Scenes from La Canicule in Paris
Key takeaways
- On the eve of the 2024 Summer Olympics, hosted by Paris, a wetsuited Hidalgo had plunged herself into the Seine.
- 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.
- Typically, the dog days arrive in late July or August, when the country winds down for its prolonged weeks of vacation.
Photograph by Dimitar Dilkoff / AFP / Getty Save this story Save this story Save this story Save this story You’re reading Critic’s Notebook, our weekend column looking at the most interesting moments in the cultural Zeitgeist.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.