The canicule does not kill equally. This is what must be said plainly, without the soft language of 'climate events' or 'thermal anomalies' that transforms catastrophe into abstraction. Eighteen degrees above normal at Nantes. Sixteen at Bordeaux. Young people drowning in rivers because their bodies cannot withstand what the air has become. Old men and women dying in shuttered apartments because the municipal cooling centres were closed years ago to balance budgets. Children in the poorest quarters of our cities suffocating while the wealthy retreat to air-conditioned rooms. This is not tragedy falling equally from the sky—it is an architecture of death, meticulously drawn, coldly administered. We have the instruments to see it: the maps, the statistics, the names of the closed facilities and the neighbourhoods left exposed. We see the crime and do not stop it.

What paralyses me is not the heat itself but our collective refusal to act as if we possess the power to change course. Yes, there are structural inequalities that weigh upon the poor and cannot be wished away with sentiment. Yes, the systems are entrenched, the interests powerful, the inertia formidable. But none of this removes from us the elementary human freedom to stand upright and say: this shall not continue. We are not the puppets of our circumstances—we are the authors of them. Every piscine that closes, every water line that runs dry, every centre of refuge that shuts its doors does so because a human being, somewhere, signed the order. And every such order can be unmade by others. Democracy is not a beautiful abstraction to admire from a distance; it is a tool placed in our hands, waiting to be used. The question is not whether we can act—it is whether we will.

This is why I turn now to those who feign blindness: to the populists of every stripe, the ultraliberals, the willful deniers who insist the problem is too large, too complex, too embedded in the nature of things to warrant serious action. You are lying, and you know it. Not out of malice, perhaps, but out of cowardice dressed as realism. The truth is harder: we could choose differently. We could remake our industries with joy and courage, not as punishment but as liberation. We could consume and produce otherwise—not in the grey language of sacrifice, but in the warm language of fraternity, of caring for one another as we care for ourselves. This is not utopian fantasy; it is the only sober response to the facts we face. To look away now is to become complicit in the arrangement of graves.

As we open this edition, we welcome to these pages a man who understood precisely this: Marc Bloch, the historian of human life in time, who refused to despair at France's collapse in 1940 and instead chose to understand rather than lament, to act rather than surrender. He wrote that history belongs to those who will not accept the determinism of their hour. He lived it. Today he enters the Panthéon, and we invite you to meet him in our special pages—to read in his work the proof that no person is the prisoner of their fate, that courage and clarity can still reshape the world. Begin there. Then ask yourself: what will you refuse to accept?