The owner of famous French rooster Maurice emerged victorious from a legal battle with neighbors over his early morning crowing today, with a court upholding the bird’s right to daytime crowing.
The case filed by the neighbors of the owner of Mauritius, Corinne Fesseau, hit the headlines around the world, considered as symptomatic of the tensions in the countryside between rural people and owners of holiday homes.
“Maurice won and the plaintiffs must pay its owner €1,000 in damages,” said Fesseau’s lawyer, Julien Papineau.
Fesseau had told the court in Rochefort, western France, that no one near her home on the picturesque Atlantic island of Oléron had ever complained about Mauritius before a retired couple bought a house holiday next door.
Corinne Fesseau, the owner of French perch Maurice has won her legal battle over the animal’s ‘right to sing’ after new neighbors complained the bird was waking them up every day
The case made headlines around the world, seen as symptomatic of tensions in the countryside between rural people and holiday home owners
After they complained that they had been woken up by his singing, she made several attempts to silence him, including placing black sheets around his chicken coop to make him think morning had not yet come – in vain.
“I’m speechless,” Fesseau said on Thursday, adding, “It’s a win for everyone in the same situation as me. I hope it sets a precedent for them.
The case became a national cause famous, with 140,000 people signing a ‘Save Maurice’ petition or proudly displaying his picture on ‘Let Me Sing’ t-shirts.
Critics saw the trial as part of a larger threat to France’s sacred rural heritage by outsiders and city dwellers unable or unwilling to understand the realities of country life.
Fesseau had told the court in Rochefort, western France, that no one near her home on the picturesque Atlantic island of Oléron had ever complained about Mauritius before a retired couple bought a house holiday next door.
The case became a national cause famous, with 140,000 people signing a “Save Maurice” petition or proudly displaying his picture on “Let Me Sing” t-shirts.
“It’s the height of intolerance, you have to accept local traditions,” Christophe Sueur, mayor of the village of Fesseau in Saint-Pierre-d’Oléron, told AFP.
The plaintiffs were a couple of retired farmers from the Haute-Vienne region in central France.
In many rural areas of France, some villagers resent wealthier city dwellers buying up property in declining farming villages, which has played into the fierce anti-government ‘yellow vest’ protests that have erupted across the country. the country last November.
The mayor of the south-west village of Gajac, Bruno Dionis, penned a furious open letter in May defending the rights of church bells to ring, cows to moo and donkeys to bray across rural France.
In many rural areas of France, some villagers resent wealthier city dwellers buying up property in declining farming villages, which has played into fierce anti-government ‘yellow vest’ protests that have erupted across the country. country last November.
Dionis du Séjour asked the government to register the sounds on the list of French heritage.
Maurice and his owner aren’t the only ones ruffling feathers. This week, a woman at the heart of duck farming in the Landes region was taken to court by a newcomer neighbor who was fed up with the chattering ducks and geese in her garden.
A petition in support of the “Hardy ducks”, as they have been nicknamed, after the name of a nearby lake, has garnered some 5,000 signatures.
“More and more people are heading to rural areas, not to work in agriculture, but to live there,” said Jean-Louis Yengue, a geographer at the University of Poitiers.
“Everyone tries to defend their territory.”
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