Paris is dying. Not metaphorically, not in the way a poet might lament the loss of a bistrot’s soul, but actually, physically, baking like a baguette left too long in a faulty oven. And what does the great French leader, Emmanuel Macron, do? He bans alcohol. Yes, in a city whose veins run on wine, where the Seine is as much a conduit for Chardonnay as water, he has declared a prohibition on public drinking as the mercury scrapes forty degrees. This is not a solution. This is a man who has looked into the face of a climate apocalypse and decided to slap it with a wet baguette.
Let us be clear: a heatwave is not a moral failing. It is not a crime. It is nature screaming ‘I told you so’ through every pore of the atmosphere. And yet Macron’s response is to treat it as an issue of public order. Perhaps he imagines that if he bans rosé in the streets, the sun will take the hint and piss off back to wherever it came from. But no, the sun cares not for his decrees. It will continue to boil the capital until the very cobblestones melt into a puddle of nostalgia and regret.
The EU, that great bureaucratic machine of do-nothingism, watches on. Brussels, the city that gave us straight bananas and the metric system, now offers us an inept shrug. There is no coordinated response to the heatwave. No emergency plans. No ice-cream subsidies for the vulnerable. Instead, there are meetings about meetings, and a subtle hope that perhaps the whole problem will just go away. It will not. The heat is here to stay, and so is the booze ban, a symbolic gesture that does nothing but inconvenience the common man while the rich install air conditioning units the size of small cars.
I sit in a pub near the Gare du Nord, sweating into my gin. The barman has a face that says he has seen empires fall and dictatorships rise, but this heat is new. He whispers that he has been selling more non-alcoholic beer than ever, which to my ears sounds like a cry for help. The tourists shuffle by, their dreams of Parisian romance replaced by a desperate search for shade. They wear floppy hats and carry fans, looking like extras in a bad remake of ‘The Sun Also Rises’.
What Macron fails to understand is that alcohol is not the enemy. The enemy is a system that prioritises growth over survival, that pumps carbon into the sky as if it were a collective lung. The enemy is the same neoliberal logic that gave us Brexit and the eurozone crisis. Banning alcohol is a sideshow, a magician’s trick to distract from the real catastrophe. And the EU, that grand institution of compromise and cowardice, has nothing to offer but platitudes and press releases.
The heatwave is not an anomaly. It is the new normal. And while Macron tries to control the symptoms, the disease rages on. I drink my gin, now warm as a bath, and I toast to the foolishness of man. To Paris, a city that will need more than a booze ban to survive. To the EU, a project that is melting faster than the ice in my glass. And to you, dear reader, for still having the stomach to read the news. I suggest you stock up on water. And gin. The summer is just getting started.
