Why do French kids get two weeks off in October?

What the Toussaint holiday is

La Toussaint is All Saints’ Day, 1 November, a public holiday in France and the day families visit cemeteries. The school holiday is wrapped around it: two weeks in late October, the first break of the year after la rentrée in early September. In 2026 it begins on Saturday 17 October and classes resume on Monday 2 November. It has nothing to do with Halloween, which happens to fall inside it and which France largely ignores.

The logic is a rhythm, not a reward

French school holidays are not scattered around feast days for sentimental reasons. The year is organised as stretches of work separated by proper rests: roughly seven weeks on, two weeks off, repeated until July. The autumn break was a week and a half until 2012, when it was lengthened to two full weeks, so that the first stretch of the year ends with a real stop. The thinking, as he explains it, is that a tired child learns badly and a long weekend does not fix a tired child.

Why the whole country stops on the same day

Because one ministry decides. The French school calendar is fixed nationally, three years ahead, and published as a single table. The only variation is by zone: the country is cut into three, A, B and C, so that the winter and spring holidays are staggered and the ski resorts and motorways do not receive all of France in the same week. Toussaint is not zoned. Everybody goes at once.

What American schools do instead

They count days. Most states set a minimum number of instructional days, and 180 is the closest thing the country has to a norm: Pew Research Center found 27 of the 38 states with a day requirement use it. How those days are arranged is a local decision, which is why two towns ten miles apart can start a week apart. What almost no district does is stop for a fortnight in October. There are single days off, a long weekend, and then nothing until the turkey.

What he thinks is missing

A pause with nothing in it. An American autumn has plenty of events: games, costumes, a fundraiser, a parade. What it does not have is two weeks in which the children are sent to their grandparents and the school is simply shut. He does not think American children work harder. He thinks they work continuously, which is different, and that by November it shows.

What I think is missing from the French version

A plan for parents who work. Two weeks off in October, two at Christmas, two in February and two in April is eight weeks of childcare before summer has started. France answers this with grandparents and with centres de loisirs, the municipal day camps that run through every holiday. It works if you have either. It is less charming if you have neither, and our friends in Paris would like that noted.

Neither calendar is the obvious one

The French year is longer and gentler, with a short summer by American standards and a rest every seven weeks. The American year is shorter, denser and ends in a summer so long that teachers spend September recovering what June lost. Each country looks at the other and sees children being treated strangely. Ours will get the American version, with a French grandmother asking on the phone why nobody is on holiday.

The autumn term, side by side

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