclear power. The second contention assumes that air con units frequently leak, thereby releasing harmful refrigerant gases. The technology has moved on; modern ones don’t leak. There is some merit in the third argument, though I heard a British 'heat island' expert say last week that air con. accounts for less than one degree of extra heat in a city. Anyway, people, unless they’re homeless, don’t live and sleep in the streets. Better to have a cooler living space than a cooler street.

Parisian apartments cannot suddenly double the width of their walls or the height of their ceilings, though it might be a good idea to replace those famous zinc roofs. About three-quarters of the rooftops in Paris use zinc as covering. A 2025 report which studied those heat-related deaths in the 2003 canicule found that living in a Paris attic room directly under the roof increased the risk of death by more than four times. Air con is a life-saver.

My daughter, who lives close to St Tropez on the Mediterranean coast, tells me that ceiling fans have become very popular alternatives to air con in France. Apparently, many elderly French believe that air con causes them to catch cold.

The Ecologists’ anti-clim views have influenced central and regional government policy for years. Only when a non-Socialist politician, Valerie Pécresse, took over responsibility for Paris’ regional transport in 2016 did the Metro start to have air con on a few lines. Even so, only six of the sixteen lines currently have it installed. Pécresse insists all trains and buses in Paris will be air conditioned by 2032.

The French politician shouting loudest for la clim to be installed in hospitals and schools is Marine Le Pen, erstwhile head of the far right Rassemblement National (RN, National Rally). Last month she demanded a nationwide "plan clim" to equip all schools and hospitals with air-conditioning. Under the plan, occupants of urban apartments and pavillons who don’t have air con units will be offered government-backed, interest-free loans worth €20bn ($22.7bn; £17.2bn) to install them. Where the largesse for this will come from Le Pen did not say.

The latest canicule has, at last, made the Ecologist Party see some sense. Their leader, Marie Tondelier, agreed last month that air-conditioning was needed in schools and hospitals. She did not mention people’s houses and flats.

According to the French Prime Minister, Sébastien Lecornu, seventy-four French people drowned trying to escape the heat of the June 2026 canicule. A 33-year old mother in the southern city of Carpentras “forgot” while out shopping that she had left her two boys, aged two and four, in the car she had parked at her mother’s house. They both died.

Our neighbours to the east (right) are weekenders from Toulouse. They don't seem to know the rules of la canicule.

It seems many French have still not learned how to cope with this extreme heat. In our village most people appear to follow the same rules during a canicule as their ancestors did: get up at or before dawn, and do any hard physical work and your shopping by 11.00; close all shutters and windows and retreat to the coolest room; have a siesta,  emerge outside at around 19.00, go and have a drink/some food in a local bar, go to bed at sunset, having thrown open every window and shutter. My neighbours to the west in the maison bourgeoise – what you and I would call a chateau – worked and slept last month in their cave next to their wine bottles.

However, we do have one luxury denied to most: the Dordogne river two kilometres away, the cleanest in France. I made full use of it…and managed not to drown.

*La canicule literally means ‘the little bitch’. It derives from the Latin for dog. Sirius, the Dog star, rises and falls at the same time as the Sun from 3 July to August 11. Hence, the English term ‘the Dog Days’ of summer.

** I included the photo in the 2019 article but have since concluded the thermometer must have been in the sun briefly at some stage. 44.4°C is 0.1°C above the highest temperature ever recorded in France… on June 23, this year.