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.
Since July 22, fire has torn through the pine forests around Bordeaux. It forced the largest evacuation France has run in decades, tens of thousands moved in a single day. And it stopped at the edge of some of the most famous vineyards on earth.
Every spring, France lets a fresh batch of words into its dictionaries, and every spring the list reads like a confession it did not mean to make. The 2026 edition took in over 150. Quiet quitting, deepfakes, and a brand new verb for chipping in on a group gift.
Franco-American friendship turns 250 this summer, and Paris is throwing a party that belongs to it too. The Eiffel Tower in American colors, Lafayette’s sword on show, and one famous date moved off the calendar out of respect.
On July 21, French lawmakers finished the job. From September, the mobile phone is out across every year of school, from the first day of nursery to the last of high school. One country, one rule, and not much debate left to have.
A Paris appeal court upheld Marine Le Pen’s conviction today, then cut the penalty. The ineligibility that had blocked her from the 2027 presidential race is gone, and she can now run. We break down what the ruling says and what happens next.
The Tour de France starts today, and almost nothing about it works the way outsiders assume. It is not run by the French State, it does not even start in France this year, and the towns it visits pay for the privilege. We decode what the race actually is.
The Festival d’Avignon opens its 80th edition tomorrow, July 4, and runs to the 25th. For three weeks a small Provençal city becomes the biggest live-performance festival on earth. Most guides stop at the dates. The real story is who pays, who chooses, and what gets pulled.
