How the French Schedule their Summer Vacations

Cars lined up to go through tollbooths on an autoroute in France. July 11, 2021.

Whereas my friends and family in the United States all seem to kick off their summer holidays in mid-June, the French focus on the last two summer months: July and August.

Which creates huge traffic jams. And cultural debate.

Say what? Why? Indeed.

The French Summer Season Divided

In France, family tradition dictates whether summer vacation happens in July or in August, with great debates over which is better—and who is better, based on which they prefer.

They even have a term for each “type” of person: The July vacationers are called “jullietists” and the families preferring August are “aoûtiens.”

July vacationers praise celebrating the national holiday while on vacation, the lower temperatures, the slightly diminished crowds. They exclaim over the joy of returning to work when the summer season is still in swing and they have a few weeks of a calmer pace to ease back into work before the autumn.

The aoûtiens, however, say it’s depressing to have finished your summer vacation before the end of the summer. (The end of the two months of summer vacation season, in France, is called “la rentrée”—the reentry.)

The French Summer Traffic Jam

Now, you’d think this no big deal—and, to a large extent, it isn’t—unless you didn’t realize that these two groups all tend to go to the same locations.

This means that the vacationer swap—the jullietists ceding to the aoûtiens—that takes place at the meeting of the months (whatever weekend most closely marks the end of July and the beginning of August), creates massive traffic jams on the highways, overcrowding in the service stations and rest stops, crammed cross-country trains, and complicated conflicts with bookings for places to stay and things to do in favorite vacation hotspots.

The French have a term for this tangled, miserable crossing of jullietists and aoûtiens: “le grand chassé-croisé.”

Side note: If you plan to take part in le grand chassé-croisé and you haven’t spent much time navigating around the roadways in France, here’s a helpful article I’ve written about driving in France.

Take Heed of the Divide when Planning Your Summer Vacation

My husband and I break the mold entirely. We tend to take our summer vacation in the last week or two of July and the first week or two of August.

Rebels, I tell you. We are rebels.

Whether this tradition-breaking causes a problem depends on whether we’ve planned our summer vacation in France, of course. If we do, we are likely to find nothing available in terms of house or apartment rentals. No one in France who rents out a place during the summer months wants to ruin their chances of two full months of rent—one from the jullietists and the other from the aoûtiens—by renting to some out-of-step jokers who just want part of each month.

We can work around it even for our French travels, though, without too much problem: As we like to change locations on vacation, anyway, hotels often work better for us—and they’re always more flexible with dates.

The summer-vacationer divide and its rental logistics are a worth-noting heads up, however, to anyone who would like to spend a summer month in France in a condo or house somewhere. You’ll need to schedule your trip or plan your place of stay accordingly.

Summer Vacation Habits

Did your family have a typical time of the season for its summer vacation?

Whereas my spouse’s family sure did, French and all, I can’t say that my U.S. family trended one way or another. I’d guess, though, that we followed the U.S. cultural norm with a vacation in June?