The French government aims to pass a law that could help protect the ringing of church bells across the country’s rural regions that are the bastion of French Catholicism.
The move follows tensions in rural areas following a rise in noise complaints attributed to residents who have moved to the countryside from big cities “bemoaning the way livestock, church bells and other rural sounds impinge on their newly claimed right to pastoral quiet”, reports the Guardian.
A new law aims to stop these néoruraux (rural newcomers) from taking farmers to court over farming activities that were already happening long before they arrived. While the legislation's focus is the noisy domain of agricultural, it could serve as a deterrent to those who might otherwise take issue with noises associated with the religious domain in France.
While opposition MPs have derided the new bill as "hot air", because it mostly just reorganises existing bits of legislation, what is new, says the Guardian, is the emphasis on what the justice minister, Éric Dupond-Moretti, calls le vivre-ensemble: living together in a respectful way.
The new bill follows farmers across the country "protesting at agro-industrial policies they say are crushing them". French bishops have spoken out on behalf of the travails of French farmers.
Dale Berning Sawa, the author of the Guardian article, highlights how she grew up in Aix-en-Provence, a town that "likes to think of itself as an extension of Paris".
In 2016, she notes, Parisian tourists holidaying in nearby Carry-le-Rouet garnered national attention when they complained about the chant des cigales (cicadas) in summer. Berning Sawa says that “it’s easy to trace a link between gentrification-inflated property prices in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur region and these nonsense complaints, which this new legislation aims to curb”.
This could include dissuading such "nonsense complaints" against the ringing of church bells, a common practise across la France Profonde – that “Deep France” comprised of provincial towns, rural and village life that are underscored by a profound Frenchness, as Gavin Mortimer describes in his Catholic Herald article.
