In a move that has sent shockwaves through the liver-spotted ranks of the nation's cider-soaked youth, France has declared a blanket alcohol ban at music festivals while half the country sizzles under a 'red heat alert.' Yes, the same nation that invented the pastis-fuelled political scandal and the lunchtime wine break has now deemed that the only acceptable sweat-inducing activity at a festival shall be the frantic search for shade, not the judicious application of cheap rosé.
Let us be clear: this is a national emergency. Not because of the heat, which has reportedly melted the wax moustaches of half the gendarmerie, but because the French government has decided that the best way to survive a heatwave is to deprive the populace of the very coolant that has sustained civilisations since the Gauls first discovered that grapes could be fermented into something that makes Roman tax collectors slightly more bearable.
The red alert, a colour usually reserved for the faces of British tourists after a single beer in the sun, now covers a swathe of France from the Mediterranean to the Loire Valley. It is a zone where the air shimmers with menace, where the asphalt softens like a Camembert left in a Parisian garret, and where the only sensible response is to lie perfectly still in a dark room with a fan and a bottle of something chilled. But no, the authorities have decreed that music festivals must proceed, albeit without the one thing that makes a five-hour set by a band called 'Les Squirts de la Mort' remotely tolerable: the promise of a €8 plastic cup of warm beer.
This is, of course, a classic French compromise: they won't cancel the festivals, but they will remove the very lifeblood of the festival-going experience. It is as if they have decided to save the Titanic by removing the lifeboats. The logic, one assumes, is that without alcohol, festival-goers will drink water, thus staying hydrated and possibly enduring the heat. But this is a nation that once built a guillotine for fun. They know as well as I do that a dry festival is a festival that will be remembered only for its tragic body count from sunstroke and boredom.
Already, the protests have begun. Not the kind with burning cars and brie-stained cobblestones, but the slumped-shouldered, defeated sort that comes from having to pay €15 for a lemonade. The youth of France, from the bourgeois offspring of the 16th arrondissement to the rabble-rousers of the banlieues, are united in their thirst for a rebellion that the government has inadvertently quashed. You cannot riot on sparkling water. You cannot storm the barricades with a coconut water in hand. The spirit of 1968, fuelled by cheap wine and Gauloises, has been replaced by a whimper and a search for a plastic water fountain.
Of course, the irony is magnificent. France, the country that gave us the term 'terroir' and the concept of the wine-tasting as a competitive sport, has now declared alcohol an enemy of public health. Never mind that the heatwave itself is a symptom of a larger crisis; the climate apocalypse is our fault, but a bottle of Bordeaux is apparently the final straw. It is like blaming the toilet paper for the house being on fire.
I have a proposal. Why not simply cancel the festivals? Or, better yet, why not airlift in thousands of gallons of chilled Perrier and declare a national holiday of lying in a ditch? But no, the French must have their culture, their music, their obligatory sense of suffering. So they will fan themselves with their own arms, watch the mercury climb to 42°C, and remember the golden days when you could get a pastis at half past nine in the morning without the gendarmes confiscating your soul.
As the heat rises and the booze disappears, one thing is clear: the French will endure this with the same stoic resignation they show when faced with a strike, a bad harvest, or a British person trying to order a croissant. They will survive. They will complain. They will, eventually, find a way to sneak a bottle of rum into the campsite. But until then, the music festival remains a monument to madness: a place where the only thing more dangerous than the sun is the sobriety of the crowd.