One to start. And one to finish (we hope). The Cuvé 2025 summer holidays were well supervised by two heat wave episodes: a particularly early, long and extended first to almost the whole territory between June 19 and July 4. And a second which stretched from August 8 to 17.
These 50th and 51st waves of heat to touch France since 1947, including 33 after 2000, are not without consequences. Mortality, fires, beaten heat records … 20 Minutes makes a quantified assessment of a hot summer.
Faits in a mess, a dead
According to data from the European Forest Information System (Effis) of the Copernicus Institute, France has yet known 244 forest fires in 2025 for a total of 35.606 hectares burned, 3.5 times the surface of Paris. It is three times more than last year, but twice less than the year 2022, marked by exceptional fires in the Massif des Landes (27,000 hectares).
The Aude fire, who left on August 5, killed a woman, injured around twenty people, including 19 firefighters and destroyed 36 houses. This summer assessment could have been much more dramatic when on July 8, a forest fire hit the north of the city of Marseille and destroyed a dozen homes.
Temperature records at the shovel
41.2 ° C in Angoulême, 41.6 ° C in Bordeaux, 42.1 ° C in Bergerac, 42.6 ° C in Romans-sur-Isère, 41.4 ° C in Pézenas… The heat wave of August broke the absolute temperature record over fifteen Météo-France stations. Without counting the monthly records fallen in Perpignan, Montpellier and Béziers, while in Toulouse, the 35 ° C bar was exceeded ten days in a row, unheard of since August 2003, details Météo-France.
Worse than temperature peaks, the floor temperature that does not go down at night. In Sète, the night of August 15, he did not do less than 30.1 ° C. The other municipalities around the Mediterranean are not to be outdone and have experienced many “tropical nights” that the inhabitants of Paris were also able to experiment with a minimum of 24 ° C on the morning of August 11 and 20 nights at more than 20 ° C this summer.
What mortality?
If everyone has in mind the 15,000 deaths of the heat wave of 2003, it is obviously too early to draw up a first assessment of excess mortality in France during the two scorching episodes.
In a bulletin published at the end of July, Public Health France reported at least 480 excess deaths in all causes (+ 5.5 %) during the scorching episode of June/July which concerned 60 departments, or 74 % of the population resident in France.
People aged 75 and over constitute almost all of this provisional assessment with 410 excess deaths (+ 6.7 %), notes the public body. The most affected region is PACA, with at least 140 excess deaths (+ 9.2 %).
However, figures to be taken with tweezers, this first estimate resulting from uncomplicated mortality data all causes, arrested on July 22, warns Public France France.
