SUMMER TIME CHANGE. We are moving to summer time by the end of the month. Date, time, rules… Check our special page to learn more about the 2023 summer time change.
[Updated Mar 10, 2023 5:24 PM] DST change is happening this month in France! It is more precisely on the night of Saturday March 25 to Sunday March 26 that the hands will jump one hour ahead, taking us from 2 hours to 3 hours. We will gain an hour of natural light at the end of the day. From the origin of the device to disappear to the rules of the transition to summer time, passing by the hypothesis of a summer time all year round in France and what it would entail, navigate in our special page to enlighten you on the time change!
The seasonal time change has been around for more than 45 years and thus aims to save electrical energy by adapting to daylight hours. While it is now applied by all EU member states and 70 countries in total, this mandatory time change has also been hotly debated for years. Its detractors point above all to too limited energy gains and negative effects on health, sleep and road safety. Several important votes on the time change have already taken place and a process is underway to put an end to this measure.
The 2023 summer time change takes place on the night of Saturday March 25 to Sunday March 26, 2023 in France, with an advance in time. Every year since 1976, the date of the transition to summer time is thus at the end of March (more precisely the last Sunday of the month), an immutable date so that the French can remember this moment.
When daylight saving time changes, at 2 a.m., you should always set the hands of your old watch or your ancestral clock ahead by one hour. At 2 a.m., the whole of France therefore returns to 3 a.m. Of course, smartphones like all connected devices switch to summer time automatically, without any intervention being necessary. The maneuver artificially loses an hour of sleep, but also gains an hour of natural light at the end of the day, in addition to the natural and progressive lengthening of the days as the summer solstice approaches in June.
France is moving towards the abolition of the (double) time change and the maintenance of summer time all year round, even if this choice remains to be confirmed. Taking existing time zones into account, on December 20, the shortest day of the year, the sun will rise at 10:06 a.m. for Brest and 9:18 a.m. for Strasbourg, instead of 9:06 a.m. and 8:18 a.m. respectively in winter time. the shift will also be visible in the evening, which is not without impact on daily life.
Benefits. Maintaining daylight saving time throughout the year would allow us to synthesize more vital vitamin D for our bodies, since we would benefit from more natural light at the end of the day. Conviviality would also be enhanced, with longer outdoor aperitif evenings. Says Olivier Fabre, founder of the European association for summer time and mayor of the town of Mazamet (Tarn) who spoke in Le Parisien on March 24, 2019, summer time (as a reminder, 2 hours difference from legal time) also promotes the tourism economy “because people go out and consume more when it’s daytime”. Athletes practicing their leisure outside should also nod.
Disadvantages. Based on real (astronomical) time, sunset takes place at 8 p.m. in France during the longest days of the second half of June, with obviously disparities of a few minutes depending on where the we are on the territory. Night doesn’t fall before 9 p.m. and it doesn’t get dark before 11 p.m. If the French can then benefit from very long sunny evenings, children aged 6-7 must go to bed in broad daylight (around 8:30 p.m., more than two hours before nightfall), and the elderly who dine early are served their dinner at “real” tea time.
In winter, maintaining summer time would also have significant consequences on raising children. In astronomical time, in the months of December-January, the sun delays its rise until about 7:30 a.m., the day beginning to show the tip of its nose an hour before, around 6:30 a.m. Under daylight saving time, daybreak will therefore be artificially postponed to 9am or 10am. The children’s wake-up time and journey to school will therefore be totally at night, and it will not be completely daylight when they begin their school activities. As for breakfast, one of the only times during winter days when you can take advantage of non-electric natural light, it will be done even more with electric light than with winter time.
European time would also be seriously disrupted in winter: France would then potentially display Greece’s legal time, two hours more than England and one hour more than Germany. What undermine the organization of communications and transport, and oblige the States concerned to modify their own time system for more coherence. Finally, the environment would not be at the party: the Senate specifies in a text on the choice of time following the abolition of the time change that the estimated energy savings over the whole of the year via the current time change of 1.5 billion kilowatt-hours would be outweighed by the expense of heating and lighting on dark winter mornings.
No, the 2023 DST change is not the last. In March 2019, the European Parliament passed a majority bill to end daylight saving time, but it won’t be in place for several years. The said draft directive provided for the abolition of the rapid time change: to do this, each Member State had to decide between remaining in winter time or remaining in summer time. The European Parliament had also pleaded for coordination between the Member States, and the European Commission so that the application of permanent hours (winter and summer) in the different countries does not disrupt the functioning of the internal market. The directive was to be adopted by the Council at the end of 2020, then transposed by the Member States, underlines the official Vie Publique website. Only, because of the health crisis linked to Covid-19, Brexit, then by the upheavals caused by the war in Ukraine, not to mention the hesitations of European leaders, the text in question on the end of the time change does not is no longer on the agenda “and should not be discussed in the near future”, concludes the site of the French administration. And once back on the table, the debates should be long: “It is up to each Member State to decide on the legal time it wishes to adopt”, thus confirmed the European Commission to Euronews in the fall of 2022.
