In 2020, when I moved to Paris from London to start a PhD at the Sorbonne, I had not heard of the word “canicule”. My French was rudimentary. Besides, during a global pandemic, discussing the weather of the day did not seem to be an urgent concern.
I first learnt of the word in 2022. The French call a heatwave a canicule. The word is derived from what the Romans called the brightest star in the Canis Major constellation — Canicula or little dog. The etymology may be charming but this little dog claimed over 5,000 lives in France in the summer of 2022. And now, in 2026, it is increasingly clear that very few lessons were learnt.
Paris is beautiful, romanticised and loved but also old, dense and
unforgiving. Most buildings in the historical centre are built to retain heat and withstand cold winters. Ceiling fans, or even standing fans, are uncommon. Even the newer buildings were not designed to deal with the long, unforgiving summer heat. So, people have no choice but to sweat it out.
This June, temperatures remained between 37°C and 40°C for hours, comparable to a scorching summer noon in the Lower Gangetic Plain, but excruciatingly prolonged and devoid of humidity. This continued for a week.
The wind, albeit rare, was desiccating. And the lack of air pollution made the sunlight even more unbearable.
I was lucky to be in temperature-controlled rooms of a biological research laboratory. However, most public transport, and a majority of public schools and hospitals have
not been so lucky. To give a number to exactly how unlucky, I went around with a laser thermometer from my laboratory to measure surface temperatures. They went up to 44ºC inside metros and 60ºC on asphalt roads.
I couldn’t go around too much though, as tram tracks deformed in the heat. I was reminded of my Class IX physics lessons — why rail tracks have gaps in them. It is to resist deformation, since heat expands and cold contracts. French engineers, sadly, did not account for climate change to this extent.
The heat also made the city almost lose its walkability. I still carried on with my water bottle, my trusted Mohendra Lal Dutt chhata and hand fan everywhere, but it seemed that many fellow residents were not as well-equipped. Some were less ill-equipped than others.
Paris, like Calcutta, consists of a small core, with people from the suburbs, called the banlieues, arriving every morning to keep the city churning, and leaving en masse at night. These residents of the poorer banlieues, living in cramped apartments, doing physically punishing jobs, are the most vulnerable.
Many are from immigrant backgrounds, a term used in France as a proxy for racial and religious minorities. They now find themselves confined in conditions that the Republic has persistently failed to address, and bearing the brunt of a climate crisis to which they contributed very little.
Above all, the biggest complaint was against the suburban trains, known as the RER, comparable to the Sealdah South trains that I took throughout my childhood. I hear that the Sealdah-Ranaghat line now has functioning air-conditioned trains but neither Sealdah South in Greater Calcutta nor RER B in Greater Paris has been so lucky.
Measures like opening up parks at night, allowing longer hours at public swimming pools and advising people to be hydrated have not been enough. The incessant siren of ambulances that I heard almost throughout the day bore ample evidence of that. Hospitals were overwhelmed as well, which led the mayor of Paris to postpone the Pride March.
The worst were the nights. I was one of a handful of Parisians lucky and pragmatic enough to prepare for the sultry nights beforehand by buying a small portable single-hose AC unit. As extreme heat becomes routine, cooling is no longer a luxury but a public health necessity. Yet, the question of air-conditioning has become, in typically French fashion, a topic of heated debate.
French energy is derived predominantly from clean nuclear energy sources. Climate change is also taken relatively seriously in France. Yet, public reluctance to adopt air-conditioning remains. Many Parisian landlords can accept the suffering of the very old and very young but not split ACs on Haussmannian facades.
On social media, this is seen as a uniquely French or European problem but one forgets how common it is for every society to have its own blind spots, especially when
science collides with culture, habit and identity.
Readers in Calcutta might feel very much at home seeing how topics that should be uncontroversial and driven by scientific evidence become matters of cultural and political polarisation. Here too, the French are, as one of the Bengali language’s greatest novelists Satinath Bhaduri said in his Paris memoirs (Satyi Bhraman Kahini), “abnormally normal”.
If I were to hazard a guess I would say, within a decade, air-conditioning in Parisian summers will feel no more unusual than bicycles gliding through avenues and rues that were once ruled by cars.
Sharbatanu Chatterjee is a researcher based in Paris