On a recent morning partway through France’s historic heat wave, Dhafer Kahri, an air-conditioning technician, let me join him on a house call to an apartment in Paris’s 16th arrondissement, where he was trying to bring a unit back to life. Kahri’s phone rang so often—several times an hour, all day long—that he worked with his AirPods in. With more work than he could handle, he could freely apologize with the magic words The boss won’t do it for rejecting jobs that he, the boss, didn’t want to do. He wanted to work on apartments with balconies, such as this one, because a balcony is in many cases the only spot an air conditioner can be installed here—hidden from neighbors, preservationists, and the city. He did not want to work on the city’s famous gray zinc roofs, which can reach temperatures of 150 degrees on the hottest summer days, creating life-threatening heat for those who live beneath them.

The position of the French government, and the city of Paris, is that air-conditioning is a “maladaptation” to climate change—a wasteful, antisocial technology that intensifies the very crisis that it purports to address.

But the national consensus underlying that position is beginning to melt as record-breaking heat tests France’s patience and principles. On Tuesday, the country recorded the hottest day in its history. Then again on Wednesday. Thursday was the same. The high temperature in Paris has been more than 96 degrees for 10 straight days, topping out at 105 this week.

Beth Gardiner: Europe’s come-to-AC moment

France has been slow to recognize that many buildings need stronger medicine than shutters, ceiling fans, and a good night breeze—and they need it now. This has left the country exposed on multiple fronts. The far right has capitalized on the present social breakdown—closed schools, canceled trains, overloaded hospitals—to proclaim itself the party of air-conditioning, turning a complicated technical question into a culture-war cudgel. Meanwhile, in the absence of clear and easy guidance, air-conditioning is proliferating through French cities in its worst forms—in many cases, a tube spilling scorching air out of an open door or window—as desperate residents adopt inefficient or illegal solutions. Finally, and most important, underestimating the need for AC has left millions of people suffering through the hottest days of their lives with no recourse.

To survive without AC during a heat wave demands a prolonged state of environmental hypervigilance, right as the heat cuts short your sleep and saps your good sense. Since the current heat wave began 10 days ago, the French have been living like sailors, internalizing the rhythms of wind and sun as they rig their homes each day. Their windows close in the morning before they commute, locking in the dawn air. The lucky ones have shutters or awnings, but others must climb stepladders to hang sheets or tablecloths from windows. The hardware stores are all sold out of chalk powder, which can be pasted onto the outside of panes to reflect more sunlight. At night they open the windows, turn on the fans, and take a cold shower. The word for this makeshift adaptation is bricolage, meaning “DIY” or “patch job,” and depending on the context, it is invoked as proof of ingenuity and agility, or evidence of a disgraceful lack of preparedness.

That approach worked well enough during other recent heat waves. But this month’s prolonged stretch of nighttime heat has made the practice ineffective. On Wednesday night, for example, the temperature in Paris dipped below 80 degrees for only a few minutes, at dawn. Furthermore, a bricolage approach is most agreeable when you leave during the day, but many French people have had to work from their dark, warm apartments while they care for children whose schools have closed because of the heat.

France’s lack of air-conditioning has been somewhat exaggerated by American pundits. Most white-collar offices are air-conditioned, along with many movie theaters, malls, supermarkets, and shops. Nevertheless, it is true that the French—like Europeans more generally—are skeptical of air-conditioning at home. In a 2021 OpinionWay survey, nearly two-thirds of respondents said that they did not have AC and did not plan to install it, mostly for economic or environmental reasons. More abstract, there is a widespread belief (or there was, before this summer) that AC is a wasteful and distinctly American indulgence. Why not dress down, hydrate, or have lunch in the shade?

Those sentiments have created, and in turn been reinforced by, rules that discourage the technology. In the country’s road map to adapt to global warming, individual air conditioners are presented as harmful. The roots of this position lie in the energy crisis of the 1970s, which prompted most of Europe to tighten its codes so that buildings would be more efficient. That’s been a huge success, but it makes installing air-conditioning in new buildings (outside of heat pumps, which can also cool buildings) all but impossible, Emmanuel Bozonnet, a building-physics expert at La Rochelle Université, told me.

Yet well-insulated buildings aren’t necessarily better in the heat. Over the past two decades, a second movement in France has emerged to ensure “thermal comfort.” Summer-ready designs including perforated blinds, ceiling fans, balconies, and cross-ventilated apartments are now standard fare in new construction; they are required in many jurisdictions, including Paris. “We should be telling ourselves: Find again the origins of architecture, in terms of climate,” Philippe Rahm, an architect based in Paris and the author of Histoire naturelle de l’architecture (“A Natural History of Architecture”), told me. “You want the building to function on its own.”

France has tried to adapt its old buildings in that spirit, assuming that AC will be the technology of last resort, deployed only after buildings have been otherwise buttressed against the sun through shutters, fans, and insulation. That “intelligent design” approach could have been sensible—had France made significant progress with those protections since the country’s deadly heat wave that killed 20,000 people in 2003. Instead, the country’s double-barrel heat waves of May and June have exposed just how much faster the climate has changed than the buildings have.

