Notes from a burning Paris - by Sarah Wilson
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Notes from a burning Paris<br>wondering what collapse looks like?
Sarah Wilson<br>Jun 26, 2026
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I write to you from a cafe in a small neighbourhood on the outskirts of Paris1. I’ve been here almost five hours on my laptop ordering a nonsensical array of beverages and foodstuffs every hour or so, to pay my way. The place is packed. Kids are playing chess (school has been cancelled), dogs are under the tables, the elderly are reading, people are whispering into their phones, trying to hold work Zoom calls. Down the back is a woman with a conductor’s baton rehearsing some score she’s listening to on her tablet.
We’re all camped out here because it’s one of the very few cafes in the city with air conditioning (only 25 per cent of hotels has AC; the figure would be even less for bars and cafes). We’ve all googled “hotel lobbies/cafes with AC”, or got the heated tip from one of the hundreds of WhatsApp groups doing the rounds.<br>This is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.
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I’m betting you’ve heard there’s a heatwave across Europe, the eye of it hovering squarely over Paris.
All heat records have been broken. Paris became one of the hottest places on the planet. The average June temperature here in Paris is 23C. It’s been over a week now of temperatures 15C over that. And 38C is, on the treeless, stone-lined streets here, experienced as 44C. I walked past one of those iconic green cross pharmacy lights yesterday. It was recording 48C.<br>And it ain’t the half of it. Minimums have barely dropped below 30C. And it only does so around 5am (it takes that long for the concrete jungle to cool after the sun finally sets at 11pm).<br>People are dying - 55 people died in Paris alone in the past 24 hours. Festivals, school, gym classes are cancelled. Hundreds of thousands of chickens have perished across France. I just read an alert: a bus driver passed out from heatstroke and crashed into a tree in central Paris. I’m not sure of the details yet.
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" title="Instagram post" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" allowFullScreen allow="encrypted-media" sandbox="allow-same-origin allow-scripts allow-popups allow-popups-to-escape-sandbox" style="height:520px;width:100%;border:0px;display:block;background:transparent;" class="instagram-embed-frame">Mosques have opened their doors so people can sleep on the cool tiles. The parks in the capital are open 24 hours for the immediate future. Thousands of locals are setting up hammocks and mattresses and sleeping the night on the cool grass. Other are carrying bedding down to caves (the subterranean storage lockups under the Haussmann apartment buildings).
The city has opened up “cool spaces” where people can just…exist for the day.<br>Exist. Survive. Ride it out. That’s pretty much all you can manage in heat like this.
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