A historically hot summer is revealing a society massively unprepared for the new climate reality.
Customers queue outside a Buly shop under umbrellas to shield themselves from the heat wave in Paris, France, in July 2026.(Vincent Koebel / NurPhoto via Getty Images)
You felt it even in your nose. Breathing in the Paris air felt like inhaling inside of a sauna. There’s some truth here: A concrete jungle such as Paris, or just about any French city center, is a built environment conceived for the far more temperate climate of the preindustrial world. But in the extreme weather of the Anthropocene—the geological epoch resulting from man-made climate change—it’s a kiln-like multiplier to the record temperatures that blanketed France and other parts of western Europe late last month.
Between June 17 and 30, France was exposed to its most dramatic heat wave in recorded history. Peak temperatures hugged 40°C (104°F) in Paris over several consecutive, grueling days. The country’s highest recorded temperature remains the 46°C (114.8°F) notched up during the 2019 heat wave in the southern town of Véragues, near Montpellier. But June 2026 now counts as thehottest on average. Summer has only just started, and the immediate human toll is already grim. On July 3, public-health authorities announced that the week of June 22 saw an increase of over 2,000 heat-related deaths.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that the country was, quite literally, fried. Alongside the human damage, June’s heat wave has ravaged natural ecosystems, dealing a second blow with numerous cascading effects from stressed water shelves and riverbeds to parched forests. They leave the country particularly exposed for the second act of summer. Satellite imagery gives an idea of the scope of damage to wildlife: A bird’s-eye view of mainland France taken as recently as May 24 showed a country covered in the rich green of spring. That same perspective a month later reveals a landmass charred by the splotches of brown usually not seen until August.
Heat may be indiscriminate, but its effects among humans are more selective, mapping on to the inequalities that divide society. Students and individuals living under Paris’s iconic zinc-topped roofs were exposed to the scorching pressure cookers that their apartments had become. Various news outlets reported on well-off residents taking up spare rooms in Paris hotels, benefiting from a few days of AC. The luckiest probably fled the city altogether, to country homes or seaside villas—anywhere for a chance at the wind, shade, and fresh water that’s cruelly lacking in the parched capital.
This is not the first time that extreme summer temperatures have caught France off guard. In 2003, a heat wave claimed the lives of at least 15,000 people, with authorities facing fierce criticism for their slow and inadequate response. Over two decades later, the shock of this summer’s heat wave should have been entirely foreseeable. For decades, innumerable reports from the IPCC and climate scientists have warned that global warming is making heat waves more frequent, longer-lasting, and more intense. According to Meteo France, the annual number of extreme heat days could be multiplied by five by 2050 (+2.7°C) and by 10 from now to 2100 (+4°C), depending on global emissions trajectories.
“We’re still only in the opening credits, but there’s no way around the realization that climate change is well under way,” the activist and writer Clément Sénéchal told The Nation. “This latest crisis confirms the failure of a certain environmentalism, which has so far not been able to slow global warming or mitigate its most tangible effects.”
During an official visit to Antibes in southern France, President Emannuel Macron sought to defend his government’s environmental record. “We have adapted to global warming, but we cannot adapt to a heat wave that has no equivalent in Europe today,” the president said on June 25. Five days later, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu defended that same record before the National Assembly. “Since President Chirac [1995–2007], every administration has, to the best of its ability, done something to tackle climate change. Denying that would undermine the republican consensus,” he said, dismissing criticism from the opposition.
But 10 years after Macron’s pledge to “make our planet great again,” it’s hard to point to major policy successes on the climate front. The government’s 2021 legislation, the Climate and Resilience Law, was a hodgepodge of weak regulations guided by a so-called “voluntaristic” approach to emissions reductions, putting the onus on changes in individual behavior.
