Back to school, back to work, back to life.
La rentrée means much more than just ‘back to school’. The word also signifies a return to social and professional normality after an extended break. This September, after 18 months of life under restrictions, la rentrée has a special significance.
Starting late August, parents in France usually anticipate la rentrée scolaire by filling their childrens’ backpacks with an extensive and very precise list of school equipment from the nearest hypermarket. The result is a heavy load for young shoulders.
During les grands vacances, those same parents will often have been re-filling their own mental and emotional backpacks. At rentrée social gatherings, bronzed mums and dads swap stories of relaxing vacations while the kids were staying with their grandparents at the beach. For a short and dreamy September period, the summer break edges into extra time – as half-read novels are completed, joggers keep up the improved fitness and few alarm clocks are set.
The same warm glow briefly extends to the workplace. Relaxed, energised professionals are fit and ready for the long stretch until the year end. Rooftop after-work cocktail parties are well-frequented and employees are, quite suddenly, happy to chat to strangers in elevators. In this annual ritual of regeneration, rentrée resolutions are made and broken – just like at New Year, but with September’s morning dew in place of January’s frost.
“The year, the already sharp contrast between empty August and full September is much magnified and la rentrée is proving to be a special edition”
All this is, of course, just standard Parisian behaviour in any given year. Famously, the city is quiet in August and then busy in September. After the mid-July exodus of locals, foreign tourists keep Paris ticking over. Not so in travel-constricted 2021. This year, the already sharp contrast between empty August and full September is much magnified and la rentrée is proving to be a special edition.
Twelve months ago, in the phoney rentrée of 2020, the brief warm glow was abruptly ended by a second wave of coronavirus and a prompt re-confinement. By the end of an anxious September, most tentative travel plans were being cancelled. This year’s post-vaccine rentrée, by contrast to 2020, does not feel like life on borrowed time.
Since mid-May, covid restrictions have gradually loosened as la reprise gathers momentum. June and July’s ‘Letter from Paris’ columns described the feel of reopening restaurants and airports. This September feels like another important step forward.
The government’s vaccination rollout and blunt instrument approach to enforcing le pass sanitaire has done much to create the current optimism. With the national double vaccine rate now over 80% for adults, antivax protests are decreasing, just as Emmanuel Macron’s approval ratings are increasing. Inflation is a spook at the party and, as elsewhere, there are concerns in France on the bottlenecks of supply and demand. The looming short supply of grapes (springtime frosts) and the rising price of milk mean higher prices for the key French industries of wine and cheese, something more likely to make headlines than the rapidly inflating steel prices now bothering real estate people.
There is quite definitely a buzz in my property industry. At the annual CBRE rentrée presentation, the opening speaker said that the current vibe feels like “the happy end of a scary movie”. This September’s busy property industry diary is squeezing in postponed events such as le MIPIM in Cannes, a mini edition with maybe 10% of the usual number of attendees in the spring.
At the Urban Land Institute’s Olympic-themed rentrée party, developer Solideo spelled out it is only 27 months until the deadline for delivering Olympic real estate. With Anne Hidalgo having formally received the Olympic flag at Tokyo’s closing ceremony, the clock is ticking. The battered hospitality industry would be a natural Olympic winner and is beginning to peer out from the trenches as France’s long holiday from tourism seems to be finally over. On 1 September, the brand-new Citizen M hotel just off the Champs Elysées opened its doors and after so much uncertainty, the staff were visibly excited to welcome my Japanese colleague as one of the first visitors to the funky rooftop bar.
Much of the Paris business community is revelling in what was impossible when working from home. Released from le télétravail, Parisian professionals are again satisfying basic human needs, such as learning things from strangers, interacting with colleagues informally and feeling the simple sense of belonging in a team. This rentrée, Paris is back to school, back to work and back to life.
