Why don’t the French have air conditioning?

Is it really a cultural thing?

Partly, and the cultural part is more specific than stubbornness. There is a genuine and widely held French belief that moving between conditioned and outside air makes you unwell — you will be told this by people who are otherwise entirely reasonable. Attached to it is a long-standing view of AC as an American solution to a problem the building should have solved.

And the building really did solve it

Thick stone, shutters closed by mid-morning, cross-ventilation at night. Those techniques work, and they worked for centuries, which is exactly the problem: they were calibrated for summers that no longer happen. A shutter is not a match for 40 degrees.

Is it changing?

Quickly. Demand has climbed with each heatwave, and the aesthetic objection is losing to the mortality figures. It has become a live political argument in France rather than a settled preference — the kind of thing that shifts within a decade.

What does he say?

That American buildings are cold enough to require a jacket in August, which is true, and that this is madness, which is arguable. He has not yet reconciled this with his position during the last heatwave, and I have not pressed it.

He judges America weekly on Instagram, and Le Bulletin collects the best of it once a month.