Muzzling the Guns in August

BAY OF THE SOMME, France â€”  The full, low-riding moon is tinting the saltwater marsh a pale, shimmering silver. It’s long past midnight, but Guillaume Houart is wide awake in the floating blind, quietly smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, his 12-gauge shotgun within easy reach.

In the man-made pond outside, he’s positioned nine caged or tethered mallards--living, quacking lures hunters call “Judas ducks,� whose calls are meant to lure unsuspecting wild fowl into shooting range.

Now, as he has seven times already this season, Houart watches patiently and waits.

“Duck hunting is my only vacation, my only holiday, my only recreation, my only leisure-time activity,� the 22-year-old Frenchman says.

Trifle with such passion and dedication, and you’re asking for trouble. That’s been the experience of the French government, which is facing something akin to a slow-motion revolt by the nation’s 1.5 million hunters, a groundswell of hostility of men in rubber hip waders and forest-green jackets that could have far-reaching political consequences.

In the United States, the fund-raising and lobbying prowess of the National Rifle Assn. is legend. There is really no parallel in France, but here, fed-up sportsmen have taken a different tack: They’ve created their own political party--and proved their clout at the ballot box.

In elections to the European Parliament held last summer, the Hunting, Fishing, Nature and Traditions party (CPNT are its French initials) racked up a surprising 6.8% of the vote, as much as the Communists and more than the far-right National Front.

North of Paris, in the departement, or administrative district, of the Somme, hotbed of the sportsmen’s protest movement, the new party swept 27% of the popular vote, a national high. In all, CPNT holds six of France’s 87 seats in the European Parliament.

The latest outrage, in the sportsmen’s view, came June 28, when Parliament passed a law banning hunting on Wednesdays, when most schools are closed in the afternoon and many children are outside. Also, private landowners now will be able to bar hunters from shooting on their property. In line with European Union guidelines, the hunting season was also shortened. It was the first serious reform in hunting laws in more than 150 years.

“I’ve been a hunter since 1968. Hunting for me is more than a passion, it’s an art of living,� one indignant sportsman, Alexandre Leopold, said in a recent letter to a national newspaper. “And I’m supposed to let myself be treated as a criminal or a fascist� by Paris salon intellectuals and environmentalists? he demanded to know.

This spring, 200 hunters unleashed a volley of stones and rotten eggs at a member of the National Assembly who had reneged on a campaign pledge and voted for the new restrictions.

Socialist Vincent Peillon, who was attending a ribbon-cutting at a garbage treatment plant near the Somme River delta, had to be helicoptered to safety behind a phalanx of gendarmes firing tear-gas grenades.

“Someone could have died,� Camille Marcan-Dumesnil, a local official, told reporters. “Vincent Peillon came close to being lynched.�

This month, angry hunters blocked the entrance to the headquarters of the Socialist and Communist parties in the English Channel port of Le Havre as well as the town hall of Octeville, also in Normandy. Some of them daubed graffiti on the buildings announcing that they would never vote again for leftist parties, which form France’s current government.

Environment Minister Is Designated Enemy

The hunters’ designated enemy is Dominique Voynet, Greens Party leader and France’s environment minister. Opposition to her has reached peaks of violence and downright nastiness that no other member of Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin’s Cabinet has had to endure.

Last year, three men claiming to be hunters set upon the 41-year-old minister in her hometown of Dole, and one punched her. Also in 1999, at least 100 self-labeled “farmers� stormed her ministry’s headquarters in Paris. They invaded her office, ransacked her desk and scattered files from the windows.

“What we’ve understood is that she’s bent on stopping us from hunting as much as possible,� asserts Jacques Houart, Guillaume’s father and vice president of the Somme Bay hunters association.

Next year, the hunters’ party plans to field its own slates of candidates for municipal elections across France. And in 2002, when France chooses its next president, the mood of the hunters could prove decisive. Center-right incumbent Jacques Chirac and Jospin, his likely challenger from the left, are now running neck and neck in the polls.

“If Jospin wants to win, he has to win back the votes of the hunters,� predicts Christian Gricourt, an avid shooter of snipe who edits a monthly magazine for French waterfowl hunters.

The hunters’ mutiny has sturdy sociological and historical roots. Rural France has become increasingly wary of outside encroachments, from city dwellers buying up homes and land to use on the weekends to complex new regulations imposed by bureaucrats in faraway Paris or Brussels, headquarters of the European Union.

Before World War II, at least half of the French had firsthand knowledge of hunting or fishing because they lived in the countryside. These days, only 23% of the country’s 60 million people live outside Paris and other cities.

