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 31st July 2010
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 La rentrée – France’s fourth season The Anglo-Saxon world doesn’t have anything quite like it. Of course there is the annual ritual of children going back to school, workmates, bosses and politicians coming back from holiday and perhaps too a new line-up in the TV schedules. But these are simply a collection of unrelated events compared with the French phenomenon that is La rentrée. It’s a word we hear throughout August before it hits us with a bang in September. The most visible rentrée concerns the schools, with most of France’s school children going back to school on the same day, an event which is preceded by weeks of adverts for pens, paper and other school equipment, plus the inevitable debate in the many TV, magazine and newspaper stories about whether the government grants to help poorer families buy such goods is enough. But the political rentrée is hardly less important. The president comes back from holiday with a tan, the Socialist Party holds its ‘summer university’ (which is neither in the summer nor a university – it means a party conference) to discuss yet again how it can ‘renovate’ itself , while the warring factions between but especially within all the major parties starting knocking lumps out of each other once more. Then there is the literary rentrée. This is the time of year when France’s top writers (and translators in the case of foreign works) see their creations filling the bookstore shelves. From novels to works of philosophy, political tracts and history, they burst on the scene once the summer ends on 31 August. In 2007, for example, no fewer than 727 French and foreign novels are being published at the rentrée. Queen of the rentrée littéraire is novelist Amélie Nothomb who by 2007 had been averaging just over a rentrée book a year for a decade and a half. Not to be left out, the broadcast media also have their own form of rentrée. Regular listeners to the excellent France Inter will know that this is the time of year when its radio jingles get changed, shows move around or disappear, and when presenters sometimes swap programmes. On TV, the TF1 news presenters Patrick Poivre d’Arvor and Claire Chazal finally make a return to our evening screens, sporting glowing skin that certainly isn’t the result of just a few snatched hours in a tanning salon. One of the few aspects of French life that doesn’t have a rentrée is sport. The previous rugby and soccer seasons never quite seem to have ended before the new ones begin. That at least is reassuringly Anglo-Saxon… By Michael Streeter  Fitting into French life: 10 Top Tips What is life in France really like? Read our survey results First Days at School in France Working with the French Culture Société Française Home Page Looking for a property in France? Use FrenchEntrée's Property Finders to help you find your property and to help you through the buying process 
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