Who complains about church bells or cicadas in France? You’d be surprised
The French parliament is taking aim at noise complaints in the countryside. Lawmakers say they are well acquainted with the problem of residents who have moved to the countryside from the big cities bemoaning the way livestock, church bells and other rural sounds impinge on their newly claimed right to pastoral quiet.
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. Opposition MPs have derided the new bill as hot air, because it mostly just reorganises existing bits of legislation. But what is new is an emphasis on what the justice minister, Éric Dupond-Moretti, callsle vivreensemble: living together in a respectful way – something I feel is sorely needed.
I grew up in Aix-en-Provence, a town that likes to think of itself as an extension of Paris. In 2016, Parisian tourists holidaying in nearby Carryle-Rouet garnered national attention when they complained about the chant des cigales (cicadas) in summer. In my mind, 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.
Aix is not where I come back to during school holidays now. For the better part of the past decade, my parents have lived in a tiny village on the edge of the Cévennes national park. The truly rural sounds here reflect the hard lives being lived.
It’s where I am right now. It’s just gone 4pm; the Catholic church’s bells have just rung eight times. Despite there being as few as 300 year-round inhabitants, the bells ring the hour twice, just metres from our beds – even through the hours of complete darkness when the street lights are switched off. They ring once on the half-hour too. A full-on fanfare, meanwhile, marks the day’s main services at 8am, midday and 7pm. It takes visiting friends a few nights to get used to it.
Yesterday, during lunch, we heard the tinkling sounds of a different type of bell and everyone – kids, parents, grandparents – jumped up and ran outside to watch the herd of sheep and barking patou sheepdogs trot down the road and across the bridge to the other side of the village, headed for pastures downstream. Often they walk down my parents’ actual street. They poop everywhere and eat my mother’s pansies.
My parents’ neighbours talk to each other from their respective upstairs windows, across the expanse of the street. There’s no need to leave home for a chat. They can hear each other just fine.
The butcher’s opens up on to the alley behind the house, which means we hear every word when he’s in a raging mood. Empathising with whatever existential despair might be built into the profession, though, isn’t that hard when you think about the fact that his is one of the few upright businesses in a diminutive local economy. Making a living in an emptying countryside is no joke.
The storms rage, too; the wind
howls; the rivers swell and rush and burst their banks and flood the cellars. Night-time is full of bats and frogs. During termtime the sound of children playing ebbs and flows as the village school fills up for lessons, empties for lunch and then fills again until hometime. At weekends, passing bikers rev through on their way up the mountain.
The summer holidays are marked by seemingly interminable fêtes du village, which always start out low-key, with Nutella crêpes, churros from a circus van and a live brass band. By the early hours, they have transformed into a booming knees-up that can be heard throughout the village, the beat bouncing off walls built long before even running water was a thing. But they always end, and you do sleep eventually, and the house stands unmoved. Its walls are built a metre thick, of stones from the river. Not even floods can shake them loose.
Summer nights can sometimes be punctuated by drunken parties of weekending teenagers, the only noise I know of that has elicited an official police complaint. The hostel-hotel across the street hosts the occasionally raucous two-night birthday party. There’ll be neighbourly mumbling about noise past 10pm or parking on private land. But mostly people speak to each other and sort it out. They really do live, respectfully, together.
Once, on an early-morning walk up her favourite road out of the village, my mother found a lady leaning on the gate at the end of her garden. “We come here for peace and quiet,” she said, “and here he is.” She gestured across the river to a man chopping wood with a machine: a kerclunk-kerclunk-thud, kerclunk-kerclunk-thud ping-ponging between the stony wooded walls of the narrow valley.
But here’s the thing. It’s freezing cold here in the winter. Even in the summer, those thick stone walls act like fridges, and no amount of government green incentives can make heating these ancient houses affordable. Gardening, foraging for chestnuts and cèpes, hunting in hi-vis, tractors hauling hay and sweets onions: this is making ends meet, and it’s a struggle. Farmers across the country have been upturning village signs – ours included – in protest at agroindustrial policies they say are crushing them.
I know living somewhere and visiting are two different things. But I have lived here and loved every aural moment of it, even when I didn’t. This is countryside clamour that is restorative simply because it’s still alive – and that’s what matters.