Please enable JS and disable any ad blocker Notifications can be managed in browser preferences. ‘A rooster needs to express himself,’ says Corinne Fesseau I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our Privacy notice The rooster is annoyed and off his game He’s not even singing anymore.” She picks up Maurice the rooster and hugs him Maurice and his owner are being sued by a couple of neighbours. They are summer vacationers who, like thousands of others, come for a few weeks a year to Saint-Pierre-d’Oleron, the main town on an island off France’s western coast full of marshes and “simple villages all whitewashed like Arab villages as the novelist Pierre Loti wrote in the 1880s the countryside has a right to its sounds and outsiders have no business dictating their customs to its rural denizens The controversy taps into France’s still unbroken connection to its agricultural past, its self-image as a place that exalts farm life and the perceived values of a simpler existence. A parliamentary representative from the rural district of Lozere recently told French news media that he wants rural sounds to be officially classified and protected as “national heritage.” Fesseau, a retired waitress who now has a torch-singing act, sees things from Maurice’s perspective. “A rooster needs to express himself,” she says. The mayor of this minuscule island capital, Christophe Sueur, sees a broader threat. “We have French values that are classic, and we have to defend them,” he says. “One of these traditions is to have farm animals. If you come to Oleron, you have to accept what’s here.” In the summer, the island’s normal population of 22,000 can balloon 20-fold. Recalling that some vacationers had even demanded the silencing of the church bells, the mayor says: “A minority wants to impose their way of life.” “There are people who refuse our traditions,” he says. He explains that chicken coops were common on the island, a place isolated from “the continent” before a bridge was built a half-century ago. To protect Maurice, the mayor supported a municipal ordinance that proclaimed the need “to preserve the rural character” of Saint-Pierre-d’Oleron. The measure, which passed, is largely symbolic, but it puts Sueur firmly behind Maurice. “This is more than just a debate about a rooster, it’s a whole debate about the rural way of life, it’s really about defining rurality,” says Thibault Brechkoff, a mayoral candidate who stopped by Fesseau’s modest two-story stone house last week for some electioneering. “The rooster must be defended,” he adds. This is more than just a debate about a rooster, it’s a whole debate about the rural way of life, it’s really about defining rurality It could be worse for Maurice, a cantankerous fowl with a magnificent puffed-out coat who struts Fesseau’s backyard with three hens in tow. His date in court has just been put off. There was no immediate risk of expulsion, or less pleasant rooster destinies. The Limoges couple, Jean-Louis Biron and Joëlle Andrieux, have petitioned a judge to make Fesseau and her husband stop “the nuisances consecutive to the installation of their chicken-coop, and most particularly the song of Maurice the cock”. They insist that the setting is urban, and so Maurice has no right to crow. Urban seems a stretch. Fesseau’s small house with bright blue shutters sits at the edge of this quiet town of 6,700, with its high-steepled stone church and narrow shopping street. The marshes quickly creep up on it; the writer Loti asked to be buried in Saint-Pierre-d’Oleron, “in the sweet peace of the countryside,” as he wrote. Biron and Andrieux hired an official court bailiff to report on the rooster, at a cost of hundreds of dollars. The bailiff didn’t hear the fowl the first day, according to court documents. It was only on the second and third day “upon entering the residence at 6.30am and 7am” that he “took note of the song of the rooster”. A mediator suggested sending Maurice away while Biron and Andrieux were using their vacation home. “I won’t be separated from my rooster!” Fesseau says. “These people come here and they say, ‘We’re going to make ourselves at home. But they can’t give us orders.” “Look, they’re not against the rooster,” says the plaintiff’s lawyer, Vincent Huberdeau. “They’ve never asked for the death of this animal.” The lawyer says his clients built their house 15 years ago and had enjoyed peaceful vacations until Fesseau installed her chicken coop in 2017. “They’ve been presented as people hostile to nature,” Huberdeau says. “But it’s not that at all. They have nothing against the rural world.” On a recent early morning, Maurice poked his head through the tiny trapdoor of his green wooden coop, painted with words of affection (choupinette and tartiflette). He clucked quietly. It was still dark. At precisely 6am, with the sun just emerging, he stiffened, raised his head, shook his wattles, opened his beak and let out a low, hoarse crow. (“Discreet” was how Maurice’s lawyer characterised it in a court pleading.) Fesseau’s husband, Jacky, a retired fisherman, slept right through the performance. “Before, he was happy, everything was going so well,” Fesseau says. “But now, with all this uproar and stress...” Fesseau’s voice trailed off sadly. The rooster’s lawyer, in official pleadings, says Maurice “himself has perceived this disquiet, as for the past several months he has only rarely sung”. A random sampling of the other neighbours uncovered only staunch defenders of Maurice. “Why must a rooster be arrested?” asks Katherine Karom, a neighbour who lives in the same mini-development as the complaining couple. “It’s as if you were to say, stop the church bells from ringing,” she says. “You can’t stop people from having animals. This is the countryside here.” Renaud Morandeau, a fisherman who lives next door, summed things up bluntly. “I’ve never even heard it,” he says. “I don’t even understand what all the fuss is about.” “And even if I had heard,” he adds, “what the heck – it’s a rooster.” Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies Corinne Fesseau poses with her rooster “Maurice” in her garden at Saint-Pierre-d’Oleron in La Rochelle 2019.[Photo by XAVIER LEOTY / AFP/Getty Images]A French court sided with the owner of the rooster accused of disturbing the early-morning peace Corrine Fessau’s neighbors went to court arguing that the rooster was polluting the environment with its crowing a judge threw out the complaint basically saying that roosters are going to be roosters and the Maurice has the right to crow in its natural Fesseau was quoted by AFP news agency saying “It’s a victory for everyone in the same situation as me her lawyers had argued the complaint was ridiculous because crowing roosters were part of country life would have had to move or figure out a way to keep Maurice from crowing the complainants will now pay her £900/$1,100 in damages The legal battle involving the four-year-old bird saw a “Save Maurice” petition garner 140,000 online signatures Merchandise has been made in his honour and letters of support have come from as far away as the United States The high-profile case is considered an illustration of the growing tension between residents living in rural France and those moving to escape city life “This is the height of intolerance – you have to accept local traditions,” Christophe Sueur wrote an open letter in May calling for the sounds of rural life – including cows mooing and church bells – to be inscribed on France’s heritage list to protect them against such complaints Senators approve law to protect the noises and smells of the countryside following high-profile cases 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. 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”. Read moreA 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. “Living in the countryside implies accepting some nuisances,” Joël 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 Lévi, 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.” The law is emblematic of growing tensions in the countryside between longtime residents and outsiders whose bucolic expectations often clash with everyday realities. Read moreCorinne Fesseau and her rooster Maurice became the image of the fight when she was brought to court by pensioners next door over the bird’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 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 south-west France also threw out that case.