It is being called a silent, weapon-less 'massacre' with an estimated death toll four times that of the September 11 attacks on New York City, an avoidable disaster that has left France looking at itself in the mirror and finding an ugly reflection.
How could a nation that prides itself on social safety nets and arguably the best medical system in the world, governed by a 'Daddy-State' that exacts high taxes in exchange for the promise that all will be cared for, have let so many people die from a freak heat wave despite early warning signs?
As the summer holidays end in France, the nation is only just beginning a post-mortem examination of why things went so dramatically wrong. Two weeks after temperatures subsided, political and social debate seems to be heating up while individuals, in some cases returning home to discover that family or friends have died during the heat wave, are putting themselves on the couch in a sort of collective self-analysis.
While investigations have begun to determine where to put the blame for the estimated 11,435 deaths - the vast majority of which were of elderly people - debates from the family dining table to the pages of the press and at all levels of government seem to have already fingered the culprit: the whole country.
On the one hand, there was the 'system', including everything from a hierarchical socio-political order where warnings either weren't heard or were lost, to the sacrosanct French addiction to retreating en masse on vacation in August, leaving many wards closed and hospitals understaffed.
On the other hand, the crisis has revealed a breakdown in social relations and a generational divide that leaves one of the most vulnerable and least represented sectors of the population - the aged - isolated and forgotten.