alt Hacker NewsLiving in the south of France outside tourist havens (I had one when renting near St-Tropez), the current situation is that serious AC is considered something for the rich.
Not because AC itself is particularly expensive, but because almost no rental apartment has it because installing AC during the construction is basically forbidden due to green laws (RT 2012) so you need to own.
And owning something decent not in the damn city itself is expensive as fuck these days.
RT2012 is the reason my uncle installed a reversible heatpump to replace the cheap electric radiator in the house he renovated, so i'm not sure it's really forbidden. But yes, RT2012 make building new houses more expensive, and you don't want to add a AC unit to that. Especially since most areas expressly forbid visible heatpump from the streets, so you have the added cost of having to hide them (In France, we basically have a big HoA in each city, it's called PLU and the mayor get to choose the color scheme and maximum height of your house, the maximum height of your trees and if you get to have AC or not).