The French Legal Framework for Marine Protected Areas

The marine environment has for many years been the 'poor relation' of French nature conservation policies, despite the fact that France has the second largest marine environment area in the world (11 million km2), in three different oceans. This assertion not only holds true for France, inherited as it is from a western vision of the 'protected area' that is itself a product of the Greco-Judaic- Christian tradition. This first developed in the United States as early as the end of the 19th century, and was based upon protecting a countryside seen to testify to original creation and that was home to the souls of the American pioneers. This is the context within which the world's first national park, Yellowstone, was created in 1872. The nineteenth century also saw the birth of France's first so-called 'natural and artistic' reserve, in the forest of Fontainebleau near Paris. The initiative came from the 'Barbizon School' of artists, and illustrates an aesthetic conception of nature intended to embrace the 'scientific, historical and legendary' qualities such as are highlighted in the French Code forestier of 1827. During the first half of the twentieth century, the French law of 2 May 1930 on 'natural monuments and sites of artistic, historical, scientific, legendary or picturesque significance,' kept alive this movement, focusing as it did upon the aesthetic appeal of a countryside to which the apparently calm surface of maritime waters contributed so little. Amended in 1957 and 1967, the law of 1930 allowed for the creation of natural marine reserves.1 A number of 'parks' were created outside of metropolitan France, in addition to the national parks in the French colonies,2 and, in the southern territories, a 'sanctuary' was instituted for certain species of birds and mammals.