French Summer Is Here

And I’m a low-key hater.

This is en route to the osteopath’s office. Just another Tuesday.

Prime Minister François Bayrou must secretly despise the job he campaigned his entire life to get, because his proposed 2026 budget is an express train to losing it. Legislators across the spectrum are calling for a motion to censure; if passed, it means Macron dissolves the cabinet and picks a new PM. Bayrou has survived eight of these motions so far, but this time it’s different, because one of his bright ideas for reducing the deficit, currently almost 6% of GNP, is legit suicidal.

He’s suggesting scotching two bank holidays.

These paid days off would no longer be off, without any bump in wages to compensate, and employers would be obliged to hand over their increase in profits to the government. If a pay cut and a new tax sound enough like electoral poison, coming for French people’s vacations is flabbergasting. It’s catnip for headlines and a recipe for demagoguery. Marine Le Pen is already sharpening her nicotine-stained teeth.

Pensions are considered the third rail of French politics; holidays are Chernobyl.

What I am about to say is sacrilegious, but I find French Summer annoying AF. I say this as an American who has been a freelancer most of her professional life. Being able to plan ahead and stake out an entire month away from work has never been a thing for me. This fact surely perfumes my bitter confession with eau de FOMO. But Americans also tend to consider long vacations soft. Take too much time off and you lose your edge.

I am never happier than when I come home from a long trip. My ideal away from home is a week. After that, I’m clawing the walls. I want routine, I want my coffee maker and my bed and my giant bathtub. I want to be back in the mix of my life, to ponder whatever madness Eleanor and Lucy got up to while I was away. I want to be alone. I want the only adventure to be inside my mind.

Just another Friday.

Peak season in Europe is the biggest boner killer of all time. By definition, anywhere everyone else is is unappealing to me. There is no sand soft or white enough, no waters cerulean enough, to make me love them when they’re crammed with other people’s arguments, smells, and children. I lean heavily into the privilege of not knowing exactly when school vacations are, except sometime in July and August. June and September are my magic months. Airfares are cheaper, and the weather is often even nicer. No lines, less noise, more grateful restauranteurs.

Look how empty. This is Mondragó, Mallorca in early June.

France has a very different approach than mine to long periods of time off, which it correctly considers a human right. The entitlement of French Summer is a gateway drug for Americans trying to imagine that there could be a better way. In France, there are vacation solidarity funds to help people in economic precarity take a yearly summer trip. Everything in my politics says yes to this. I love French people for demanding playtime. Americans need to do it more. And still, I roll my eyes when I pass by the Secours Populaires office in Paris. “Babies,” I silently spit to myself.

I’m not saying I’m right about any of this. Clearly, I’m conflicted.

It’s just, the only time off Americans are raised to venerate is time off from school. The only summer we fetishize is a teenage one, and the only iconic break is in spring, when we take fluorescent shots and throw up on ourselves and show people our tits and lose our virginity heedlessly and clumsily. Time off is a rite of passage we are supposed to get over, not a way of life. The thrust of the National Lampoon Vacation movies? Long trips away are aberrant and unleash dangerous forces of chaos. Compare this to the beloved French Camping franchise, where the field of conflict might be between social classes, or the forces of tourist development, but never the institution of leisure itself.

“Where are you going this summer?” is the French version of “What do you do for a living?” It’s impolite to ask the latter question within the first few hours of conversing with someone—some might even say days. It invites hierarchy and preening. And yet your summer plans tick off all the important social signifiers and get the same job done in happier hues.

Green shutters equal the Île de Ré. If you go in August, the bike paths are like the 101 Freeway at 5pm on a Wednesday.

Where you go and what you do on your vacation show how much money you have, and whether that money is generational. Say camping and they know you’re working class. The Ile de Ré is Martha’s Vineyard, the Côte d’Azur is trash Hamptons, Saint-Briac is Palm Beach, the Dordogne is Maine, Provence is Napa Valley, the Pays Basque is Montauk. If you say surfing, you are basically telling people you smoke pot. If you say you’re going on a cycling trip, you’re probably on a diet a lot and don’t drink very much, and thus you and I probably won’t be exchanging numbers.

If you are American and reading this, ask yourself how you would feel if a perfect stranger mingling near you at a cocktail party asked you where or how you spent your summers before they knew about your family or where you showed up for work every day. You’d think they were creepy. Or French, because if they come at you with that question from jump, they most likely are.

