When I first lived in France in the 1970s, heatwaves were an exception. I was doing research on the French Revolution in the national archives in Paris in June 1976, during one of three heatwaves in the 20th century, when scorching heat forced archivists to stop issuing historical correspondence because our sweat was damaging the documents.
Today, such extreme weather events are almost an annual occurrence, with the heat starting ever earlier in the year. In July 2022, the nearby Montagnette hills burned for nearly a week in a fire started accidentally by sparks from a passing train and fanned by the Mistral wind that whistles down the Rhône Valley. The hills are still blackened and bare four years later. Such wildfires have become frequent.
We hear the low growl of Canadair water-bomber planes over the Alpilles hills and fire engine sirens and watch anxiously from the rooftop for smoke. Laurent Manson, a 38-year-old volunteer fireman from our neighbouring village, Saint-Étienne-du-Grès, died on fire prevention duty this week.
Friends who lovingly planted a vineyard in the Var hinterland were evacuated from their home near Cotignac as the firestorm approached. Taking only an overnight bag, their dog and their car, they sheltered in a nearby village, only to be told to move again as the wildfire spread. They returned home to find their house standing but the olive grove devastated, the garden scarred by the flames, the vines scorched and desiccated, and the forest behind the house burned to the ground. No grape harvest this year. Neighbours were less fortunate and lost everything.
Changing climate patterns are starting to affect the attractiveness of Provence as a destination for tourism and second homes, while making life harder for farmers and wine growers. The government extended the summer sales for a week to try to entice consumers to shop, but shopkeepers complain that few venture out in this heat. A British couple we know have just sold their house in Saint-Rémy and bought a place in rainy Brittany, where it’s cooler. The green and temperate Dordogne looks ever more enticing. It’s no longer a struggle to convince my French wife to holiday in Northumberland in July.
This year, severe fires have moved further north, ravaging the forest of Fontainebleau, near Paris, immortalised by the 19th-century Barbizon school of painters and impressionists such as Monet, Renoir and Cézanne. Canadairs had to scoop up water from the Seine to douse the blazes.
Another monster wildfire has driven holidaymakers and residents from Cap Ferret on the scenic south-western Bay of Arcachon and burned all the way to the outskirts of Bordeaux, forcing the evacuation of 220,000 people to makeshift dormitories in community centres, sports halls and fairgrounds. Air pollution from smoke particles threatens the health of residents over a wide area. Some 13,000 businesses, including aircraft and armaments factories, have been temporarily shut, and the toll on the economy is mounting.
On a drive through the French Basque Country at the weekend, the A63 motorway to Bordeaux was closed for 170km south of the city because of wildfires and for emergency vehicle traffic. Officials broadcast appeals to tourists to change their holiday plans and avoid the region.
Like everything in France, the heatwave quickly turned political. Candidates campaigning for next year’s presidential election have lambasted the government for everything from failing to buy more Canadair planes (they are ordered but there is a three- to five-year wait) to failing to install air conditioning in public buildings. “It is absurd to let people die of heat,” the hard-right National Rally leader Marine Le Pen said.
She has promised “a massive plan for air conditioning”, starting with hospitals, schools and care homes, with interest-free loans to households and local authorities
to install cooling. Marine Tondelier, the leader of the French green coalition Les Écologistes, has accused the government of blaming forest fires on arsonists, rather than adapting the country to climate change by cutting carbon dioxide emissions faster and insulating buildings better.
Yet in a country where people expect a lot of the state, families who have lost everything sound surprisingly resilient, and overwhelmingly grateful to the firefighters and emergency services. “We’ll just have to start all over again,” said a middle-aged woman interviewed on France-Info radio, surveying the smouldering ruins of her home near Cap Ferret.
The sense that climate change is rapidly gathering pace is stark in southern France, prompting some well-heeled residents to plot their escape while others struggle to adapt their homes and lifestyles to ever more intense heat. Perhaps the starkest illustration of the pace is in the Côtes-du-Rhône wine sector. Grape harvesting now officially starts two weeks earlier than in the 1980s. The average alcohol content of the wine has increased by up to 1 percentage point per decade, from 11 per cent in the 1980s to more than 14 per cent on average today. The wrath of God at man’s climate sins can be tasted in the grapes of Provence.
[Further reading: The responsibility of scientists]
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This article appears in the 29 Jul 2026 issue of the New Statesman, The new terror
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Subscribe here to commentThank you for an article tediously telling us what we already know. So should we panic? No indication here. What about ways of reducing the fires, and damage caused by global warming? Nothing. Bit of a waste of time, this article, don’t you think?
Politicians expect people to take the rough with the smooth in their daily lives, but seem incapable of doing it themselves.