For one September weekend France opens everything: the Élysée, the ministries, village chapels, courtrooms and lighthouses. The Journées du Patrimoine turn 43 this year, and the theme is the machine France gave the world: photography.
Marine Le Pen is eligible, wears an electronic bracelet, and trails her own protégé in every poll. Jordan Bardella is thirty-one and leads them all. Before April 2027 the far right must put one name on the poster.
France votes for a president in April 2027, and almost nothing about the ritual works the way Americans expect. Two Sundays, paper ballots, 500 signatures to get in, and a result announced at exactly eight o’clock.
On 21 July France banned social media for anyone under 15. On 14 August nine judges struck the ban down. Between those two dates sits an institution Americans keep mistranslating, and its favourite verb: censurer.
France keeps a national benchmark for dry summers: 1976, the year of the drought tax. In August 2026 the soil moisture maps slid past it. Four heatwaves, a record area burned, and one word everywhere: la sécheresse.
Gérald Darmanin wanted the Élysée. On 17 August he told a regional newspaper he would step aside and back Édouard Philippe for 2027. One announcement, one very French verb: se rallier. The presidential race just changed shape.
Every September, France comes back from summer all at once, and it has a single word for it: la rentrée. It is not only the first day of school. It is a whole country restarting on the same week, with its own rituals.
On the 15th of August, half of France is stuck on the same motorway, crawling south toward the sea. It is a public holiday and the peak of the grands départs, the summer’s biggest wave of vacationers all leaving at once.
Every year, as France comes back from the beach, its bookshops brace for a flood. Hundreds of new novels land in a matter of weeks, all chasing the same handful of prizes. No other country does this. Welcome to the rentrée littéraire.
Every autumn France writes a budget, and every autumn the same drama returns: a government that can be toppled, a parliament that agrees on nothing, and a strange constitutional tool that lets Paris govern without a vote. Here is how it actually works.
