Timothée Dufour is a lawyer at the Paris bar.
“
Isn't it absurd to have to specify natural evidence by law?
".
This is the question legitimately asked by the deputy Agnès Thill during the debates at the national assembly, on January 22, 2020, with a view to examining the bill "
aiming to define and protect the sensory heritage of the French countryside
", tabled by his colleague, MP Pierre Morel-À-L'Huissier.
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This intends to recognize the intrinsic value of the rural heritage, and to fight against neighborhood disputes brought by people who settle in the countryside without accepting their specific characteristics.
The adoption of a law, which will be discussed by the Senate from January 21, far from constituting a natural evidence or yet another superfluous law in the legislative mille-feuille, is required in view of a reality territorial, societal and legal.
First of all, a territorial reality.
The surface area of agricultural land is in constant decline, mainly due to the urban sprawl we are witnessing.
Between 1981 and 2012, agricultural land fell by 7% in favor of urbanized soils, losing some 2 million hectares, according to the latest figures published by Agreste.
This represents 3.8% of the surface area of France, or the equivalent of the two largest metropolitan departments combined, the Gironde and the Landes.
Agriculture is only one of the possibilities of land use, confronted with many other uses in terms of economic development, transport infrastructure or housing
The immediate surroundings of cities are in fact the subject of intense competition in terms of land use.
Agriculture is only one of the possibilities of land use, confronted with many other uses in terms of economic development, transport infrastructure or housing.
The expansion of settlements shifts the area of contact between peri-urban residents and farmers, and necessarily changes their social relations.
As the interpenetration of rural and peri-urban spaces increases, “
social contact between two worlds with different cultures will therefore necessarily increase, for better or for worse
”, as the researchers Christine Léger-Bosch rightly pointed out. and Françoise Alavoine-Mornas in a study published in 2013 (
Peri-urban agricultural exploitation seeks recognition and land visibility
, Geography and cultures).
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Many farmers are seeing a proliferation of incidents proving a disconnection of their peri-urban fellow citizens with regard to rurality and its components, thus illustrating the real difficulties in sustaining agriculture on the outskirts of cities.
Local agriculture, in this context, is seriously threatened.
However, this is a growing consumer demand.
Being able to know the origin and production conditions of what we eat is a guarantee of quality.
Short circuits, the purpose of which is to facilitate dialogue between producers and consumers, constitute an important asset for the reassessment of agriculture in our society.
Consecrating “
natural evidence
”
through a legal text is
imperative, in view of this first territorial reality, at the risk of seeing farmers renounce their role of full actor of economic development in peri-urban areas, and leave those - here for more distant lands where they will be less subject to administrative or even legal hassles.
More than 8 out of 10 Parisian executives want to leave the capital, underlines a Cadremploi study published in August 2020
A societal reality, then.
This is the result of an urban exodus desired by city dwellers who give in to the temptation to reach the countryside for good in order to live there more peacefully thanks to teleworking.
The numbers tend to confirm this.
More than 8 out of 10 Parisian executives wish to leave the capital, underlines a study by Cadremploi published in August 2020. Soaring property prices, repeated heat waves, increase in social conflicts, air pollution, hyperdensity are all inherent drawbacks to large cities.
This trend is not new and has been accentuated by the coronavirus crisis, which also seems to have profoundly changed our choices in terms of habitat and living environment.
"
The Covid-19 has come to reveal a new facet of the defects of concentration in the city
", analyzes the author of
La Renaissance des Campagne
(Vincent Grimault, Seuil, 2020).
450,000 Parisians would have fled the capital during the first confinement.
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In this context, elected representatives of rural communities are confronted with city dwellers who come to go green.
How to welcome neo-rural people who leave urban areas?
How to make them cohabit with the rural people in good harmony?
Indeed, the neo-rural people who dream of calm and the good air, have forgotten that the countryside is not a controlled nature until it has become sanitized.
She lives with her familiar smells and sounds.
In response, humor was recently used by the mayor of Saint-André-de-Valborgne, in the Gard, who put up the following sign at the entrance to the village: "
Here we have bell towers which ring regularly, roosters crowing very early… farmers who work to feed you.
If you can't stand it, you've come to the wrong place.
Otherwise we have good local products
”.
Others have heard to regulate relations via
soft law
, as evidenced by the town of Millay, in Nièvre, whose municipal council has adopted internal regulations concerning lifestyles linked to the countryside.
The neo-murals (...) tending (...) to multiply the complaints in town hall or with the police forces for alleged noise or odor nuisance
Humor and
soft law
are not enough to govern relations between farmers and neorurals, the latter tending, as we shall see, to increase the number of complaints to town halls or to the police forces for alleged noise or odor nuisance.
A legal reality, finally.
The number of disputes between rural and neo-rural is, alas!
increasing.
The parliamentary report produced by the deputy Pierre Morel-À-L'Huissier shows that “p
res than 1,800 requests for environmental nuisances are listed by the chancellery and 490 appeals against abnormal neighborhood disturbances have been submitted to the Court of cassation
”.
The affair known as the Maurice de Saint-Pierre-d'Oléron rooster, singing too early and too often to the taste of the neighbors, is the perfect illustration of this.
On September 5, 2019, the Rochefort district court deliberated, ruled in favor of Maurice, "a
living being endowed with [a] sensitivity
", and dismissed the plaintiffs for lack of sufficient evidence.
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Maurice is not the only animal dragged into court for bothering neighbors.
The other examples are plethora: cicadas are considered too noisy in the Var, petitions are signed against cow bells in Savoie or against draft horses used for the maintenance of the vines in the village of Guebwiller and whose presence was contested by the operators of rural lodges because of alleged olfactory inconvenience.
Very recently, the case of the Breton Pie Noir cows, whose installation is planned in Adainville by an organic farmer, raised an outcry from several neighbors on the grounds that they would cause "
permanent nuisance, in particular sanitary, sound and olfactory [which] will be further accentuated by wind speed, rainfall and air humidity
”.
The case, which is currently the subject of an appeal before the Council of State, tends to become the new symbol of rurality against those who would like to sanitize the countryside, put it in cellophane, make it an ecological Disneyland.
Examination of these cases shows, however, that in practice, everything is a matter of appreciation by the trial judges, in particular with regard to the evidence produced.
Conversely, a farmer who had built a barn and placed a manure within fifty meters of a house was convicted in 2017 by the Riom Court of Appeal.
This is also the case for the owners of a pond whose presence of frogs was disputed by neighbors, and whose destruction was recently ordered on December 3, 2020 in execution of a judgment rendered by the Bordeaux Court of Appeal.
Examination of these cases shows, however, that in practice, everything is a matter of assessment by the trial judges, in particular with regard to the evidence produced.
The increase in the number of conflicts that arise in a society whose lifestyles are changing rapidly fully justify the bill "
aiming to define and protect the sensory heritage of the French countryside
".
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This, co-signed by sixty-six deputies belonging to different political groups, is not intended to oppose rural or neo-rural people, even less to defend an archaic vision of French agriculture.
On the contrary, the said proposal aims to take into account a reality that is at the same time territorial, societal and legal in a context where local agriculture, which is more than ever at the heart of public action carried out by local authorities, must be supported and encouraged.