France Bakes Under Red Alert as Paris Landmarks Shut
France’s weather service placed Paris and two dozen departments across the north-west under its top red heat alert on Saturday, affecting more than 22 million people, as temperatures climbed towards 39C in the country’s third heatwave since May. The Eiffel Tower closed to visitors from 4pm on Saturday and Sunday, and the Louvre and Musée d’Orsay shut early, as the same anticyclone baking Britain settled over the continent. June had already been France’s hottest month on record.
The red alert — the weather service’s highest, triggering school closures, event cancellations and emergency plans for the vulnerable — is the continental scale of the heat now gripping Britain, and a reminder that this is a European event, not a local one. A persistent high-pressure system has parked over western Europe since spring, delivering heatwave after heatwave and turning landmark closures, once exceptional, into a routine of the new summers. The human cost is measured in excess deaths that emerge only weeks later, disproportionately among the elderly, which is why France now treats a red alert as a public-health emergency rather than a tourism inconvenience. The economic edge is real too, in lost output, strained power grids and buckling transport. Watch the peak temperatures on Sunday, the excess-death estimates that follow, and whether the pattern breaks or extends into a third week.