What you absolutely must remember
2022 winter time change takes place on the night of Saturday October 29 to Sunday October 30, 2022 in France, with a backward movement of the hour. Every year since 1976, the date of the transition to winter time has thus been at the end of October, an immutable date so that the French can remember this moment. The time change makes us more precisely switch to winter time during the last full weekend of October.
During the winter time change, at 3 a.m., you always have to bring back the hands of your old watch or your clock ancestral back one hour. At 3 o’clock in the morning, the whole of France therefore goes back to 2 o’clock. Of course, smartphones like all connected devices switch to winter time automatically, without any intervention being necessary. The maneuver artificially gains an hour of sleep, but also loses an hour of natural light at the end of the day, in addition to the natural and progressive shortening of the days as the sun approaches. winter solsticein December.
The seasonal time change has existed 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.
In February 2018, the European Parliament polled EU citizens about the time change. Among the 4.6 million Europeans who responded, 84% said they were in favor of the removal of the measure at the time. And during a consultation organized by the National Assembly in France at the start of 2019, it was also the end of the time change that was widely supported, by 83.71% of French people. In March 2019, the European Parliament adopted a majority project to end it. The said draft directive provided for the abolition of the time change from 2021. To do this, each Member State had to decide between winter time and 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.
A deadline had even been set to put the time change in the closet: October 2021. The directive was to be adopted by the Council at the end of 2020, then transposed by the Member States, underlines the official site Public Life. Only, because of the health crisis linked to Covid-19, Brexit, then subsequently 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 change of time is no longer on the agenda “and should not be discussed in the near future”, concludes the site of the French administration. The elimination of the alternation between winter time and summer time, and therefore the end of the time change, is therefore not for now!