Donkey braying could soon be protected by law.

-

Image by Ansgar Scheffold from Pixabay

  • A deputy from Lozère, worried about the inflation of court cases caused by typical characteristics of rural life, decided to legislate.

  • The bill by Pierre Morel-A-L'Huissier, UDI deputy, aims to define the characteristic sounds and smells of each French terroir in order to protect them.

  • The text will be debated this Thursday in the Senate, one year after being adopted in the Assembly.

Make the song of cicadas or the scent of cow dung a part of French heritage?

This may make you smile, but the proposal of MP Pierre Morel-A-L'Huissier is very serious, to the point of being debated this Thursday in the Senate.

The elected representative of Lozère, defender of rurality, carries a bill aimed at "defining and protecting the sensory heritage of the countryside", while rural noises and smells have found themselves at the center of many disputes for nuisance.

A mayor "harpooned" by tourists because of a bell

For several years now, Pierre Morel-A-L'Huissier has been reading in the press very specific stories of rural conflicts.

"The trigger was this episode in the town of Bondons, Lozère," said the centrist elected to

20 Minutes

, about a news item at the beginning of August 2018. "The mayor is harpooned by people who came to stay in a lodge, who complained about the chapel bell ”.

A few days later, a few hundred kilometers to the south, in the Var, the mayor of Beausset receives complaints from tourists about the cicadas.

“They asked him to eradicate them with insecticides!

», Indignant this lawyer who was mayor of the village of Fournels for seventeen years.

“I told myself that we were attacking the fundamentals,” he recalls.

He then embarked on the drafting of a bill.

Inflation of legal complaints

This text aims to define a rural “sensory heritage” and to include it in the environmental code, as part of natural environments.

A protection that the deputy hopes will dissuade complaints of nuisance, some of which have had a national response.

In the summer of 2019, the Mauritius rooster had become a symbol of rural traditions in the face of urbanization due to legal proceedings launched by neighbors complaining of morning cocoricos.

According to the deputy for Lozère, there are thousands of judicial proceedings of the same type, "about 18,000", a number that the services of the Ministry of Justice could not confirm to

20 minutes

.

For Pierre Morel-A-L'Huissier, this phenomenon is symptomatic of a "growing unacceptability of the other" and of the evolution of the sociology of the countryside.

“People come to settle there when they don't know what rurality is.

It is an art of living, and the countryside has its smells and sounds.

At home, it's dung, tractors, slurry, that mixture of urine and animal feces that we use to grow grass.

"

“What can be assimilated by tourists as a nuisance (the noise of agricultural machinery, the smells of spraying in the fields, the traces of mud and cattle on the roads…) is nothing for us other than a reflection the country character of our region ”, abounds Jean-Pierre, Finistérien.

Like many readers questioned by

20 Minutes

, he approves this parliamentary initiative.

As for the Council of State, it gave a favorable opinion on the text, in January 2020, considering that “the subject dealt with, at first sight innocuous, in reality covers deep questions, affecting both French identity and living together ".

A sensory inventory to be done in each territory

With this law, each territory would have the right to an inventory of the smells and sounds that characterize it, by the State services.

Once these sensations have been registered in the sensory heritage, “if a judge is seized of a case and finds that there is a heritage that has been listed, he can tell a possible complainant that it is ill-founded to come before a court. court contest an element which is part of the heritage of the region, ”explains Pierre Morel-A-L'Huissier.

Its text has a good chance of being promulgated, after being adopted in January 2020 by the Assembly thanks to the support of the majority and the favorable opinion of the government.

If the Senate approves it without changing it on Thursday, then it will come into effect quickly.

Justice

Ardèche: Five months suspended prison sentence for killing the Marcel rooster he wanted to silence

Society

"Be careful, you are in the countryside" ... In Alsace, a municipality warns city dwellers who are too demanding

  • Patrimony

  • Campaign

  • Noise

  • Rurality

  • Senate

  • Law