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A historically hot summer is revealing a society massively unprepared for the new climate reality.

You felt it even in your nose. Breathing in the Paris air felt like inhaling inside of a sauna. There’s some truth here: A concrete jungle such as Paris, or just about any French city center, is a built environment conceived for the far more temperate climate of the preindustrial world. But in the extreme weather of the Anthropocene—the geological epoch resulting from man-made climate change—it’s a kiln-like multiplier to the record temperatures that blanketed France and other parts of western Europe late last month.

Between June 17 and 30, France was exposed to its most dramatic heat wave in recorded history. Peak temperatures hugged 40°C (104°F) in Paris over several consecutive, grueling days. The country’s highest recorded temperature remains the 46°C (114.8°F) notched up during the 2019 heat wave in the southern town of Véragues, near Montpellier. But June 2026 now counts as thehottest on average. Summer has only just started, and the immediate human toll is already grim. On July 3, public-health authorities announced that the week of June 22 saw an increase of over 2,000 heat-related deaths.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that the country was, quite literally, fried. Alongside the human damage, June’s heat wave has ravaged natural ecosystems, dealing a second blow with numerous cascading effects from stressed water shelves and riverbeds to parched forests. They leave the country particularly exposed for the second act of summer. Satellite imagery gives an idea of the scope of damage to wildlife: A bird’s-eye view of mainland France taken as recently as May 24 showed a country covered in the rich green of spring. That same perspective a month later reveals a landmass charred by the splotches of brown usually not seen until August.

Heat may be indiscriminate, but its effects among humans are more selective, mapping on to the inequalities that divide society. Students and individuals living under Paris’s iconic zinc-topped roofs were exposed to the scorching pressure cookers that their apartments had become. Various news outlets reported on well-off residents taking up spare rooms in Paris hotels, benefiting from a few days of AC. The luckiest probably fled the city altogether, to country homes or seaside villas—anywhere for a chance at the wind, shade, and fresh water that’s cruelly lacking in the parched capital.

This is not the first time that extreme summer temperatures have caught France off guard. In 2003, a heat wave claimed the lives of at least 15,000 people, with authorities facing fierce criticism for their slow and inadequate response. Over two decades later, the shock of this summer’s heat wave should have been entirely foreseeable. For decades, innumerable reports from the IPCC and climate scientists have warned that global warming is making heat waves more frequent, longer-lasting, and more intense. According to Meteo France, the annual number of extreme heat days could be multiplied by five by 2050 ( 2.7°C) and by 10 from now to 2100 ( 4°C), depending on global emissions trajectories.

“We’re still only in the opening credits, but there’s no way around the realization that climate change is well under way,” the activist and writer Clément Sénéchal told The Nation. “This latest crisis confirms the failure of a certain environmentalism, which has so far not been able to slow global warming or mitigate its most tangible effects.”

During an official visit to Antibes in southern France, President Emannuel Macron sought to defend his government’s environmental record. “We have adapted to global warming, but we cannot adapt to a heat wave that has no equivalent in Europe today,” the president said on June 25. Five days later, Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu defended that same record before the National Assembly. “Since President Chirac [1995–2007], every administration has, to the best of its ability, done something to tackle climate change. Denying that would undermine the republican consensus,” he said, dismissing criticism from the opposition.

But 10 years after Macron’s pledge to........

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