Parisians were temporarily barred on Friday from drinking alcohol in public as the city authorities tried to limit the strain on France’s health system during record-breaking heat.
The Paris police chief, Patrice Faure, banned alcohol consumption in streets and parks from midday on Friday and the sale of alcohol after 6 p.m. The interior ministry declined to say how long the restrictions, which were also briefly enacted but not widely respected during a music event this past weekend, would remain in place.
Separately, Mr. Faure suspended sports competitions and asked the organizers of other public events, including a different music festival and a Pride march, to postpone their gatherings. The march and festival organizers soon complied.
The French interior ministry said on Friday that it had also invited regional officials to enact similar restrictions on public alcohol consumption.
Mr. Faure told journalists on Thursday night that the outdoor drinking ban was necessary because “alcohol in direct sunlight has devastating effects that result in our firefighters and emergency medical services’ being tied up and called upon at a time when other people might need them.”
Mr. Faure said, “My job is to ensure that the emergency response and hospital care systems are not overwhelmed.”
Any congestion would be “disastrous,” he said, “since it could lead to additional accidents or even deaths because of an inability to provide care.” During the restrictions over the weekend, he said that no one would be detained for ignoring the ban but could be fined.
France’s health minister, Stéphanie Rist, warned on Thursday that over the past 24 hours, Paris had recorded four times the normal rate of people suffering cardiac arrest.
Ms. Rist said it was too early to estimate the excess mortality caused by the heat wave. But the government estimated that 55 people had drowned in heat-related accidents between June 18 and Thursday, and according to prosecutors at least three children have died after being trapped in cars.
A 3-year-old was found dead in his family’s car in a Paris suburb on Wednesday, and in the southern city of Carpentras, siblings aged 2 and 4 died after they were found unresponsive in their parents’ car on Monday.
The restrictions in Paris drew a mixed reaction.
Richard Loiseau, a 50-year-old house painter, was sitting on a bench under the shade of a tree and sipping from a can of beer shortly before the ban began on Friday.
The interdiction, he said, was “normal,” because “when people drink too much, with the heat they can faint.” Mr. Loiseau doesn’t mind briefly changing his habits, he said. “I’ll just drink water,” he said.
Lee Carbonnier, 27, who works in a library, disagreed. She described the ban as “ridiculous and called it “a strange priority.”
“The real priority should be to reinvest money in public hospitals to address systemic problems,” she said, “rather than making sporadic decisions that once again infringe on our basic freedoms and only serve to postpone the problem.”
Ms. Carbonnier’s friend Camille Monnier, 27, a costume coordinator in the film industry, said she wanted “to know the proportion of people who ended up in the hospital because they passed out while drunk in a park, compared with those who pass out at home because they live in poorly insulated homes.”
Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu said on Thursday that he had activated the highest level of mobilization within the health care system, bolstering hospital staffing and prioritizing care for people afflicted by the heat. The health ministry later announced a special fund of 100 million euros, or roughly $114 million, to allow hospital services to buy air-conditioning units and fans.
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