France and much of western Europe are in the grip of a late-June heat wave, and Paris is feeling it at street level. A French pharmacy sign in the city showed 45 degrees Celsius, or 113 degrees Fahrenheit, on Wednesday afternoon, while Métro riders were told to drink water regularly and watch out for people most at risk.
The heat is not just an inconvenience. Hundreds of schools in Paris have closed, and at Stalingrad underground station, tent settlements held nearly a thousand people sleeping rough. One man, Lyas, stood out in a tattered T-shirt reading “fashion pas facho” before stretching out his arms and being pushed into the water, a scene that summed up how the city is trying to turn danger into relief.
The scale of the heat explains the urgency. The same system has blanketed France, Germany, the U.K., Belgium, the Czech Republic and the Netherlands. In France, temperatures had already reached 36 degrees Celsius, or 97 degrees Fahrenheit, during a heat dome in May, and the current spell is pushing well past what late July or August would normally bring. La Canicule is the French term for a long, punishing stretch of heat, but even that label hardly captures how early and how hard this one has arrived.
Paris has tried to answer with water. Emmanuel Grégoire inaugurated swimming zones in the Canal Saint-Martin in mid-June, and Anne Hidalgo plunged into the Seine on the eve of the 2024 Summer Olympics, a gesture that now looks less symbolic than practical. The following summer, three swimming zones were established in the Seine with lifeguards included, part of a city effort to make the river usable as temperatures rise.
That effort has landed in a city that is warming quickly and still not prepared for this kind of heat. Swimming zones may offer relief for some, but they do nothing for the students sent home or the people at Stalingrad facing another night outdoors. The immediate question is not whether Paris can stage a public show of adaptation. It is how long the heat wave will hold, and whether the next reading on a pharmacy sign will be even higher.
