France Festivals and Celebrations

Why there are almost no dates on this page

Four French public holidays move every year, because they follow Easter: Easter Monday, Ascension, Whit Monday and the pre-Lenten carnivals. Our sources for this cluster carry no festival calendar at all, and a date remembered rather than checked is the single easiest thing to get wrong on a page like this.

So this guide tells you what each occasion is, roughly when in the year it falls, and what it does to a city, and then sends you to the municipal tourist office or the commune for the year you are traveling. For anything with a fixed statutory date we say so.

The fourteenth of July

The national day is fixed: the fourteenth of July, every year. It is the one French festival a visitor is most likely to be present for by accident, and it has two halves.

The morning is the military parade, in Paris down the Champs-Elysees and in regional capitals on a smaller scale. The avenue is closed, crowds form behind barriers hours ahead, and the transport network around it is disrupted for most of the day. The evening is fireworks and public dances, the bals, which are a village and neighborhood event far more than a state one and are the better half if you have a choice.

Practically: central Paris is not the place to be moving luggage that day. Book anything you care about in advance, expect closures, and read our safety guide on crowds.

The eleventh of November

Armistice Day is also fixed, and it is a public holiday rather than a festival. Ceremonies happen at war memorials in essentially every commune in France, which is a thing worth seeing precisely because it is not staged for visitors. Shops and many services close.

The four that move

• Carnival, in the weeks before Lent. Nice runs the largest one in France, with parades and flower battles over roughly a fortnight; Dunkirk runs a very different and much more local one. Both move with Easter, so both need checking for your year.
• Easter Monday, a public holiday. Most things close.
• Ascension, a Thursday in spring, and the reason for the French institution of the pont: with a Thursday holiday, the Friday is widely taken too and the country effectively has a four-day weekend. Trains and roads fill.
• Whit Monday, another moveable public holiday, with the same effect on a smaller scale.

The pont is the part visitors do not anticipate. A moveable holiday landing on a Thursday or a Tuesday turns into a long weekend across the whole country, which fills every train, hotel and coastal road at once.

The Fete de la Musique

Every June, free music appears on streets, in squares and in doorways across every French town at once, played by anyone who wants to play. It is the most purely enjoyable thing on this list and it needs no ticket, no plan and no reservation. Check the exact date for your year.

Bastille aside, the rest of the calendar

• The first of May, Labor Day, fixed. A public holiday, with marches in the big cities and a near-total closure of shops. Sprigs of lily of the valley are sold on the street.
• The fifteenth of August, the Assumption, fixed. A public holiday in the middle of the French holiday month, which makes it the single busiest travel weekend of the year.
• The first of November, All Saints, fixed. Families visit graves; chrysanthemums are everywhere; it is a quiet day rather than a celebration.
• Christmas markets, from late November through December, and strongest in Alsace, where Strasbourg and Colmar run the best known in the country. Cold, and worth it.
• Harvest and village festivals, through September and October across the wine regions. These are local, small, and set by the commune, which is exactly why no page can date them for you.

Practical advice for any of them

Book accommodation and trains well ahead for a fixed national date or a pont weekend. Expect public transport to be reduced on public holidays rather than normal. Expect food shops to close, which matters more in France than it would elsewhere because the good ones are small. Demonstrations and marches happen on some of these days and can form with little or no warning, so keep an eye on what is happening around you.

And check your year with the commune or the municipal tourist office. That is the only reliable source for a moveable date or a local festival, which is why this page does not pretend otherwise.

Sources

• UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office: France safety and security: terrorism, industrial action and demonstrations, pickpocketing on the Metro and the RER, assaults on RER lines B and D, drink spiking, the identification requirement, the face-covering ban and its fines, swimming and riptides, driving law, winter equipment, pollution stickers, extreme heat and wildfires. Accessed 16 September 2026.