Day 3364 (Monday) 24th August 2026
This is Winston Churchill looking at the port on Saint-Jean Cap-Ferrat
and this is Monaco.
As usual on Monday here What’s happening in France this week. The Local France.
exposure photograph shows the full moon during a total lunar eclipse. (Photo by Biju BORO / AFP)
Paris marks 82 years since liberation, property tax bills should start dropping into letter boxes, August’s second celestial spectacle takes place, and pioneer French astronaut Sophie Adenot makes her second space walk.
Monday
Council of ministers - Schoolchildren still have one more week of holiday, but the government gets back to work on Monday, when Emmanuel Macron will chair the first Council of Minsters meeting of la rentrée. Meanwhile the Assemblée nationale does not resume normal sessions until October 1st.
Tuesday
Anniversary – The 82nd anniversary of the Liberation of Paris during World War Two. The capital will concludes three days of ceremonies, tributes, and historical events honouring the resistance fighters and Allied soldiers who ended the Nazi occupation in 1944.
Taxe foncière – Property tax bills should start dropping into letter boxes from around August 25th. The deadline for payment is towards the end of October.
Space – A week after Sophie Adenot became the first female French astronaut to perform a spacewalk, she will make her second to complete the installation of a communication antenna between Earth and the International Space Station, Nasa has announced.
Wednesday
Rock on – Tyler the Creator, Lorde, The Black Keys, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, The Cure, Wet Leg and Interpol are among the numerous acts lined up for this year’s annual Rock en Seine festival at Domaine national de Saint-Cloud, which runs to Sunday.
Football – Lyon host Fenerbahce in the crucial second-leg of their Champions League qualifying play-off, less than hours before the draw for the pool phase of this year’s pan-European club tournament. The sides are tied at 1-1 after last week’s first leg. Victory for the French side will see them become the fourth Ligue 1 outfit in the competition.
Thursday
Draw – Champions League qualifiers – including French sides Paris Saint-Germain, RC Lens and LOSC Lille – will find out who they will face in the pool phase as the draw takes place in Monaco.
Rugby – The senior men’s domestic season kicks off with the opening matches of the new ProD2 campaign. Top 14 sides start their bid for the Bouclier de Brennus on the first weekend of September.
Friday
Lunar eclipse – After the sun, the moon. In the early hours of Friday, a partial lunar eclipse will be visible from mainland France, as the moon passes through the Earth’s shadow. The peak of the eclipse will be at around 6.10am, when 93 percent of the moon will be immersed in Earth’s shadow.
Traffic jams – The final busy weekend of the summer holiday period on France’s main routes, with red and yellow warnings in place from Friday, through to Monday. Schools return on Tuesday, September 1st.
Income – If you owe income tax, you should have received your tax bill by now.
Sunday
Seine Swimming – It’s the diaried final day for swimming in set areas of the Seine in Paris, though some sites may extend their opening hours into September, as happened last year.
Grated Camembert! Who said the French were stuck in their ways?
A food company from Brittany has come up with an inventive product that gives a new twist to one of the country's most sacred cheeses. But will the French turn their noses up at it?
It seems more like something you'd find on the shelves of a Tesco supermarket in the UK - the home of the straight croissant - rather than something the French would actually invent themselves.
But on Tuesday an industrial food company from Brittany, in northern France unveiled a new way of serving up one of France's softest and smelliest cheeses.
Grated Camembert. Will the French ever swallow it?
It took Breton company AB Technologies Alimentaires six months to come up with the winning formula before they succeeded.
The reason it took so long was that they needed to come up with a way of hardening the soft cheese to be able to grate it without ruining the flavour.
But why do it all, you might ask.
"Today, the range of grated cheese is quite limited," the company's marketing manager Françoise Chauvel told French newspaper l'Ouest France.
"Emmental, Cantal ... We wanted to offer something else and thought about Camembert. "
And according to the company, the cheese has multiple uses and can be used to grate on pasta, pizza or in sauces. They want to initially aim it at companies and those working in the food industry but will also sell it to the public in supermarkets if there proves to be a demand.
But many French Twitter users turned their noses up at the thought of grated Camembert. "I just don't know what use it would have," said one while another said "only the industrially produced fake Camembert cheeses will be able to be grated".
However one tweeter praised the inventiveness of those in Brittany. "Bretons have invented grated Camembert. One day they will rule the world," said the tweeter.
But no doubt there will be cries of heresy from the neighbouring region of Normandy, which is home of the original Camembert.
“The Normans have pinched the Mont-Saint-Michel, so today we are stealing Camembert from them – in a grated version,” she said, referring to the fact that the famous abbey has been officially deemed to be in Normandy, despite Brittany's claims that it belongs to them.
While the cheese is aimed at industrial food producers, the firm is open to the idea of selling it to the public if there is demand.
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