French word of the day: La Clim

#PARISFOMO and other stories from France

We have been cooking here in France, for the past 10 days or so. No, I don't mean the finale of the TV show Top Chef, although that competition was on the télé last night. (Congratulations Chef! Although that pear and cheese purée dessert did not look good.)

What I mean is that we as a people have been literally cooking. Temperatures all over France have been hovering around the 90-100s°F (30-40s°C) for several days in a row before finally breaking last night, before it broke us all.

And that’s because if you've ever visited France in the summer before, you know that the French don't install air-conditioning, aka la clim.

My kids were home from school for most of this week because of the heatwave, as a Vigilance Code Red was declared and schools requested that parents keep the children home to protect them.

The school board did of course operate on the throughly unscientific assumption that the meteorologists were all wrong and so waited until we already sent them to school on Monday, to then tell us 2 hours later to come back to fetch them back.

(In Canadian snow-day terms, this would be shovelling out the snow to deliver the kids to school, and then having to go pick them up again.)

Since the school closures were announced so late, I did rush out Sunday morning to the only Carrefour supermarket that was open to equip my little Frenchies with a little handheld fan and a mini water spray-bottle. (Because I do tend to believe in meteorologists forecasts.)

The kids duly brought the fan and vaporiser back home at lunchtime, ready for the next heatwave. But the weather has been so bad for the past 3 days, I regretted not telling them to leave the stuff for their poor classmates who weren't lucky enough to have parents who could spontaneously pick them up and keep them home. (We do have a small mobile aircon unit at home.)

So why the lack of air conditioning in France? The leading theory here is that it is bad for the environment. Never mind that over 95% of France's energy needs are covered by bas carbon (low carbon) nuclear and solar, and so the environmental impact would be relatively minimal.

Science aside, there is an ideological component in France over the morality of air conditioning. It is apparently “only the extreme-right who want air-conditioning”! Instead, we should all stoically suffer through, reduce our consummation of technology for the environment and embrace all things natural. Even if it decreases productivity and has an adverse impact on personal health and the economy. (Because how much work do you think is getting done when kids are sent home from school on the spur of the moment?)

There is an official website from Santé Publique France (Health France) advising people against installing air-conditioning, and recommending that people instead “rent a room somewhere else, if they have a money.” A nice hotel in Monaco maybe?(On a hilarious note, this advice was hastily removed after going viral on social media.)

Anyway I could apparently also drive around with a horse and buggy and catch e-coli from unrefrigerated food, but cars and fridges have been deemed vital. However air-conditioning for regularly recurring annual heatwaves is not.

Barely 25% of businesses and homes have air conditioning because of the lack of air vents and hyper-restrictive building norms, according to the French govt agency ADEME that reports these things.

That means the vast majority of public buildings in France, including hospitals, schools, old age homes, libraries, etc simply don't have the vents to install air-conditioning. Don't deliver a baby or get old in France in July/August because you will likely have to do so in a sauna. (Spare a thought for the doctors and nurses working in these conditions!)

And it’s not just old buildings that don’t have air-conditioning. A state-of-the-art hospital is currently being built in the city of Nantes, to be completed in 2027. And guess what? No air con.

Should I mention it is the same discussion every year? Every year it is the same government advice with unhelpful warnings to "drink water", "close your shutters" and "wet your t-shirt".

To make sure the message gets out there also is a "special heatwave emergency phone number" to tell you to drink water, close your shutters and wet your t-shirt.

It would be absurdly funny if it was not so serious. More than 5,000 French people died due to the heat in 2023 (a very rainy year), and 10,000 in 2022.

But the real traumatic marker was the 2003 heatwave where over 19,000 people died in France. It was so appalling a Journée de solidarité was put in place each WhitMonday (Pentacôte). On this day every year "people agree to work for free" for a day.

Yes, there is actually a day where French workers work for zero salary, and the money is supposed to go towards helping the aged and vulnerable survive heatwaves and improve their quality of life.

More than 20 years later, it is clear that whatever the government is doing with the €billions and billions collected, it has not been to install basic air-conditioning in old-age homes or hospitals. So that would be the public holding their end of the bargain, while the politicians don't.

While each summer the French litigate the morals and merits of a technology that has existed since 1901, I shall apologize in advance if I send a similar newsletter next year...It is going to take a revolution here in France.

In other news:

• Le Parisien reports on a new French dish, "the Doritos Kebab". Basically it involves taking a pack of Doritos and adding cheese, meats, and sauce on top. Someone has just discovered loaded nachos.

• The best pastis in the world in 2025 is not from Marseille, but from Normandy...?

• President Macron apparently has a lot of time on his hands, because he now wants to inscribe French techno music in UNESCO world heritage.

And in the blog:

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