It's not just that France isn't installing them. It's that laws prevent installing them, and laws keep offices and schools warm on purpose.

The prevention comes to play with massive restrictions around visibility of the units on facades in order to preserve character of apartment buildings and beauty. In some cases these can apply to private homes, too. Additionally you have the copropriété, where you need the majority of the building to grant you the right to install AC. The cities have rigid enforcement of all these and can mandate clawbacks and of course fines. And we didn't get into what you're even allowed to install - the things installed in the US won't cut it.

Offices and schools. Laws don't mandate AC, but they prevent it from being put too strong. 27C, I believe is as cold as you're going to get.

French people have a sort of cultural revulsion to AC - forget climate change and American influence, it'll make you sick and you'll hurting your health.

Just stating the facts, not defending the US. The US has a religious opposition to climate change actions as strong as the French religious opposition to AC.

And for older people, France sucks. For younger people, arguably the whole situation really sucks.

On top of everything you mention, AC makes the climate problems worse. Solar reduces the negative impact, but does not eliminate it.

I live in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California. 15 years ago, typical summer daily highs made it into the 80s for a week or two, and in 10+ years of being here before that I never saw it hit 90°F. Now we're 90°F almost all summer and we hit 106°F last summer (the forecast says over 100°F by the end of this week). Overnight lows have seen a similar increase. I'm getting older and fans no longer keep me cool enough to function well. As a compromise, I installed evaporative cooling 5 years ago. In our climate (very dry air when it's hot) it works well and takes ~25% of the energy of AC to run (power is only consumed by a large fan motor and a small water pump). But it does consume water, increasing our total water usage in warm months by ~50%. We have plenty of water in our area, but that's been trending in the wrong direction as well, even in wetter years.

> something they do not need

Except France very much does need AC. They may keep it off 99% of the time, but anyplace that experiences 38C+ temperatures should have AC systems installed for public safety. The cost benefit ratio is extremely in favor of having AC in France even if they don’t fully cool indoor temperatures to 22C, there’s a huge advantage to limiting temperatures to below 30C.

Paris has hit 42+C before, in places without AC those temperatures result in deaths.