At the beginning of July, as the school year ends, activity in France begins to slow down. Parents ferry their kids off to camp or to the grandparents, and once the national holiday on July 14 is over, Bison Futé, the Smart Bison of French traffic predictions, warns of the annual traffic jams on the highways as the juillettistes head off to their vacation destinations.
Repeat this every weekend over the summer, with a particularly sharp peak in both directions as the juillettistes, the July holiday-makers, return home and the aoûtiens, the August holiday-makers, take their place.

The slowest time of the summer comes around the public holiday of August 15, when many small shops in the cities close and coastal towns will triple and quadruple their population as families enjoy the summer. I wrote about Paris in August in an earlier blog post.

But even the longest school holidays eventually come to an end. After almost two months, kids have to be back in school at the beginning of September. No big deal, right? It’s similar in many countries in the northern hemisphere. But France has this particularity that school years dictate the rhythm of the nation.

Sports clubs, for example, won’t offer you calendar-year membership but school-year ones. This makes sense for kids who change schedules and activities from one school year to the next, their continuity interrupted by the long summer holidays. But grown-ups, who only have a three-week break in summer, are bound by the same rhythm.

Just as France slows down for the summer, it wakes up again at the rentrée. The term derives from the verb rentrer, to return. In September, you have the obvious rentrée scolaire, the return to school, but also the rentrée politique, as politicians come back from summer recess, the rentrée littéraire, as publishers throw new titles onto the market, variations like rentrée sportive, rentrée radio/tv (as radio and tv stations return to their regular programming), and others happily used by advertisers in late August and early September.

Everyone gets back to business, and you can wish your French friends a Bonne rentrée!