Since the start of the weekend and for the next 15 days, the 30th edition of the Journees des Chemins has been taking place in France. Several thousand volunteers in around a hundred municipalities, throughout the territory, are mobilizing to clean, to clear brush, to maintain, and even to reopen rural roads that have fallen into disrepair. A social question that we decipher with sociologist Jean Viard.
franceinfo: What is important here, according to you, is to appropriate your territory? The one closest to you?
Jean Viard: It’s first of all being in nature, walking in nature, looking at flowers, etc. Afterwards, we don’t walk in the same way at all. For example, if we hunt, we have a form of observation, we get up at dawn, it’s completely different from long hikes, walks, there are different relationships. And we are in a time where we really want a relationship with nature, to be able to show our children trees, etc.
So the long-distance trails date from the post-war period, in 1947, the National Association was built between the wars, where there were local associations, but today , what is original in the request is that there are very different people, because there are hunters, walkers, people on motorbikes, people on horses, so there is all that .
In fact, these Pathways Days, organized by the green leisure collective, promote walking, mountain biking, horses, but also motorbikes, quads, 4x4s, all motorized vehicles, there is all this diversity, the also hunt elsewhere?
That’s why I say that it’s not the same thing, and there is also the “support environment” which is not the same. If you pass by quad, or 4×4 in a field, obviously there is not the same reaction as if you pass on foot or even on horseback. Like the hunter, it is yet another relationship to the territory.
But the question is: do we have the right to pass? Because for a long time, Gaullism decided that beauty was superior to property, it was national parks, it was the classification of a certain number of buildings. It belongs to you, but we say: “no sir, no ma’am, you cannot transform it because it is classified.”
It is the idea that beauty is a collective good, and that property is only a private good, it is an idea which developed in the United States in the 19th century, but here, under Gaullism. Afterwards, are we allowed to walk? So, it’s a complex question, because hunting, for example, we have the right to hunt when we are a member of the Association of the Hunting Society. And besides, this authorization stops 150 meters from the houses, where the land goes to the owner. It is he who can decide or not that you can hunt at 150 meters, and always with your back to the house.
So the question is: what can we put up with? Can we support a hunter? Can we support a walker? Can we support a quad? As someone who lives in the countryside, what we can’t stand around my house are quad bikes. It’s the noise of the mechanics, it’s the motorcycle. Someone who goes on horseback at the end of your land or on your land is much easier. Afterwards, it must also be said that we put up barriers, that there are lots of paths that were traditional paths. Little by little, there were barriers, people tried to break the historic rights of way.
It is precisely for this that this green leisure collective is fighting, precisely?
Of course, but the complex problem is that the right of way is thirty years, that is to say that if no one has passed for 30 years, the right of way expires. So it’s not something simple. And then it’s not for the same uses either, because before, we took the herds to the mountains, so there were functions included in the local culture of the territory, the quad ride did not part, because there was no quad.
There is a real debate. And what is a private space and what is a public space? And there is the coastal law: we cannot prevent people from passing along the coast, but go around Lake Annecy, there are plenty of places where you cannot pass… So, it It’s a real subject, the freedom to walk, but at the same time also respect for houses, properties, not damaging plants, not picking flowers.
So that’s the interest of the GR, because the long-distance trails are negotiated, there are different colors, there is a code, there are 75,000 kilometers of GR. And it is estimated that there could be approximately 250,000 kilometers that could be organized, to give an order of magnitude of the possibilities. But then, we can also understand that all noise is not acceptable in every place, just as some owners do not want hunters around their home, it is in some way their right.