A summer escape to Paris, at least in the American mind, evokes a certain set of images: quiet strolls along the canals, long hours in bookstores and museums, a pleasant park bench, a glass of wine. Those pleasures are now contending with one of the most brutal and dangerous heat waves that Europe has faced in decades, a muggy, enervating stretch of weather that has forced millions of people across Europe, many of them in homes without air-conditioning and with few options for refuge, to endure triple-digit temperatures.
Tourist icons of Paris—the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre—have been closing early. Thousands of schools across France (and elsewhere in Europe) have closed or changed hours, but others, also without air-conditioning, have remained open. The heat has disrupted train travel, spiked utility prices, and led to power blackouts for thousands in Brittany and in Italian cities such as Turin and Milan. French television showed throngs of people swimming in Paris’s Canal Saint-Martin, once notorious for its pollution. Tuesday was the hottest day recorded in France in nearly 80 years. Yesterday was even hotter. Since the heat wave started, two children died in an over-hot car, and the rush to cool off has had its own terrible consequences—at least 48 drownings across France since the heat wave began last week, according to French authorities. And that glass of wine? During Sunday’s Fête de la Musique, an annual music festival, outdoor alcohol consumption was restricted.
“It is just unbearable,” Yamina Saheb, a lecturer at Sciences Po, told me. “We are locked in the heat.”
Saheb, an expert on adapting buildings to the warming atmosphere and an author of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, has been rising at 3 a.m. to work in the slightly cooler overnight hours. She took her 6-year-old son to an evening movie for a brief escape. On Sunday, she fainted in her apartment in the 14th arrondissement, in the southern part of Paris. “I was so tired at that point. I’m not old, and I don’t have any health issue, but I cannot stand the heat,” she said.
Only about a quarter of France’s housing stock has air-conditioning, a much smaller proportion than in the United States and other parts of the world. Much of that housing is ill-suited to the extended stretches of dangerous heat that have blanketed Europe in recent decades. A notorious heat wave in August 2003 killed an estimated 70,000 people across the continent, and even though European countries have tried since then to protect themselves by establishing cooling sites and making registries for vulnerable people, those measures do not appear to be keeping up with the threat. The World Health Organization says that heat has killed more than 200,000 people across Europe in the past four years.
Paris authorities announced plans yesterday to extend hours at public swimming pools; some 1,400 cooling spots, including misting stations and fountains, were open across the city. Authorities were also conducting welfare checks on individuals, the city said in a statement. In Paris, many buildings have zinc roofs and are made of concrete (both materials trap heat); some lack shutters or blinds; top-level apartments are notorious for their ovenlike qualities on hot days. In a week like this, such spaces “have become uninhabitable,” as a story in Le Monde put it. The French entertainer Olivier Giraud, known for his show How to Become a Parisian in One Hour, demonstrated that he could seemingly cook various dishes—l’oeuf campagnard (country-style eggs), cote de boeuf (rib eye)—by letting a frying pan heat on his window ledge. He suggested in one video that people come to the theater for his one-man show, where at least “we have air-conditioning.”
Peter Thorne, a climate scientist at Maynooth University, in Ireland, was attending a climate-adaptation conference in Oxford this week; he stepped out of his hotel into a humid mid-90s afternoon that he described to me as a “sauna.” (Yesterday also set the record for the hottest June day in the United Kingdom.) He has been alarmed by the magnitude of this heat event, which is Europe’s second extraordinary heat wave in a month and which has been breaking records by large margins, and early in the summer. “We’d expect records to be broken, yes, but we wouldn’t expect them to be smashed to smithereens,” he said. “This is absolutely not normal.”
The weather pattern responsible, a heat dome sealed in by an area of high pressure, is itself nothing new. But now “we have loaded the atmosphere with greenhouse gases for the past 200 years,” which traps heat in the atmosphere, Thorne said. Reduced sea ice and snowpack don’t help. Temperatures in Western Europe are about 3.6 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter, depending on location, than they would have been in similar weather patterns during the second half of the 20th century, the organization ClimaMeter estimated.
Those elevated temperatures are expected to last through the week while moving north and east, possibly into Scandinavia, across cities and towns that were designed to trap heat, not dispel it, Thorne said. The improvements in forecasting and early-warning systems, as well as plans for cooling sites, will help reduce the death toll, but Thorne still expects it to be substantial. “This is truly extraordinary, unprecedented weather happening in places that are simply not designed to cope with this kind of heat,” he said. “Europe’s not prepared for this in the slightest.”
In France, access to air-conditioning has become a hot-button political debate; some far-right politicians have been pushing an AC-for-everyone message, while people on the left worry about the cost and environmental impact. Vidhya Ragunathan, an American attorney who has lived in Paris for nearly four years, has noticed that a surprising number of people still use handheld or paper fans; for her part, she’s running the fans and portable AC units in her third-floor apartment, which isn’t in direct sunlight most of the day. “This is where the American in me comes out: Those fans will run when somebody’s in that room,” she told me. “I don’t need heatstroke to throw on my plate right now.” Her children’s school remains open but has encouraged parents to keep kids home, and it has been sending letters asking which children intend to show up each day. “I throw a bunch of ice cubes in my kids’ water bottle, and I’m like, ‘Let’s go to school. We have five days left,’” she said. She’s found that some metros and buses have air-conditioning, whereas others do not; public transportation has faced delays and interruptions. An important appointment that she had at a government office, originally scheduled for tomorrow, has been canceled because of the temperature. “The thing I’ve learned about Paris is the city is completely capable of handling winter and rain; it cannot handle any sort of summer at all,” Ragunathan said. “France buckles under heat.”
At a school in Morlaix, Brittany, for children with learning disabilities and mental-health issues, some of the live-in students have tried to escape the heat by sleeping in hallways, the school’s director, Lena Bleunven, told me. Teachers have taped newspapers over the windows to block out the sun. Without air-conditioning, the school, where some 50 students spend the night, is relying on 15 fans to stay cool. “I should have bought more, but we never had this,” Bleunven said, and there were “no more fans in shops.” Last week, she’d asked regional health officials, who oversee the school, if they planned to close it for the heat wave, but she was told that there was an obligation to continue public service, she said.
In Saheb’s flat in Paris, in a building built in 1959, window AC units are not allowed on the facade that faces Parc Montsouris; on the back side, such an addition requires consensus among all owners in the building, who have so far refused, she said. After she fainted on Sunday, she wrote an open letter to President Emmanuel Macron from her cellar—“the only habitable place” in her building, as she described it. Macron, in a message on X, had urged people to look out for one another during the heat wave, particularly children and the elderly. (Macron’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) Saheb considered that message insufficient and criticized Macron for failing to do more to help France adapt to this climate emergency. “I don’t know about you, but I refuse to hand down to my son a country where the only refuge is the basement, and the only survival strategy is fending for oneself,” she wrote.