Gas and electricity bills: the cold is arriving, and so is the bill

According to Le Monde, which on 5 November launches a call for testimony, temperatures are dropping sharply across France while gas and electricity prices soar, "against a backdrop of international tensions". The paper invites employees and students to describe how they are adjusting to bills that keep getting heavier. For now, no testimony has been published, nor are there precise figures on the scale of the increase: we will not invent them. What follows is our reading.

The word "adapt" deserves a pause. When the bill climbs, nobody negotiates it: you turn the heating down a degree, shut off a room, put on an extra jumper, cook when it is cheaper or don't cook at all. "Adaptation" is a neat word for a very concrete piece of work, the job of keeping a life going on less.

This is what sociologists call social reproduction: everything that goes into making and maintaining people rather than commodities. Keeping warm, making meals, doing the laundry, keeping a child warm enough to do homework, looking after an elderly parent. None of it runs without energy. And when the cost of energy rises, the system does not abolish this labour: it hands it back to households, who must make up for it with time, improvisation and deprivation.

In most households, it is reasonable to assume that this daily accounting, the trade-offs, the revised menus, the laundry scheduled for off-peak hours, falls first on women. That is a hypothesis, one the testimonies may confirm or refute, but it fits what research on the "double day" has long described: a paid job outside the home, then the running of the house, which never stops and is never paid.

There is also the question of housing. A tenant chooses neither the insulation nor the heating system of their flat. They pay a rent, then a bill inflated by a thermal sieve (a "passoire thermique", the term for a poorly insulated dwelling) that they do not own. The cost of a building's poor condition thus passes from the owner to the person living in it. Students, often housed in small, badly insulated spaces on thin incomes, are on the front line, as are low-paid employees with no margin at all.

The risk of a call for testimony, however useful, is that it turns a collective problem into a contest of individual ingenuity: who found the best trick for shivering with elegance? Tips are not a policy. The real question is who pays for the increase, households or those who sell the energy, and why heating should become a luxury rationed at the kitchen table.

We will return to the accounts Le Monde gathers. In the meantime, let us keep one image: turning the thermostat down a notch is not an ecological gesture. It is often one more bill that someone, at home, ends up paying in hours, fatigue and chattering teeth.