SUMMER TIME CHANGE. What are the key facts about the daylight saving time change? Date and time but also rules, or even the latest data on the end of the time change… Consult our special page for summer time 2023 to get you started!
[Mis à jour le 24 février 2023 à 16h08] The change of summer time in France is coming soon: it takes place on the night of Saturday to Sunday of the last full weekend of March, and more precisely Sunday March 26 next. Of the’origin of the device brought to disappear to daylight saving time rulesgoing through the hypothesis of a summer time all year round in France and what it would entail, browse our special page to enlighten you on the time change.
The seasonal time change has existed for more than 45 years and thus aims to save electrical energy by adapting to daylight hours. If it is applied today by all the Member States of theEU 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 25 to Sunday 26 March 2023 In France, with an hour advance. 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.
During the summer time change, at 2 o’clock in the morning, you must always start the hands of your old watch or your clock ancestral ahead of an hour. At 2 o’clock in the morning, the whole of France therefore goes back to 3 o’clock. Of course, the smartphones as all connected devices switch to summer time automatically, without any intervention required. The maneuver artificially causes one hour of sleep to be lost, but also an hour of natural light to be gained at the end of the day, in addition to the natural and progressive lengthening of the days as the sun approaches. solstice summer, in June.
France is moving towards the abolition of the (double) time change and towards maintaining summer time all year round, even if this choice remains to be confirmed. Taking into account the time zones existing, 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 summer time throughout the year would allow us to synthesize more vitamin D vital to our body, 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 offset 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 does not fall before 9 p.m. and it does not 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. Wake-up time and the children’s 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 in 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 energy savings estimated over the whole of the year via the current time change, i.e. 1.5 billion kilowatts -hour, would be outweighed by the expense of heating and lighting on dark winter mornings.
No, the 2023 time change is not the last. In March 2019, the European Parliament adopted a majority plan to end the time change, but it will not be implemented for several years. The said draft directive provided for the abolition of the rapid change of time: to do this, each Member State had to decide between staying on winter time or staying on 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. However, because of the health crisis linked to Covid-19, Brexit, then 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 which legal time it wishes to adopt” thus confirmed the European Commission at Euronews in the fall of 2022.