France averaged 24.0°C across June, July and August, Météo-France said in the seasonal climate report it published on 3 September. That is 3.6°C above the 1991–2020 normal, and 0.9°C above the summer of 2003 — itself 2.7°C above normal, and the season that has served, for more than twenty years, as the country’s reference point for what extreme heat looks like. Daytime maxima ran 4.8°C above normal, against 3.3°C in 2003. July on its own, at 24.9°C, was the hottest calendar month of any kind measured in France since the record begins in 1900.
The size of the gap is what distinguishes this from an ordinary record. National seasonal averages are stubborn numbers, smoothed across hundreds of stations and three months of weather, and new records usually arrive by tenths of a degree. Clearing the previous benchmark by 0.9°C is not the record edging forward; it is a step.
The detail underneath it is consistent. Météo-France counts 53 days of heatwave across three episodes — 17 to 30 June, when up to 72 departments were placed on red alert; 4 to 19 July; and 28 July to 19 August, with 83 departments on orange. The 40°C threshold was passed 178 times on the service’s main station network, against 88 times in 2003. At Vivès, in the Pyrénées-Orientales, the temperature did not fall below 30.6°C on the night of 8 to 9 July, the highest minimum ever observed in mainland France and Corsica.
Dryness came with the heat. Rainfall finished 40 per cent below normal, making this the second driest summer since 1959 behind 1962, with only 15 to 20 days of rain nationwide. Sunshine ran more than 20 per cent above normal — the sunniest summer in the series, tied with 1949. Those three things together, heat and drought and sun, are the combination that carries a season into the autumn: soil moisture, river flows and reservoir levels do not reset when the calendar does.
Records of this kind are usually described as warnings about the future. This one is better read as a measurement of the present.