Too ugly, too noisy, too… American? France’s great air con debate
As France prepares for another heat waveHe barely escaped the last one. Meteorologists expect scorching temperatures to return this week, and with them the same question asked again and again in June: Why isn’t France coming back? turn on the air conditioner?
Some people are already taking matters into their own hands. Dozens of people lined up outside several Lidl stores in the Paris area on Thursday hoping to get their hands on an air conditioning unit. In the Paris suburb of Aubervilliers, doors collapsed under the pressure of the crowd and fights broke out among shoppers. “I saw people being trampled,” one customer told Le Parisien newspaper. “I was in shock, I was pushed in every direction and unfortunately I didn’t leave with the air conditioning unit,” another said.
According to France’s energy transition agency, only 24% of French homes have air conditioning; that rate was 18% just two years ago, but still well below the roughly 50% seen in neighboring Italy.
Alexia, 26, who lives on the outskirts of Paris, says she gave up when she learned that a new heat wave was approaching. “All the air conditioners I was potentially considering buying were out of stock. So I rushed to buy a new one before it was gone.”
Meanwhile, only 7% of French schools have air conditioning, and thousands closed their doors last week as the heat in classrooms became unbearable. With more than 2,000 deaths recorded in six days at the height of the June heat, France’s cultural resistance to AC began to soften, according to health officials.
AC has long been viewed by the French as ugly, noisy, unnecessary and, above all, American. The French also have a long-standing belief that breathing conditioned air can make you sick. Instead, the French building tradition relies on thick stone walls and shuttered windows, passive cooling techniques that work well enough when summers are milder.
Then there is the regulation. France’s reputation for bureaucracy and bureaucratic excess also applies to air conditioning units. In the 19th-century buildings that dot the Paris skyline, residents routinely find themselves denied permission to install outdoor condenser units; because the rules of inheritance, most of them in Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s III. It preserves the uniform appearance of the city’s roofs and facades, built during the Napoleonic era’s major remodeling of the capital. Common ownership body approval is required before a fixed unit can enter shared ownership buildings, and installations without this may be forcibly reversed.
Tourists protecting themselves from the sun under umbrellas pass by the glass Pyramid of the Louvre Museum in Paris on June 24. -Alice Sacco/Reuters
Air conditioning has become fertile political ground as the 2027 presidential race approaches. Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally became the loudest pro-AC voice and “plan to climb” $23 billion in government-guaranteed, interest-free loans to equip every school and hospital and help 30 to 40 million households install units.
On the left, attitudes are divided. The Greens, traditionally the fiercest AC skeptics, are changing course, with party leader Marine Tondelier acknowledging that cooling is now necessary in at least some schools and hospitals. Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far-left France Unbowed party, warned against air conditioning, saying that installing air conditioning everywhere “means causing more harm.”
The government is somewhere in the middle; In approving emergency air conditioning units for hospitals, he is trying not to appear to be abandoning France’s insulation-first approach to heat. Just how heated the debate has become was revealed on Thursday when the Greens tabled a motion of no confidence in the government over its response to the heatwave. The motion is unlikely to be accepted, but it shows how deeply politicized the issue has become.
Resistance to air conditioning is also framed from an environmental perspective, with the idea that it directly contributes to climate change through the energy it consumes. In France, this claim is at odds with the country’s energy mix: Roughly 95% of French electricity comes from low-carbon sources, with nuclear power alone providing two-thirds. Running an air conditioner from the grid carries a fraction of the carbon cost it would in a country like Poland or Germany, where fossil fuels still account for a much larger share of electricity generation.
The use of concentrated air conditioning can increase city temperatures through waste heat. This is a local phenomenon; It is not the same as global warming caused by pollution caused by the warming of the planet, but it increases inequalities between those who have access to air conditioning and those who do not.
What environmental activists also claim is that the struggle has been reduced to an AC versus no-AC binary, and the debate is focused on the cure, not the cause.
But although more and more French people are trying to individually combat the causes of climate change, the need to cope with its symptoms has become a necessity.
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