Half of France fell under its highest heat warning on Tuesday, with 54 departments placed on red alert as a punishing early-summer heatwave tightened its grip on the continent. Daytime readings pushed past 40°C in several regions, and Meteo France logged a national temperature indicator of 29.8°C averaged across 30 stations — the highest figure of its kind ever recorded, edging out the marks set in 2003 and 2019.
The human toll has mounted quickly. Officials have tied 40 drownings over the past week to people, many of them young, seeking relief in unsafe water. France also passed through its hottest night on record, a sign of how little overnight respite the heat has offered.
In Paris, the strain reached the city’s landmarks. The Eiffel Tower shut its doors early in the afternoon, and the Louvre said it would close two hours ahead of schedule from Wednesday through Saturday, warning that heat is taking a growing toll on its ageing building and that visitor crowds worsen interior conditions. Mont Saint Michel asked travellers to hold off on visits while red alerts remain in force.
Schools bore much of the disruption. Roughly 1,800 closed nationwide, with others cutting their hours, in a country where air conditioning remains scarce across homes, workplaces and transit. Public events and rail networks were thrown off as well.
The crisis extends well beyond French borders. Spain braced for highs near 44°C in parts of Andalusia under red warnings, Italy declared red alerts in as many as 16 cities including Rome and Milan, and Britain trimmed school hours and rail services. Poland, Croatia and Hungary all issued high-level warnings as the heat advanced into Central and Eastern Europe.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies cautioned that such temperatures can turn life-threatening within hours and pressed governments to act fast to shield the elderly and the ill.
Energy systems felt the heat too. One French nuclear reactor was taken offline after the river water drawn to cool it climbed past safe limits.
Climate researchers place the episode within a longer pattern, noting that Europe has warmed at roughly double the global rate since the 1980s. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service has recorded 2024 as the hottest year measured worldwide, and scientists expect heatwaves of this kind to grow longer and fiercer as warming continues.