In the lead-up to the latest heat wave, the government was even caught watering down elements of its environmental agenda. Only a day after France’s first heat episode in May ended, Macron’s administration announced a 20 percent cut (€162.5 million) to the Green Fund—a program specifically designed to support the energy transition and help local communities adapt to climate change. Environment Minister Monique Barbut was forced to acknowledge that the budget allocated by the current government was “not up to the task.”
If France is not alone in dragging its feet on emissions reductions, the heat wave revealed a deeper fragility in the public services that are needed for the new climate normality. Although it has introduced measures aimed at improving preparedness, such as its national heat-wave-alert system and emergency health protocols, critics argue that these remain largely reactive rather than anticipatory. They point to the absence of structural adaptation policies that would require better weathering for schools and hospitals to more fundamental redesign for cities to reduce urban heat islands and protect vulnerable populations.
“We realized that our technological and built environments are likely to malfunction under extreme conditions,” said Julien Dossier, a climate change and adaptation consultant. “The state was caught entirely off guard and suddenly realizes that critical infrastructure such as health services, public schools, and hospitals—in short, essential, front-line services—have been bled dry by spending cuts and are far less able to cushion the blow,” said Sénéchal, a former campaigner with Greenpeace France.
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Sénéchal drew a parallel between the French state’s response to the Covid-19 epidemic and its initial reaction to the heat wave. State prefectures issued administrative orders canceling events, and officials in cities like Paris even tried to institute a ban on outdoor alcohol consumption.
NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg is one of the foremost experts on how communities respond to episodes of extreme heat. If minority and working-class neighborhoods were most affected by the infamous 1995 heat wave in the Windy City, as he argued in his 2002 study Heatwave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, those that survived best were able to benefit from denser social solidarity and mutual aid networks. “Neighborhood libraries, public parks, playgrounds, and schools are sites for social integration that have helped people build social support to get through extreme events,” he said.
One of the deadliest factors in a heat wave, he argues, is social isolation: “The more we depend on private gathering places and social media to anchor our collective life, the more isolated and vulnerable we will become.”
“Part of the public has reacted with anger, and that is quite new,” said Dossier. He went on to praise what he calls the “firefighting mentality” that set in on a grassroots level, with individuals and neighbors organizing to make up for the lack of policy preparation. “If you see the threat and it’s immediately coming upon you, you act,” he continued. “But we also need city halls to use their protective power and coordination capabilities.”
In preparation for future heat episodes this summer, Dossier has for example advised administrators in the city of Nantes to purchase and distribute hundreds of thousands of heat-reflective blankets. Meteorologists have warned that a new heat dome could hit parts of France in the first half of July, with hot and dry conditions expected for the remainder of the month.
Communities taking things into their own hands has in some cases been met with police intervention, producing several surreal scenes evocative of a two-track society in the face-off with extreme heat. In Clermont-Ferrand, police intervened four times in a working-class neighborhood to dismantle plastic paddling pools set up by local youth. One video that sparked particular outrage on social media showed a large police contingent hacking at the children’s installation with knives. Before it was finally authorized on June 24, police were deployed to prevent people from swimming in Paris’s Canal Saint-Martin.
Numerous communities suffered from power outages at the height of the heat wave, but working-class areas were particularly exposed. The Paris suburb of Chanteloup-les-Vignes saw a 24-hour power outage, leaving some 27,000 households without electricity. A few kilometers away, at the heart of Paris’s genteel 14th arrondissement, the luxury group LVMH rolled out a giant tidal wave for its men’s fashion week show, in a brazen case of conspicuous water and energy consumption. Writing in Libération, the philosopher Paul Preciado argued that France was entering the age of “thermocracy,” when control over temperature becomes a defining symbol of power and status.
A heat wave at full force is all-engrossing. Work slows down, at least for those who can afford to slack off. Everything gets crowded out by the priority to make it through to sundown.
