On the sixth day of France’s heat wave, when temperatures reached record highs, shoppers scrapped over box fans, and Americans and Europeans beefed on X, a neighbor in our apartment building near Paris finally broke down and texted me.

“I was wondering if I can borrow your AC tonight?” she asked, knowing my family and I were out of town. “The ACs are sold out even on Amazon. Hopefully the temperature will go down a bit tonight, but our walls are really hot.” She punctuated her message with a photo of the local Intermarché’s frozen aisle: a single pot of off-brand chocolate ice cream remained.

Who was I, an American of the “comfort is close to godliness” variety, to deny my French Romanian friend this small slice of salvation? “Of course,” I wrote back from my in-laws’ air-conditioned apartment in Morocco, where the temperature outside was somehow a good 15 degrees cooler than in Paris. “Take it for as long as you need.” A few hours later, she replied: “The AC is life-changing 🙏.”

I know, right?

French attitudes toward air-conditioning — an American necessity — are finally shifting, it seems, but it’s taken decades, increasing heat waves, and a lot of preventable deaths for us to get here. It’s not just that the iconic Haussmannian apartment buildings, outfitted with zinc roofs that turn every chambre de bonne into an oven, don’t have AC. It’s that it barely exists anywhere — not in hospitals, at schools, or on public transit. When it’s as hot as it was last week, there is simply no relief. And if you do happen to stumble upon some place advertising a salle climatisée, don’t expect it to be much more effective than a fan. Parisians have taken to sticking aluminum foil to their windows to reflect sunlight, rolling down their window shutters and living in utter darkness, and forgoing any meals that require turning on the stove or oven.

The aversion to AC is partially steeped in old wives’ tales about “thermal shock” and “coup de froid” (basically “catching a chill”), which hinge on the belief that air-conditioning — or at least going from one environment to another with a drastic temperature difference — can make you sick. (This is why my husband, who is French Moroccan, won’t be caught dead without a scarf below 70 degrees Fahrenheit. Though for a population that believes a fresh breeze can send a healthy adult straight to their deathbed, they have a suspicious overconfidence in their immune systems when it comes to swimming in the canal.)

But another part of it is that French culture seems to value, or at least believe it’s somehow necessary, to suffer — physically, emotionally, bureaucratically. While the real American Dream is to live as frictionlessly as possible, believing that comfort isn’t a luxury but our God-given right, French society tends to view discomfort as a necessary part of life.

“I think that the French for a very long time saw having air-conditioning as a moral failing,” said Katherine McGrath, an American writer who has lived in Paris for several years. “It’s this idea of, Well, it’s so greedy and it’s so American to have AC.”

There’s also the fact that electricity is more expensive in France than in the U.S., which means having the AC running can eat away at our already low salaries. Plus there’s the question of AC’s impact on the environment, which is a huge issue in a country as environmentally conscious as France. AC accounts for 7 percent of global electricity use and 3 percent of carbon emissions, a fact that is frequently touted by politicians on both sides of the political spectrum. In a gambit for votes in next year’s elections, the far-right nationalist party Rassemblement National put forth a plan last week to invest billions in air-conditioning. (It’s hard to imagine leftists voting for a Nazi because they’re that passionate about air-conditioning, but anything’s possible.) Even the hard-line Ecologists party is coming around to the fact that AC is now a necessity, with the party’s head, Marine Tondelier, saying hospitals and schools should be equipped with cooling systems. (Strangely, many hospitals have AC in the waiting areas but not in the actual hospital rooms.) Tondelier’s statement comes as emergency services have struggled to keep up with the increased call volume caused by the heat wave and the government reported around 1,000 excess deaths for the ten-day period when temperatures exceeded 30 degrees Celsius.

Of course, France wasn’t always this hot. On the few days a year it went above 90 degrees Fahrenheit, you could make it through by closing your shutters and drinking a lot of water. But Lindsey Tramuta, a French American journalist who lives in Paris, said she believes the government has missed a major opportunity over the years to adapt to the reality that Europe is the fastest-warming continent and things are only going to get worse. “We’ve had plenty of scary heat waves that should have fueled the country to accelerate not only their greenification programs but building and infrastructural adaptation,” she said. “That means potentially doing the thing the Architectes de Bâtiments de France” — the powerful French historic-preservation agency — “don’t want to do: modify Parisian heritage structures to make them livable and safer.”

“What is most enraging is not seeing widespread messaging that acknowledges the emergency of cooling things down for people now while also urgently working on the long-term solutions,” Tramuta added. “Several things can be true at once, but the French continue to make this about AC resistance and not the layered crisis we’re facing that requires multiple solutions.” The short-term solutions do seem a bit subpar. In Clichy, the Parisian suburb where my family and I live, the heat-wave survival response from the local government was to publish a map of water-fountain locations, distribute extra fans to overheated schools, and remind people to eat lots of fruits and vegetables.

But for all of the back-and-forth online over American and European attitudes around air-conditioning and climate change, it’s this heat wave — the second in the last month — that may have finally been the one that altered France’s perception of AC once and for all. “The reaction I’ve seen has been a 180 overnight in terms of this heat wave, which is fantastic, and understanding that it’s not a moral failing to not want to subject yourself to crazy temperatures,” McGrath said of the French attitude towards AC. “Fundamentally, the debate is a health issue.”

“I think the debate is very fake in the sense that I feel like today no one in France is against air-conditioning, really,” her partner, Hugo Weber, who was born and raised in Paris, added. “It used to be a lifestyle choice, but today, it’s become a means of survival.”