A Living Rural Heritage : Experiments in the French Landscape

The idea that France is a beautiful country, united around the diversity of its landscape, arose in the 19th century. From the early 20th century and until today, the appreciation and pride in the beauty of the landscape goes hand in hand with a fear of its destruction, and many laws were acted to protect it, either as a natural occurrence of the “picturesque” or because of its historic value. These values assigned to the landscape – to some designed and officially recognized parts of the landscape – were the first driving force leading to the development of tourism. Today, there is a third value associated to the rural landscape, that of nature conservation and biodiversity.
There is today a growing sense of threat to the rural landscape, both in its visual qualities and in the sense of identity it conveys. The threat to what came to be considered as heritage springs from a lack of recognition of existing landscape qualities (in industrial development and periurban banalization in urban areas or abandonment in rural areas) on the one hand, and the instrumentalization of these qualities for mass tourism in the other. The desire to protect this heritage led to the development of a diversity of tools and inspired a wide variety of actions, from legal protection of designated areas, policies at the European and national level and local regulations to artistic festivals. A common characteristic of the more recent experiments is the recognition of the living, changing character of landscapes, and the focus is evolving from the protection of specific landscape forms to the encouragement of the actions (agricultural know-how) creating such forms.
In my talk I will give an overview of the question of landscape heritage in France and present some interesting recent actions that show the evolution in landscape conservation from an attitude seeking to immobilize heritage to an attitude of care and accompaniment.