Bank Holiday Season – les jours de fériés 2018

Posted by on Apr 26, 2018

le Mont St MichelIt’s bank holiday season in France.  May is notoriously full of bank holidays in France and this year there are more ‘pont’ weekends than usual.  A ‘pont’ is the extra day that can attach itself to a Bank Holiday weekend when the bank holiday falls on a Tuesday or a Thursday.  So when the bank holiday is on a Tuesday the holiday weekend takes on the Monday etc.

The first pont weekend end with 1st May, next Tuesday.  1st May is Labour Day and it’s one of the very few days of the year when Mont St Michel is closed.

The next pont weekend ends with 8th May.  8th May is Victoire 1945 Day, celebrating the end of WWII in Europe.  That’s another long weekend ending on a Tuesday.

1st May and 8th May are bank holidays that always fall on the exact date.  Next year, when they are on a Wednesday, it just scuppers the long weekend.

Unusally, the holiday ending on 8th May is followed by another long weekend starting on 10th May.  Not sure why Wednesday 9th got left out.  This is Ascension.  This holiday is always on a Thursday, 40 days after Easter Sunday, so it’s always a pont.  We got unlucky the other year, when Ascension was on 8th May… no double dip extra holidays.

After that there is a whole week at work before the weekend of Lundi de Pentecôte.  This is a discretionary holiday, which the State tried to abolish, but it seems to have crept back.  It’s always on a Monday.

Then things go back to nearly normal… apart from the Mont St Michel Marathon on 27th May, which happens to coincide with an English bank holiday!

Later in the year we aren’t so lucky with bank holidays.  14th July, Bastille Day is on a Saturday, so no long weekend there.  And 15th August is on a Wednesday…

But we do have another pont weekend to look forward to on 1st November.

Happy Holidays