Black Saturday
Posted: Sat Aug 01, 2026 12:19 pm
Sometimes you read the news early in the morning and old memories come flooding back. On the way to Normandy or Brittany for the summer holidays, driving through varied countryside – and certainly in an older diesel car – you’ve learnt to be patient.There’s no chance of really picking up speed. Camping sites where little boys meet girls, not in a Porsche or Lamborghini, but enough car and smile to arouse some interest. On the way back, in villages that are still somewhat sleepy, you see people queuing at the bakery for a fresh baguette – after all, they don’t keep for long – and you find yourself thinking: if only I were standing in that queue, with more than 1,200 km still to go....
Over fifty years ago, all those 'holidays for ever' families from Paris, forget all your troubles, dreaming of two or three weeks of sunshine, were on their way to somewhere along the Mediterranean coast. They were all stuck in a queue. Not on the autoroutes, but on the Routes Nationales somewhere in France. Through towns and villages, sometimes even modernised RNs. Three-lane motorways, with the middle lane for overtaking slow-moving traffic, two single track roads and the middle lane for those who dare to look death straight in the eye. Peugeot 204s, Simca 1100s, Renault 4s and 5s, Peugeot 404s and not to forget the Citroën 2CV and DS. One long queue of easy to indentify cars and clouds of exhaust fumes. “In some places, it takes three hours to travel 10 kilometres,” said the presenter of the TV news on Saturday 2 August 1975.
That August day in 1975 is regarded in France as ‘the traffic jam of the century’. Some 450 kilometres of cars were barely moving. Across the country, 60,000 cars were stuck in traffic, 40,000 of them on the RN10 alone: the motorway from Paris towards Spain. By the end of the day, 145 people had died as a result of collisions and the heat. "L'imagination au pouvoir" in Mai 1968, one year ealier in 1967, Jean-Luc Godard, "Le weekend".
That infamous Saturday is firmly etched in la mémoire collective of the French, young and old alike, as if carved in stone and also elsewhere.
Over fifty years ago, all those 'holidays for ever' families from Paris, forget all your troubles, dreaming of two or three weeks of sunshine, were on their way to somewhere along the Mediterranean coast. They were all stuck in a queue. Not on the autoroutes, but on the Routes Nationales somewhere in France. Through towns and villages, sometimes even modernised RNs. Three-lane motorways, with the middle lane for overtaking slow-moving traffic, two single track roads and the middle lane for those who dare to look death straight in the eye. Peugeot 204s, Simca 1100s, Renault 4s and 5s, Peugeot 404s and not to forget the Citroën 2CV and DS. One long queue of easy to indentify cars and clouds of exhaust fumes. “In some places, it takes three hours to travel 10 kilometres,” said the presenter of the TV news on Saturday 2 August 1975.
That August day in 1975 is regarded in France as ‘the traffic jam of the century’. Some 450 kilometres of cars were barely moving. Across the country, 60,000 cars were stuck in traffic, 40,000 of them on the RN10 alone: the motorway from Paris towards Spain. By the end of the day, 145 people had died as a result of collisions and the heat. "L'imagination au pouvoir" in Mai 1968, one year ealier in 1967, Jean-Luc Godard, "Le weekend".
That infamous Saturday is firmly etched in la mémoire collective of the French, young and old alike, as if carved in stone and also elsewhere.
