“Summertime in France tends to be hot – and not just in terms of degrees of Celsius. Of course, the occasional temperature heatwave (canicule) – famously in 2003 – does raise the question of national preparation and social protection, of the progressive neoliberal abandonment of the urban poor and elderly to the precarity of meteorological circumstance and unequal access to air conditioning. But the French summer also heats up in more metaphoric, if equally consequential, ways. State-mandated breaks from schoolyear demands and workday routines provide the occasion for pondering broader existential questions about individual futures and collective destinies. And more often than not, such public reflections tend to question the shifting meaning of Frenchness and the future of the Republic.” Pluto Books, Postcolonial France: Race, Islam, and the Future of the Republic – Paul A. Silverstein