Part of the problem is that, outside of their tenants’ pleas, landlords face neither any real pressure nor any legal requirement to install shutters and ceiling fans; even owners who want to do so are thwarted by recalcitrant co-op boards or finicky historic-preservation reviews. A national law to make it easier to install shutters—as ridiculous as that sounds—was proposed last year, but little progress has been made. More than 40 percent of French homes still do not have solar protection on the windows, Maider Olivier, a climate advocate with the Foundation for Housing of the Disadvantaged, told me.

Even the most ardent defenders of this basics-first approach acknowledge that some buildings will never be habitable without active cooling. Three categories stand out for urgent intervention: hospitals, schools, and top-floor apartments. This week, in an effort to demonstrate what could be accomplished without AC, Paris Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire organized a press visit to a school. Temperatures in unrenovated classrooms were almost 108 degrees. In classrooms that had received “thermal comfort” renovations, the temperature was 91. That is, technically, proof that you can substantially change indoor conditions with simple modifications. It is also proof that French schools are going to need air-conditioning—Grégoire also ordered 1,200 air conditioners for Parisian schools.

Paris encapsulates the French AC conundrum: Cooling is both desperately needed and tightly regulated for its negative externalities. According to a 2023 study in The Lancet, the French capital is the European city with the highest risk of excess heat deaths, thanks to a combination of density, demographics, geography, and architecture. In the 2003 heat wave, two-thirds of the Parisian dead had lived in tiny, sweltering top-floor apartments.

The city also has some of the world’s most complicated rules about air-conditioning installation. That is partly rooted in the aforementioned co-op laws and historic-preservation regulations. But it's also because planners fear the urban-heat-island effect—the local rise in temperatures resulting from urban infrastructure. One study suggests that mass air-conditioning could expel enough hot air to raise the city’s temperature by nearly 4 degrees Fahrenheit on the hottest days, and bring more intense localized effects on narrow streets and in building courtyards. Cool air for some would mean hotter air for others.

As a result, getting official approval for even a mini-split—a relatively efficient way to cool a home—is very difficult. Residents of cooler apartments on lower floors aren’t always sympathetic to the plight of those suffering upstairs in the “maid’s rooms,” and don’t want to live next to compressor noise and hot-air exhaust. Parisians of means resort to illegal, hidden installations on roofs or balconies, risking fines if they’re found out. Installers don’t ask questions; if an illegal system needs to be removed later, that’s just more work for them. More cautious neighbors may install a water-powered system, which is impossible to detect but can use nearly a bathtub’s worth of cold water every hour to keep an apartment cool. Most resort to mobile air conditioners, generally shoddy products sold to people on the eve of a heat wave. All of these solutions are unevenly distributed, and the effects of unadulterated heat are concentrated on the country’s poor.

Into this warm void has come the French far right, seeing an issue that exposes the hypocrisy of the country’s politics and media establishments, whose denizens enjoy AC in their offices and television studios. The far-right leader Marine Le Pen has, for the second year in a row, called for a national air-conditioning plan, though the details are scant. The right-wing mayor of Nice has asked for a law mandating AC in hospitals and retirement homes, and even the leader of the Green Party, Marine Tondelier, now says some places can no longer do without AC. Last week, President Emmanuel Macron’s government highlighted that it had slashed taxes on heat pumps from 30 percent to 5 percent.

Joshua Partlow: Perhaps France should reconsider AC

It would be ironic indeed if air-conditioning helps Le Pen’s National Rally win over voters in next spring’s presidential election. Her party has often mocked the country’s efforts to adapt to climate change, and has fought any effort to reduce its effects. But the status quo makes an easy target. Renters cannot wait for landlords to install shutters and ceiling fans. Hospital rooms are approaching 100 degrees. Thousands of schools have been closed for days on end, and students are taking their exams in stifling classrooms. The temperature inside the train station in Nantes, which opened in 2020, was 106 degrees on Wednesday afternoon. (Inside the nearby cathedral, which broke ground in the 1400s, it was 79.)

Some prominent left-wing politicians, notably the perennial presidential candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon, remain adamantly opposed to the technology. But that stance is becoming untenable. AC is not nearly as bad for the environment as it used to be. Its most notorious refrigerants are illegal, the machinery is now more efficient, and the French electricity grid is powered overwhelmingly by renewable energy.

The most valid objections are that AC will preclude more efficient heat-proofing renovations, and that it will run all summer, permanently warming the urban environment. But air conditioners work best in concert with, not in replacement of, the basic architectural technology that makes up the backbone of the French climate-adaptation plan. And the French should not worry too much that AC will change the culture. Many will cope the old-fashioned way: going out of town. Even in the city’s air-conditioned cafés and restaurants, plenty of people still chose to sit outside this week.

Yesterday, I caught up with Sylvain Waserman, the head of France’s office for climate transition. He was dismayed by the angry tenor that the air-conditioning debate had displayed in recent days but conceded: “It’s hard to be serene when it’s 105 degrees outside.” He defended having AC be the solution of last resort, at least in terms of public policy, but noted that anyone was free to walk into a hardware store and buy a mobile AC. Had the extraordinary temperatures changed his priors? “It’s a wake-up call,” he told me—but not for him, for his opponents: “Nobody can say any longer that climate change isn’t real.” Then my phone dropped the call—it had overheated.