Scenes from the Paris Heat Wave

It was the middle of June, and Emmanuel Grégoire, the newly elected mayor of Paris, was installed on the banks of Canal Saint-Martin, surrounded by shirtless Parisians, set to perform his John the Baptist drag. Lyas, a curly-haired twentysomething influencer, outstretched his arms, ready, in his tattered “fashion pas facho” T-shirt—“fashion not fascist,” in English—to receive a playful palm to the chest from the Mayor, which sent the influencer straight into the water. The other bathers followed suit.

Likely to his annoyance, Grégoire, who is forty-eight, and a member of the Socialist Party, is not the first Parisian mayor to stage an opening of the waters in this city, which is warming at disaster-film-montage pace, and which is not prepared for the current heat wave. That distinction may belong to Anne Hidalgo, Grégoire’s predecessor, under whom he served as deputy mayor, and with whom he had a political falling out that weighed him down for some years with the unfortunate title “ex-dauphin,” given to him by the press.

On the eve of the 2024 Summer Olympics, hosted by Paris, a wetsuited Hidalgo had plunged herself into the Seine. More than a billion dollars had been allocated for the cleaning of the river in time for the Games; the following summer brought the establishment of three swimming zones in the Seine, lifeguards included. Grégoire was, in mid-June, inaugurating similar zones in the Canal Saint-Martin, presenting them as urbane oases in a direct response to a miserable heat wave that had hit the city, a couple of weeks earlier, in May, when a North African heat dome swallowed the entire country, and temperatures reached thirty-six degrees Celsius, or ninety-seven degrees Fahrenheit, at their peak.

May was nothing; Grégoire and the bathers and every other person were in for something else at the end of June, when a heat wave blanketed France, Germany, the U.K., Belgium, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands. A pedestrian, willfully ignorant of the exact temperature on Wednesday afternoon, happened to glance at a flashing L.E.D. sign outside a French pharmacy. It read forty-five degrees Celsius, or a hundred and thirteen degrees Fahrenheit. Her jaw dropped, cartoon-style. The heat stole into her mouth, stuffing her like cotton. Breathing eluded her; she felt like vomiting the heat out. It had been only ninety degrees or so that morning.

“La Canicule,” the term that the French have used to describe an elongated spell of oppressive, often dangerous temperatures, doesn’t really translate to “heat wave”—the phrase for that would be “vague de chaleur.” The spirit of La Canicule is more like dog days. Typically, the dog days arrive in late July or August, when the country winds down for its prolonged weeks of vacation. And those days tend to hover some twenty degrees Fahrenheit lower than what it is experiencing now. La Canicule is an old term, a cheeky one, just newly representative of the climate crisis.

“Good Morning America” milked a decline-of-the-Occident comparison, highlighting the fact that parts of France, for a brief period, were hotter than the Sahara Desert. In Paris, signage exhorts Métro riders to hydrate regularly, stay attentive to those who are most vulnerable, et cetera. At one underground station, the Stalingrad, tent settlements of nearly a thousand people sleep rough. Hundreds of schools have closed. The shops, if they have decided to remain open, have draped their windows with reflective blankets, to deflect light particles. Many restaurants have forgone opening during the day altogether, a handwritten sign indicating that they’ll start seating customers after 7 P.M., when the temperature approaches something closer to tolerable. The Louvre has closed early, as has the Eiffel Tower. Moist towels soothe necks, mist bottles spray short relief, hand fans flap in overdrive; motorized fans are held up to strangers at cafés, who have resorted to pouring water directly on their chests for cooling. What is a more elemental influence over human behavior than weather? Commiseration is the tone here; in other public spaces, like the supermarket, fights have ensued. At one café, a van pulled up as the diners spoke to one another about the heat. The driver opened the back door and pulled out a gurney. A refrigerated compartment was visible in the back of the vehicle; he was here to take a body to the morgue. A café customer chimed in, “Welcome to Paris.”

At the café, the patrons wondered if the corpse wasn’t that of an elderly person who had died in the heat. As of Friday, forecast as the penultimate day of the wave, dozens have died, including at least fifty people who drowned, mostly while seeking relief in the water, and four children who had been left in hot cars. The pallor of mortality is a reminder, for some, of the heat wave in the summer of 2003, when nearly fifteen thousand people perished in France. Santé Publique, the national public-health agency, had taken that disaster as an awakening to the public-health crises of the new millennium. Epidemiological studies found that although the heat wave affected a large swath of Europe, it was France that had borne the brunt of its effects. This led to the heat-warning system, the Heat Wave and Health Alert System, which locked in its highest possible warning for seven days in Paris. Hospitals this week are overwhelmed, prompting Grégoire to effectively ban public alcohol consumption until Sunday, as a form of preëmption. (The country’s President, Emmanuel Macron, is in line.) “We must not believe we are invulnerable,” Grégoire, a different man from that day at the canal, told the public.

Paradox is the word. The clean air of western Europe, its comparative lack of light-deflecting pollutants such as aerosols, causes the heat to be more extreme than it might be in other parts of the world. La Clim, air-conditioning, is the linchpin of an intensifying political debate in France. The stereotype is that acclimatization to any weather has been a source of cultural pride. Isn’t it worth a few days of suffering to avoid submission to the Americanization of things, of flattening the city to a land of window units and ice machines? France is a climate-conscious population; there has been a strong aversion to air-conditioning, understood, rightly, as a Band-Aid that might hasten the deleterious resolution of the climate crisis. At the same time, France has not “greened” its urban areas with urgency, as climate scientists have pointed out, in op-eds and on news shows, all week. There is, too, the infrastructural issue, especially in what Americans recognize as the so-called iconic Paris, the altar to Haussmann, lined with structures whose façades cannot be marred by external cooling systems. But a decade of prolonged flashes of extreme heat makes it clear that the stakes may be deadly. Is air-conditioning an essential protection? The far right has, in recent years, come out on the side of air-conditioning, a cynical extension of the National Rally’s localism ideology, deriding environmentalist leftists as fan lovers; Marine Le Pen, the former president of the R.N., this week, reinvigorated talk of her “Plan Clim,” a nationally subsidized rollout of air-conditioners en masse.

The noncitizens, our least consequential faction, the foreigners gallivanting in Paris, adapted to the heat with a kind of deranged good humor. Little French could be heard as they traipsed all day along the canal, slurring their languages loudly. Waves of Londoners, in particular, had arrived at the start of La Canicule, on the solstice, for La Fête de la Musique. The French government has been sponsoring this daylong country-wide party since 1982, which, in Paris, is becoming like a Black-diaspora mirror to London’s Notting Hill Carnival. The Black Francophone complained about the Londoners, with their English and their brand sponsorships. The foreigners (with money and connections) stayed for men’s fashion week, which started officially on Tuesday. Linen and cotton, cooling garments, were too plebeian; the people posed nobly for street-style social-media accounts in leather jackets and low-slung jorts. They could cool off at this or that brand event, held in some gallery or store where the air was on. Some accommodations had to be made: the Rick Owens outdoor show was pushed up to the morning, as was Jonathan Anderson’s Dior show. At Issey Miyake, staff handed out cold compresses. Some plans got cancelled, yes. But the misery of the heat would add to the story told over natural wine at a bar back home. ♦