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France passes law to give rural noises and smells protected status

From crowing roosters to the whiff of barnyard animals, the "sensory heritage" of France's countryside will now be protected by law from attempts to stifle the everyday aspects of rural life from newcomers looking for peace and quiet.

Published: 22 January 2021 09:17 CET
Updated: 24 January 2021 14:50 CET
France passes law to give rural noises and smells protected status
Noisy cockerels now have the full backing of the law. Photo: AFP

French senators on Thursday gave final approval to a law proposed in the wake of several high-profile conflicts by village residents and vacationers, or recent arrivals derided as “neo-rurals”.

A rowdy rooster named Maurice in particular made headlines in 2019 after a court in western France rejected a bid to have him silenced by neighbours who had purchased a holiday home nearby.

READ ALSO How a noisy cockerel exposed France's urban and rural divide

 

“Living in the countryside implies accepting some nuisances,” Joel Giraud, the government's minister in charge of rural life, told lawmakers.

Cow bells (and cow droppings), grasshopper chirps and noisy early-morning tractors are also now considered part of France's natural heritage that will be codified in its environmental legislation.

“It sends a strong message,” said Pierre-Antoine Levi, the senator who acted as rapporteur for the bill.

“It can act as a useful tool for local officials as they carry out their educational and mediation duties,” he said.

The law is emblematic of growing tensions in the countryside between longtime residents and outsiders whose bucolic expectations often clash with everyday realities.

Corinne Fesseau and her rooster Maurice became the image of the fight when she was brought to court by pensioners next door over the animal's shrill wake-up calls.

Critics saw the lawsuit as part of a broader threat to France's hallowed rural heritage by outsiders and city dwellers unable or unwilling to understand the realities of country life.

Thousands of people signed a “Save Maurice” petition, and a judge eventually upheld the cock-a-doodle-doos.

In another case from 2019, a woman in the duck-breeding heartland of the Landes region was brought to court by a newcomer neighbour fed up with the babbling of the ducks and geese in her back garden.

A court in southwest France also threw out that case.

Member comments

  1. About time too. Very sensible to have this enshrined in law especially as the post-Covid world will most likely see more city folk moving outward into the countryside.

  2. If you live in a rural area you accept the good things about country living and maybe, for some people, the not so good, roosters crowing, farmyard smells etc just make me realize how lucky I am to live in the country!

  3. Absolutely totally unnecessary. Why do we French think that everything has to made into law. Is it a relic of the mob mentality of the Revolution. vie au roi

  6. It was once said of a politician that “He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel in moonlight.” I wonder if his outpourings would be protected.

  8. The real problem with noise in the countryside, is the one created by the screeching children staying in bloody gites and their loud mouthed British parents.

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JOHN LICHFIELD

OPINION: Macron’s attempts to tame world leaders shows he’s more a thinker than a diplomat

French President Emmanuel Macron's flawed efforts to charm the world's autocratic and populist leaders have previously ended in failure or even humiliation. Taking the Chinese president to the Pyrenees won't change that record, writes John Lichfield.

Published: 7 May 2024 12:06 CEST
OPINION: Macron's attempts to tame world leaders shows he's more a thinker than a diplomat

Emmanuel Macron used to fancy himself as a lion-tamer.

There wasn’t a murderous dictator or mendacious populist that the French President would not try to charm: Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Narendra Modi, Recep Tayip Erdogan, Victor Orban.

The results, overall, have been poor. Sometimes Macron has been eaten, diplomatically-speaking. Years of trying to smooth-talk Vladimir Putin – with invitations to Versailles and the presidential retreat at Fort Brégancon and the long-table talks in the Kremlin – ended in disillusion and humiliation.

Macron’s attempts to create a blokeish friendship with Boris Johnson ended in cross-Channel exchanges of insults and accusations. His mission to find a core, reasonable Donald Trump ended in the discovery that there was no reasonable Donald Trump, just a self-obsessed, shallow deal-maker or deal-breaker.

And now President Xi Jinping of China. The two presidents and their wives are on an away-day to the French Pyrenees (Tuesday), visiting a region dear to Macron since his childhood.

The first day of Xi’s French state visit in Paris yesterday seems to have produced very little. The Chinese president promised to send no arms to Russia but that is a long-standing promise that he has, technically-speaking, kept.

Xi is reported to have promised to restrict sales to Moscow of “secondary materials” which can be used to make arms. We will see.

The Chinese leader also agreed to support Macron’s call for an “Olympic truce” in Ukraine and elsewhere for the duration of the Paris games in late July and August. Good luck with that.

On the gathering menace of a trade war between the EU and China, no progress was made. As a minimal concession to his French hosts, Xi promised to drop threatened dumping duties on French Cognac and Armagnac sales to China.

Otherwise, Xi said that he could not see a problem. Cheap Chinese-built electric cars and solar panels and steel are swamping the EU market? All the better for the European fight against inflation and global warming.

READ MORE: How ‘Battery Valley’ is changing northern France

Maybe more will be achieved in shirt-sleeves in the Pyrenees today. The Chinese leadership is said to approve of Macron or at least believe that he is useful to them.

Beijing likes the French President’s arguments, renewed in a speech last month, that the EU should become a “strategic” commercial and military power in its own right and not a “vassal” of the United States. The Chinese leadership evidently has no fear of the EU becoming a rival power. It sees Macron’s ideas for a “Europe puissance” as a useful way of dividing the West and weakening the strength of Washington, the dollar and “western values”.

Macron has sometimes encouraged this way of thinking, perhaps accidentally. After his state visit to China last year, he gave a rambling media interview in which he seemed to say that the EU had no interest in being “followers of the US” or defending Taiwan from Chinese aggression. He had to amend his words later.

That was Macron at his worst, an ad-lib, stand-up diplomat who ignores advice from the professionals in the Quai d’Orsay. I would argue, however, that the wider Macron argument – the EU must become more powerful or die – is the French President at his best.

Few other politicians in the world think ahead so much as Macron does. Democratic politics is mired in short-termism. Only autocrats like Xi or Putin can afford to think in terms of decades or centuries.

Macron likes to look around corners. He is often a better thinker than he is a diplomat or practical, daily politician.

His core argument – made in his Sorbonne speech last month and an interview with The Economist – is that Europe faces an unprecedented triple threat to its values, its security and its future prosperity.  

The rise of intolerant populist-nationalism threatens the values and institutions implanted in Europe after World War Two. The aggression of Russia and the detachment of the US (not just Donald Trump) threatens Europe’s security. The abandonment of global rules on fair trade – by Joe Biden’s US as well as Xi’s China – threatens to destroy European industry and sources of prosperity.

READ MORE: OPINION – Macron must earn the role of ’21st-century Churchill’

Civilisations, like people, are mortal, Macron says. Unless the EU and the wider democratic Europe (yes, you post-Brexit Britain) address these problems there is a danger that European civilisation (not just the EU experiment) could die.

Exaggerated? Maybe. But the problems are all real. Macron’s solutions are a powerful European defence alliance within Nato and targeted European protectionism and investment for the industries of the future.

The chances of those things being agreed by in time to make a difference are non-existent to small. In France, as elsewhere, these big “strategic” questions scarcely figure in popular concerns in the European election campaign.

Emmanuel Macron has now been president for seven years. His remaining three years in office will be something between disjointed and paralysed.

It is too early to write his political obituary but the Xi visit and the Sorbonne speech offer the likely main components. Macron will, I fear, be remembered as a visionary thinker and flawed diplomat/politician.

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