They had taken legal action to ask their neighbors to cut down a tree which was shading their Airbnb accommodation, but the Nantes court rejected their request and saved the magnolia.
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A magnificent tree, a magnolia soulangeana with enormous pink flowers that resemble tulips, was threatened by the owners of an Airbnb accommodation. Two years ago, in 2021, this fifteen-year-old tree found itself at the heart of a neighborhood conflict. Located at the bottom of the garden of a young couple with two children, Alan and Marion, the tree disturbs the neighbors who have just built an extension to their house under its branches, to accommodate Airbnb hosts. They demand that it be torn down, in the name of “sunlight damage” and send Marion and Allan to court.
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A priori the law was not really on Alan and Marion’s side. Because legally, trees are considered things. And article 671 of the Civil Code provides, since Napoleon, that a tree less than 30 years old, planted less than two meters from a party wall, may be cut down to two meters in height, which is the most often to kill him. The tree does not in fact have any intrinsic rights, and does not weigh heavily in relation to property rights, “inviolable and sacred”. It is therefore cuttable at will. So Alan and Marion weren’t exactly optimistic when they went to court, with their only defense being a letter from their children begging the judge not to cut down “their tree.”
The court considers that cutting the tree could cause ecological damage
But against all expectations, the Nantes court rejected all of the Airbnb hosts’ requests, finding that the magnolia “brings a benefit to the community through environmental benefits” and that as such “it must be preserved in accordance with Article 2 of the Environmental Charter according to which ‘Everyone has the duty to take part in the preservation and improvement of the environment'”. Still according to the court, “The cutting of this tree to a height of 2 meters is likely to cause ecological damage within the meaning of article 1247 of the Civil Code.”
A simple neighborhood conflict results in jurisprudence which raises the question of the status of trees/things that it might be time, 200 years after Napoleon, to rethink. Because granting intrinsic rights to trees would also preserve human rights, the fundamental but abused right to live in a healthy environment.