“At school, my grammar book used to contain examples where hunting wasn’t presented as a harmful activity, contrary to what’s happening today,� complains Gilles Ondet, 54, director of a 2,500-member waterfowl hunting association in Normandy.

Perhaps most important is the persistence of memory. Just as millions of American gun owners can cite the 2nd Amendment to the Constitution by rote, in the towns and villages of France, people speak fervently of the night of Aug. 4, 1789, during the first months of the French Revolution.

On that long evening, the most historic in the annals of French representative government, members of the National Assembly abolished the privileges that the old feudal system reserved for a few. Hunting, once the jealously guarded preserve of aristocrats, became the right of all.

A Hard-Won Right Is Seen to Be Undermined

For many French sportsmen, the recent legislation wasn’t just the tweaking of regulations, it was the abolition of traditions more than two centuries old and of hard-won gains of democratic government.

“These are serious attacks on our liberty,� fumes Pascal Allot, 36, a disgruntled hunter.

Forty nights a year, the lanky supermarket employee rows across the Somme River to the wind-scoured marshlands at its mouth, where he spends the night in one of 158 blinds, scanning the wide sky for ducks. With the new law, Allot says ruefully, he no longer can walk to his blind with his double-barreled shotgun loaded and ready to fire. He must carry it unloaded, a legal obligation he considers an affront to his rights as a Frenchman.

“What’s happening now is disgusting,� Allot says, grimacing.

Although the new legislation does leave room for some local exemptions--for instance, for nighttime hunting and dove shooting--some hunters reject it as yet more cookie-cutter uniformity imposed by French and European Union bureaucrats.

“The same law that applies to us is supposed to apply to the Somme,� complains Martial Emprin, 69, a retired helicopter pilot who hunts deer, wild boar and hare 300 miles from the Somme, in the Jura Mountains by the Swiss border. “This is just not possible.�

In the Somme, people take birds and hunting seriously. Above the verdant marshlands and pastures, 300 species of ducks, geese, herons, plover, oystercatchers and other birds migrate annually from the British Isles, Scandinavia and European Russia to winter in Africa, and back again in spring. It is paradise for people who watch birds and for those who, for generations, have loved to shoot them.

The shallow pond near the Channel coast where the young Houart tethered his live decoys was patiently dug by his grandfather with a shovel and wheelbarrow. This spring, Houart, his father and other family members built a new blind, at a cost of about $5,700, complete with two camp beds for nighttime hunting. Like a cozy covered boat hidden under camouflage netting, it rides up and down with the tidal waters of the estuary.

Sportsmen who can’t afford to rent one of the hut sites, which are passed down in local families as coveted heirlooms, wrap themselves in a waterproof tarp and bury themselves in the sand, or inter themselves in an elongated box resembling a coffin. To shoot ducks, many are ready to endure hours of bone-numbing cold and damp.

“Most people who hunt waterfowl are of modest means; they don’t take vacations, they don’t go to the mountains,� Gricourt says. “Shooting water birds is their passion, passed from father to son.

“And now people realize that a government of the left is going to take away one of their liberties.�

At the Environment Ministry in Paris, officials argue that such wasn’t their intention at all. France is changing, and, says Jean-Jacques Lafitte, who’s in charge of the ministry’s division of hunting and wildlife, “the new law seeks a social balance between hunting and other outdoor activities--strolling, bird-watching, etc.�

In some cases, Lafitte says, France has been compelled to modify its laws because of conflicting European Union guidelines or court decisions. In particular, national law had to be amended to conform to a 1979 EU directive designed to protect migratory birds.

Hunting season in France varies according to species, but on average, Lafitte says, the season has now been shortened by six weeks, and opening day moved from the first weekend after July 14, the Bastille Day holiday, to Aug. 10.

Hunting Now Banned on Wednesdays

As for banning hunting on Wednesdays, there are two reasons: to establish that France’s woods and fields belong to everyone, not just hunters, and to minimize the risk of accidents, Lafitte says. According to the National Office of Hunting, 42 people were killed and 187 wounded in hunting accidents in France last season.

For many hunters, the legislation is yet more proof that their France--overwhelmingly rural, traditional and stable--is slipping away.

Despite the new law, on July 15, when hunting season would normally have opened, Guillaume Houart and three other men spent the night in the blind in the Somme River bay. They didn’t shoot anything but were practicing their own brand of civil disobedience. “We did this to tick off authorities,� Houart says.

“I’ve told myself this may end in blood, yes,� says Gricourt, who is also spokesman for the Somme departement’s hunters federation. “People won’t let these things be taken away from them.

“We’re forgetting our roots,� the snipe hunter says. “Hunters consider when they kill something that, well, death is part of life. But nowadays, ask kids in school to draw you a fish, and they’re as likely as not to draw you a breaded fish stick.