One silver lining is that experiences like these show the breadth of things that urgently need reform, from changes to labor law, allowing for paid work stoppages, to the greening of urban areas. For all of its violence, a heat wave holds up a mirror to what might be the outlines of “ecological planning,” the rallying cry for comprehensive environmental mobilization heard from parties on France’s left-wing opposition. There’s a common quip: If the French presidential elections currently scheduled for spring 2027 were held in August, then addressing the effects of climate change would be the defining campaign issue, and not the hysterics over immigration and insecurity that usually dominate the newscycle.
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The far-right Rassemblement National ought to appear politically exposed by the current crisis, which fits poorly into its regular talking points. At the peak of the 2019 heat wave, the RN’s Julien Odoul lambasted environmentalists for “hysterical messaging designed to scare the French people. Personally, I’d prefer it if the government would focus on other subjects like the Islamist heat-up.”
Such denialism was less tenable this time around, if only because of the tangible public frustration. After all, RN voters are no more immune to the effects of excruciating heat than the “eco-fraudsters” they denounce on the left. On June 30, the party of Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella rolled out its “grand AC plan,” proposing zero-interest loans for households and local governments looking to purchase air conditioning. The climate equivalent of a Band-Aid, solutions like this at least presage a boon for the cooling industry, which has seen sales surge in recent weeks.
For Quentin Ghesquière, founder of the think tank Adapt, France needs a nationwide mobilization comparable to the economic and regional planning that was the norm in the postwar period. “School renovations alone require an estimated €40 billion in additional investment,” he says. “The €800 million allocated to the Green Fund in this year’s budget is nowhere near enough.” The Rassemblement National’s AC plan, Ghesquière argues, is the flip side of its total failure to measure the urgency of the climate crisis. “These are the same people who voted to cut the Green Fund and called for dismantling the national energy transition agency, the ADEME,” Ghesquière told The Nation.
If some AC investment is no doubt essential to reinforce critical services, Dossier warns that such “technosolutionist” proposals could add pressure on an already stretched electrical grid network. They are also part of a deeper problem whereby climate shocks serve to individualize and privatize ecological adaptation. For example, several sources pointed to Parliament’s consideration this summer of an emergency agricultural bill that weakens restrictions of harmful pesticides and reinforces the role of Big Agriculture in the governance of water resources. In rural parts of France, tensions over water is already a growing issue: In 2022 and 2023, the construction of large reservoirs to service agro-industry devolved into pitch battles between armed police and rural activists, whom then–Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin labelled “eco-terrorists.”
Then there’s the elephant in the room. For Claire Nouvian, founder of Bloom, an association dedicated to the preservation of oceans and marine life, the immediate public reaction to France’s heat wave has dangerously skirted the question of reducing emissions. “If we continue on our current path, our summers will reach 50°C,” the activist and biodiversity expert told The Nation. “At that point, the entire electrical system will begin to fail. Without electricity, air conditioning won’t take us very far.” Nouvian initiated a July 6 open letter in Le Monde urging Parliament to adopt a climate emergency law that would ban all new oil and gas projects, prohibit fossil fuel lobbying, and codify the crime of “globocide,” referring to human activities capable of bringing about the total destruction of the biosphere.
Nouvian, like Klinenberg, advocates for naming heat waves after fossil fuel giants. “It’s time we call out those responsible,” she said: “TotalEnergies is a climate criminal.” Despite promises to reach carbon neutrality by 2050, France’s oil and gas major is in the throes of a significant international expansion, developing pipelines and extraction projects in West Africa or Qatar’s North Field, one of the world’s largest LNG reservoirs. “A ticking climate bomb,” Nouvian said of the group’s investments. On June 24, at the peak of the heat wave, TotalEnergies CEO Patrick Pouyanné announced investment in a major new gas venture in the United Arab Emirates.
June LoperJune Loper is a Franco-American journalist and sound artist, working in radio and print, with a focus on environmental and social justice struggles.
Harrison StetlerTwitterHarrison Stetler is a freelance journalist based in Paris.