Because vacations are so fricking long in France, you have to be really clear on who you are traveling with. One trip to the Ile de Ré with Charles and Sasha turned out to be heaven, but only after we offloaded a pair of fellow travelers who killed our vibe for the first week and a half. Amandine was a fashion executive whom I knew to be beautiful and spiritual and kind-hearted, but we had only ever met for dinner or drinks, where she would invariably have ten million food restrictions. Off-leash in summer mode, she revealed herself to be painfully insecure and melancholy, possibly bulimic, and so desperate for approval and attention that she brought along a newish boyfriend simply because he was willing to invest in the trip. He wore a leather cord man-necklace, had terrible opinions about movies and though he swore up and down to his new lover that he wasn’t drinking anymore, every morning, Charles and I awoke to find the Campari and the gin significantly reduced from the previous day’s levels. When Amandine clocked it, she fell apart. Cue the pained arguments, not quite out of earshot.

Another trip to the Ile de Ré, back when Terrance was still alive, involved Terrance’s mistress pawning her insufferable ten year old off on us with no money for groceries or restaurants or babysitters, while the mistress fucked off somewhere else with her husband. Her small monster with a big voice was proud to tell us that only thing she cared about in life was Harry Potter. She wore one of those digital wristwatches that all ten year olds own briefly before losing it or mastering its various functionalities. The alarm on hers went off every hour on the hour all night long. There wasn’t an extra bedroom in the house Charles had generously rented for us all, so they threw her in mine. As a rule, I try not to be rude to children. This time, I don’t think I succeeded.

No strangers, no danger.

These are the kind of people you would prefer to have in your space for a matter of hours, not days or weeks. The abbreviated American approach to summer would have saved us, because none of it would have lasted that long or meant that much.

When I lived in Paris, especially in the 20^th arrondissement, and not my touristy old neighborhood of Montmartre, I went full bore on anti-French Summer. I stayed in Paris all of August, where I could drive the ex’s whip anywhere in town without traffic and park almost anywhere for free. (This has since changed; Mayor Anne Hidalgo has cracked down on street parking and set up a congestion zone.) Most of the people who remained in Paris were essential workers or simply people without the money to leave. The screeching yuppies and their kids were all somewhere else. Paris without upwardly mobile Parisians? You cannot ask for better.

Now I live somewhere that my former social cohort considers a getaway destination, not a home base. People ask me where I’m going for the summer, and I’m like, the party is right here, people! Why would I skip out on the gently rolling hills when they’re covered with sunflowers in peak form, or the forests at their most voluptuous? Plus, I’m working on three and a half books at the same time. I couldn’t go anywhere right now even if I wanted to.

The most crucial maximiens are here in force or soon will be. Patty will be back for all of August. Tom and Callahan should be getting here any minute, with their genius daughter who is now six and will have learned new tricks. Once Michel and Simon are done flitting around Rabat, they’ll be back too, and in their best moods because here and not Paris is where their garden is. But for a short trip back to their former home base of Saint-Lunaire (aka Newport, Rhode Island), Cassandre and Jean-Yves are pasted to the village as much as I am.

Last night, the three of us and Michel, who is here for a long weekend, had dinner at Jean-Yves’s house. He made us zucchini and chorizo risotto, and we covered every subject under the sun, including Cassandre and Jean-Yves’s past lives as Saint-Lunaire year-rounders. The next town over has a famous golf course that Cassandre’s second husband used to frequent. “I hated that place,” Cassandre said. “I’d show up to the green dressed head to toe in black leather and French kiss my husband in front of everyone.” Michel’s ex-wife has a family house nearby and goes whenever she can, usually joined by a rotating crew of perfectly maladjusted middle-aged partyers whom she has known most of her life. They pop in and out with their kids for weekends or a week of roast chicken dinners followed by impromptu dance parties that invariably end with the greatest hits of Prince. I have an open invitation, which I cherish, but my liver usually can’t take more than four days. It’s a three-hour drive from Saint-Maxime—low stakes perfection.

In Saint-Maxime, there is no pressure to do anything except show up at the Fête de Village, because there is nothing else to do. There is no need to worry about booking anything, because there is nothing much to book. There is no point to wait in any line except for the good tomato guy in Saint-Jouin because there aren’t any tourist attractions here. This is the proper spirit of vacation for me, and it happens every day of my life.

#winning