France’s culture clash reaches a coop over rooster
ST.-PIERRE - D’OLÉRON, France — The rooster was annoyed and off his game. He shuffled, clucked and puffed out his russet plumage. But he didn’t crow. Not in front of all these strangers.
“You see, he’s very stressed out,” said his owner, Corinne Fesseau. “I’m stressed, so he’s stressed out. He’s not even singing anymore.” She picked up Maurice the rooster and hugged him. “He’s just a baby,” she said.
Maurice has become the most famous chicken in France, but as always in a country where hidden significance is never far from the surface, he is much more than just a chicken.
He has become a symbol of a perennial French conflict — between those for whom France’s countryside is merely a backdrop for pleasant vacations and the people who actually inhabit it.
Maurice and his owner are being sued by a couple of neighbors. They are summer vacationers who, like thousands of others, come for a few weeks a year to St.-Pierre-d’Oléron, the main town on an island off France’s western coast full of marshes and “simple villages all whitewashed like Arab villages, dazzling and tidy,” as the novelist Pierre Loti wrote in the 1880s.
These neighbors, a retired couple from near the central French city of Limoges, say the rooster makes too much noise and wakes them up. They want a judge to remove him.
But for tens of thousands across France who have signed a petition in the rooster’s favor, and for a host of small-town French mayors, Maurice has become a national cause. The crowing Gallic coq, an eternal symbol of France, must be
protected, they say. The rooster has a right to crow, 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 Lozère 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 said.
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,” Sueur said. “One of these traditions is to have farm animals. If you come to Oléron, you have to accept what’s here.”
In the summer, the island’s normal population of 22,000 can balloon twentyfold. Recalling that some vacationers had even demanded the silencing of the church bells, the mayor said, “A minority wants to impose their way of life.”
“There are people who refuse our traditions,” he said. He explained 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 St.-Pierre-d’Oléron. 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,” said 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 added.