Culture
Fête de la Musique, the Best Night of the Year in France
Every June 21, the summer solstice, France steps outside to make music. A guide to the night the entire country becomes one open-air festival, and where to spend it.
On June 21, the longest day of the year, Paris and the rest of France turn into one continuous concert. Just about every street, square, and café terrace joins in: classical on one corner, a rock band on the next, an electronic set spilling out of a bar two doors down. It sounds chaotic, but mostly it fills the city with life. The trick is knowing where to spend it.
Most visitors meet Fête de la Musique by accident. The streets begin to fill in the late afternoon, shops and cafés set out speakers and turntables, and for a block or two it reads as a single party, until it becomes clear the entire city is in on it. Few evenings make Paris feel more magical than this one.
Music everywhere, concerts nowhere
In 1982, the Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, and Maurice Fleuret, his director of music and dance, turned the summer solstice into a national celebration of music. A survey that year had found that one in two young people in France played an instrument, and the idea was to get them out of their rooms and into the streets. Fleuret’s line for it was “music everywhere, concerts nowhere.” The name itself is a pun: faites de la musique, fête de la musique, make music, festival of music. It’s free, it spans every genre, amateurs play alongside professionals, and it has since spread to more than a hundred countries. But it started here.
The night itself
There is no lineup, no venue, no ticket. The city is the stage, and everyone is in the band. The names get bigger than you would expect, Diplo has played it, but the point was never the program. Classical, jazz, rock, and electronic sets run at the same time within a few blocks of one another, and the sound carries you from one to the next.
The best versions of the night are unplanned. An evening that starts on one terrace drifts to a square, then follows the music uphill to Montmartre, and ends somewhere above the rooftops long after the streets have gone quiet.
How to do it well
Pick a neighborhood and stay with it, rather than trying to see the whole city in one night. Arrive by early evening, eat before the terraces fill, and then wander.
One thing to know: this is not a wild night. Parisians, and the French everywhere, treat it as exactly what it is, a good time, but a considerate one. Nothing gets trashed, and the music winds down around midnight so the city can sleep. If you come, and you should, throw yourself into it, and stay respectful of the city and the people letting you in.
The rest of France celebrates just as fully, from village squares to the coast, and the solstice by the sea has a magic of its own. Wherever the night finds you, it earns its name: the best of the year.
