07-07-2025
Chilling out gets political as France swelters without air con
The summer heat has opened a new front in France's 236-year-old war between the political left and right: the morality of air conditioning.
Marine Le Pen, the populist champion and presidential favourite, responded to this month's 40C temperatures with a call for an urgent 'national air-conditioning plan' to help the sweltering lower classes. Schools, which saw 2,000 heat-forced closures last week, and care homes were especially hit, she said.
'They suffocate in buildings without air conditioning because leaders have decided that the French people should suffer from the heat, while they obviously enjoy air-conditioned vehicles and offices,' the leader of the hard-right National Rally told parliament.
Le Pen was tweaking the ingrained view among France's superior classes that there is something sinful about climate control. Even before the fear of greenhouse gases emerged in the 1970s, air conditioning was seen as an unnatural, noisy, costly and unhealthy indulgence, suitable for soft Americans, like automatic car transmissions, but not for the steelier French. The outlook has shifted, with wider adoption of 'la clim' in homes, mainly in the sunny south.
Some 25 per cent of French homes have air conditioning, well below the level of equipped homes in Italy and Spain, which is 40 per cent. In Britain it is 5 per cent, and Germany 3 per cent. Sixty per cent of all new cars in France have climate control.
The old outlook endures, however, as witnessed by the refusal by the 2024 Paris Olympics organisers to cool the athletes' village. That prompted foreign teams to bring mobile conditioners or move to hotels.
A thicket of regulations govern installations, with permission needed from the town mayor for houses and a vote from co-owners in apartment buildings. A 2021 survey reported that 48 per cent of French people believed air conditioners should be outlawed because they damaged the environment.
Le Pen's attack on the country's leaders as hypocritical was aimed at her core audience, who are seen by the thinking classes as diesel-driving cigarette smokers.
'For the so-called French elite, austerity is always reserved for the lower-middle and working classes,' she said.
Éric Ciotti, a former conservative leader who runs a small party allied to Le Pen, leapt in with his own demand to subsidise aircon for the masses.
Right-wing commentators railed at the lectures on climate virtue from the 'nanny state'. Often mentioned is the renaming of the weather forecast on France 2 television, equivalent to BBC1. It is now Météo Climat, instead of just La Météo. In another example, a caller to a government hotline for coping with heat was told to avoid even using a basic electric fan.
On the other side of the political divide, the left and Greens voiced outrage at the call from a party leader who plays down climate change and opposes wind turbines. Agnès Pannier-Runacher, the environment minister, called Le Pen incompetent and ignorant because nursing homes were already required by law to provide air-conditioned rooms for fragile residents.
'The issue we have with air conditioning is global warming. We need to provide air conditioning for vulnerable people and give them some respite,' Pannier-Runacher, a career treasury official and graduate of elite universities, said. 'However, we mustn't do it everywhere, otherwise we risk warming the planet, which is a bad solution.'
Gabriel Attal, a former socialist and ex-prime minister who leads President Macron's centrist Renaissance party, said the focus must be placed on insulation and buildings designed like traditional southern structures to cope with outdoor heat. Along similar lines, Sandrine Rousseau, a radical Green MP, urged France to revert to shutters and fans.
