79 festivals filed · 79 with full entries · 34 with a sourced attendance figure
Country pass 01 · 79 entries, Q-FR-001 to Q-FR-079
The first thing the French calendar tells you, once it is classified rather than listed, is that almost nothing in it is fixed. Of seventy-nine entries, exactly two fall on the same calendar date every year and have no further conditions attached: the Fête de la Musique on 21 June, and the Fête des Lumières around 8 December in Lyon. Everything else moves, and it moves for one of four quite different reasons.
Fifty-five entries are seasonal windows — the festival returns to the same part of the year and announces its dates annually. Fourteen are anchored to a weekday rule, which sounds like a fixed date and is not: the Braderie de Lille is always the first weekend of September, the Fête des Vendanges de Montmartre always the second weekend of October, and so the actual dates shift by up to six days each year. Five are set by Easter. Three are not annual at all.
That distribution is itself a portrait of the country. A calendar of fixed saints' days would describe Italy or Spain; France's festival year is dominated by the administrative window — a date agreed between a commune, a prefecture and a sponsor, published in the autumn, held for a year. The French festival is a scheduled cultural product more often than it is a rite.
The exceptions cluster, and they cluster in two places: the Channel coast and the Midi.
Dunkerque and Granville both run carnivals that grew out of the departure of the Newfoundland cod fleet — a send-off for men going to sea for six months — and both now move with Lent. Limoux, in the Aude, runs what it claims is the longest carnival in the world, every weekend from January until Lent begins. Nice, with records going back to 1294, holds the largest of them. Arles opens the Provençal bullfighting season on Easter weekend itself.
The practical consequence is one that a month-by-month calendar cannot express. In a year when Easter falls late, the whole of this cluster moves with it, and a traveller who has booked Nice for the third week of February on the strength of last year's dates will find the city empty. The swing is up to five weeks.
Pentecost does the same work seven weeks later: the Feria de Nîmes, the largest of the French ferias at a reported 1.1 million participants, is a Pentecost event, and the Ascension holiday pulls Les Nuits Sonores in Lyon around with it.
Between Bayonne, Dax, Nîmes and Arles, France keeps a form that belongs culturally to Spain and administratively to France: the feria. White clothes with a red sash; bodegas run by neighbourhood peñas in courtyards and garages; bandas playing through the night; five days during which a city of 50,000 stops being a city of 50,000.
The Fêtes de Bayonne report around a million participants over five days, Nîmes 1.1 million over six. Both are anchored or Pentecost-set rather than fixed, and both sit inside the hottest weeks of the French holiday calendar, which is why the accommodation effect reaches across the Basque coast into Spain.
The bullfighting these ferias carry is legally protected as regional tradition and contested every single year. The honest line for a reference work is that the street programme and the arena programme are separable and that the visitor can choose: the bodegas, the parades, the abrivados and the Landes course landaise — in which nothing is killed — are not the corrida.
Thirty of the seventy-nine entries touch July, and a dozen of them are among the largest in the country. Avignon and its Off run simultaneously for most of the month. Aix stages opera, Orange stages opera in a Roman theatre with its stage wall intact, Arles opens the photography season, Carhaix fills a field with the largest music audience in France, Marciac turns a Gascon village of 1,200 into a jazz festival, and the Tour de France moves across all of it.
Two things follow. The first is that southern France in July is not a destination but a timetable: these events overlap, and the accommodation they displace overlaps too. The second is that this concentration is why the August entries — Lorient, Bayonne, Dax, Rock en Seine — read as a second, smaller season rather than a continuation.
Thirty-three of the seventy-nine entries carry an attendance figure that can be stated with a year and a basis attached. Forty-six do not, and the reasons are worth setting out, because they are more interesting than the gap suggests:
Where figures do exist, they are not commensurable, and the template now forces that admission into the record. Cannes reports 40,000 accredited professionals — the public cannot buy a ticket. Roland-Garros reports 727,000 turnstile visitors. The Tour de France reports ten million roadside spectators strung along 3,500 kilometres over three weeks, from 2018. Nîmes reports 1.1 million city-wide participants accumulated over six days. These four numbers describe four different things, and the only reason they are ever compared is that most calendars print them as a single column.
The genuinely trustworthy figures are the ticketed and audited ones: the Salon de l'Agriculture at 607,503 for 2025, the Paris Marathon at 57,464 finishers, Le Mans at 350,105. These are counts. Almost everything else in the French calendar is an estimate of a crowd in an open street, and should be read as a magnitude.
Visitor-origin data — the split between domestic and foreign audiences, and which foreign markets — is published by almost nobody in France. In this pass the field is empty for all seventy-nine entries, and that is a finding rather than an omission.
Three cases where the mix is obviously material and still unpublished are worth naming for a later research pass. Le Mans fills its infield campsites with British, Dutch, German and Belgian visitors who drive down for the week. Strasbourg's Christmas market, at a reported 3.05 million over five weeks, draws heavily from Germany, thirty minutes away across the Rhine. Cannes is by definition an international professional audience and its accreditation database knows exactly what it is.
In each case the organiser holds the data. None of them publishes it.
January and February belong to the north and the carnival, and to the trade halls — Angoulême, the Salon de l'Agriculture, Sirha in its odd years. March is thin. From April the calendar opens outwards and does not close until the end of August, with July as an unmanageable peak. September is the rentrée in festival form: Lille's braderie, the heritage weekend, Deauville, the Lyon biennale. October and November turn to food and wine almost exclusively — Montmartre's vineyard, Espelette's peppers, Beaujolais at one minute past midnight, the Hospices sale that prices a vintage. December is light: Lyon for four nights, and then five weeks of Alsace.
It is a year with one genuinely immovable public holiday of its own invention — 21 June, when anyone may play anything anywhere — and one city that has put candles in its windows every December since 1852 because of a postponed statue. Between those two fixed points, France schedules.