MAGAZINE
Var, Gironde: A summer of embers — and those holding the line
There are summers we remember for the beaches. This one, in two départements eight hundred kilometres apart, we will remember first for the smell: smoke coming into homes through windows we did not have time to close.
In the Var, the fire broke out on 22 July in the hills above Pontevès, driven by a mistral that turned every spark into a threat. Nearly 2,500 hectares of forest and scrubland burned. Around 1,200 firefighters took turns day and night, while some 400 residents of Pontevès and Barjols hurriedly left their homes with a bag in hand, heading for reception centres opened at short notice. The fire flared up again where it had been thought extinguished; aircraft were urgently redeployed. That is the cruel mechanics of summer fires: nothing is ever over until everything is black or green.
In the Gironde — here at home — the scenario played out again a few days later, on land that has not forgotten 2022, La Teste-de-Buch and Landiras. Once again, the fire advanced despite the considerable resources deployed, until the prefecture activated FR-Alert, that alarm that makes everyone freeze at the same instant, to order the evacuation of new communes. Those who heard it know: this is no longer information; it is an order to leave. This Tuesday, too, nearly fourteen flare-ups were tackled during the day, and the prefect said it plainly: the fire is not contained. But the firebreaks advanced — more than 120 kilometres cut in a single day — and residents of Le Haillan, Mérignac and Eysines were able to return home.
Those who stay when everyone else leaves
It must be said plainly: while thousands of people were moving away from the flames, women and men were walking towards them. Firefighters first — professionals and volunteers, the neighbours, tradespeople and nurses who set aside their ordinary lives to put on the uniform. The pilots of the Canadair and Dash aircraft, skimming ridgelines through air made turbulent by the heat. The gendarmes and police officers, municipal police, who knock on doors, carry older people to vehicles, secure roads and watch over empty homes so that the anxiety of leaving is not compounded by fear of looting. The mayors and municipal workers who open gymnasiums, the volunteers who line up camp beds and bottles of water. To all of them, these lines say one thing: thank you. The word is small; what they held fast against was not.
And this Tuesday, that thank you took on a weight no one wanted it to bear: on the night from Monday to Tuesday, Corporal Laurent Manson, a thirty-eight-year-old volunteer firefighter, lost his life while on duty on the road in Bouches-du-Rhône — the fourth firefighter to die in France since the start of the month, after a young volunteer in Savoie and two firefighters who died here in the Gironde, facing the blaze at Bordeaux-Mérignac airport. A volunteer is someone who was under no obligation — and went anyway. Eighty-eight others came away from these fires injured. These lines bow before him and his fellow firefighters who died in the line of duty, before their loved ones, and before their station colleagues, who returned to the fire with grief on their shoulders.
Anxiety cannot be evacuated
Leaving means ten minutes to choose what matters: papers, medication, the cat that can no longer be found, the photographs. Then comes the waiting — the worst place to be — watching the wind direction on an app, calling a neighbour who stayed too close, not knowing whether the house will still be there tomorrow. Some returned to intact walls that smelled of smoke. Others lost more: roofs, sheds, farming or wine-growing equipment, beehives, fences, crops still in the fields — not just possessions, but tools of the trade, in other words, livelihoods for the days ahead. For them, the fire will not truly be out until after long procedures, assessments and seasons of rebuilding.
And yet, one thing must be said about the toll: as we publish these lines, the flames have taken no resident’s life, either in the Var or the Gironde. Homes have burned, working lives have been damaged — but the evacuations fulfilled their promise. This was not luck: it was the precise result of some people’s courage and others’ discipline — warnings taken seriously, timely departures accepted, instructions followed. The fact that the only deaths this summer have been men protecting others says everything about the debt we owe them.
What the fire is telling us
Finally, we must look at what these flames reveal. The 2026 season began earlier than any we can remember: repeated heatwaves, entrenched drought, nearly 40,000 hectares already burned in France since January. These are no longer summer accidents; this is the new climate of our summers. And in the face of it, firefighters’ courage cannot be our only policy.
The adaptation we will have to impose more firmly has concrete names: genuinely clear brush around homes — it is a legal obligation and, first and foremost, a form of protection; rethink what we build and where we build it; maintain and diversify forests so they are less flammable; give the SDIS the resources to match a season that is growing longer; teach a culture of risk from the earliest school years, just as we teach life-saving skills. And, above all, honour our climate commitment — because every tenth of a degree avoided means summers that are a little less flammable for those who come after us.
The Var will replant, and the Gironde will replant — it has done so before. But July’s lesson is for all of us: fire does not wait until we are ready. We must be ready before it is.
— The Terondo editorial team, with Audrey