French Letter: election-be damned as temperatures soar across France

You would think that with their two-month-long election season finally reaching a climax on Sunday, the French would be on the edge of their seats.

The possibility that Jean-Luc Mélenchon could cancel out Emmanuel Macron’s recent victory in the presidential contest by leading his all-green, all-whingeing coalition of the Left to a majority in the National Assembly ought surely to get the blood coursing, no matter whose side you’re on.  

Well, maybe in Paris, but not here in central Brittany. Here, the election posters are already starting to peel. All the talk is of the weather, which threatens to go from uncomfortably hot to downright unbearable over the course of the weekend. 

France is crying out for rain. Farmers in Brittany and elsewhere say that their wheat crop this year will be only 80 per cent of normal — this at a time when the world, in the midst of the Ukraine crisis, is in desperate need of record harvests. 

I am a city boy. I don’t know wheat from barley or how cows work. But even I can see that the cereals in the fields around where we live are behind schedule and that the maize — not normally harvested until September — is barely showing above ground. 

Grazing has also been hit. Cattle in many cases are still being fed with last year’s hay, and in the middle of the afternoon when they should be getting on with the job, they spend most of their time sheltering under trees. Not, I should add, that I blame them.

Further south, the ongoing drought, or sécheresse, is even more serious, affecting not only cereals but, crucially, the nation’s vineyards, where the yield this autumn could be the smallest in almost half a century. In the Spring, vines were already hard hit by unseasonal frosts, forcing growers in Bordeaux to place large heat-giving candles between the rows.

And then, out of the blue, just before the heat began to build, hailstones as big as tennis balls rained down. All they need now is a return of Phylloxera, the disease that in the nineteenth century almost wiped out wine production in France. 

As I write, at midday on Friday, it is already 29 degrees down our way, or 84 degrees in old money. In the Languedoc or Occitanie, as it now prefers to call itself, the heat is expected to peak at 37 degrees and could even nudge 40 degrees inland from the Mediterranean. 

This isn’t normal. It’s only mid-June. If it goes on like this, the Midi, France’s southern region, could end up as hot as the Sahara, which is where this weekend’s heatwave apparently originates. 

In 2003, the last year in which there was a canicule that lasted more than a week or two, thousands died from heatstroke and dehydration. The same could happen this year, which is possibly why the small matter of the election is slipping below the fold in all but the most political of the nation’s newspapers. 

Closer to home — in fact just outside my front window — the grass and hedges have almost stopped growing. In the latter case, I have – unlike most of my neighbours – dutifully complied with the law that requires hedges to be left unmolested until the end of the nesting season. But I have to say, three-quarters of the growth thus far was already achieved by mid-May. Since then, nothing. And the birds have stopped singing. 

When we bought our house, back in 1999, it was supposed to come with a well that, once filtered, would provide us with all the water we needed. Unfortunately, one of our neighbours, as in Jean de Florette, had, in the interregnum, diverted the flow so that he was the sole beneficiary. There was talk of taking the matter to our learned friends, but in the end, with our taps running dry, we opted for mains water, which was quickly supplied, leading this summer, I have to admit, to a certain degree of anticipatory schadenfreude. 

Much worse is the situation of our good friend Hilke, an actual grower of carnations and “pinks,” whose normally dependable source has completely dried up, leaving her without the ability to irrigate her several acres of flowers.

Unlike Le Papet, played by Yves Montand, in the film version of Jean de Florette, Hilke’s neighbours are helping, but there is only so much they can do. She has to hope that Méteo France is right when it assures us that the weather will break on Sunday or Monday, with a series of biblical thunderstorms, to be followed by more heat and then more storms. 

I will be taking a break of my own next week. Louisa and I are heading to Paris, thence, Easyjet-willing, to London in the middle of the national rail strike. In the meantime, will Macron hold off madcap Mélenchon — who I understand has cast off his trademark cardigan in deference to the heat — or is the government of France destined to grind to a halt over the next couple of years or more?

Everything hangs in the balance in this election. What happens will depend on the willingness of voters, more than half of whom stayed at home last Sunday, to step out of the shade and get themselves down to their local polling station. Watch this space.