Public Holidays in France

I'm sure I've already done this, perhaps in a spreadsheet (in a format no longer easily read, perhaps), but I haven't found it.

The basic idea is to compute the possibilities for the number of holidays falling on Monday through Friday in the course of a year. Holidays falling on Saturday are also of interest, but more because they are inconvenient for those with Monday-to-Friday occupations who count on getting their errands done on Saturday. Holidays falling on Sundays are wasted. Monday is especially nice, and Tuesday is even better if one has a floating day off to make the “bridge”.

• The column “day number” is the sequence number in the year beginning with “1” on the first of the year. The column “day mod 7” will be used for calculating the day of the week in which it falls relative to the first of the year; in parentheses, the leap year version of same.
• Sure (by criterion of timing) : 3 (4 in Alsace-Moselle)
• Alsace-Moselle have a couple of extra holidays for historical, Treaty of Augsburg, reasons.

In which the fourteen possible years are considered, the possibilities resulting from starting the year on each of the seven weekdays, and the year being “leap” (29 days in February) or not.

Now, tallying those figures, we see more readily that one never gets all eleven national holidays : at least one falls on either a Saturday or a Sunday, for an average of 61/7, or about 8.6 net holidays per year. 2011, the year in which this is being prepared, is a “year index 6”, as meager as they come, with three days lost to Sundays. It is not quite so bad in Alsace-Moselle.